Tag Archives: technology

Va va Vrroom!

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Vrroom is the best educational resource on the web, in the world.

Ok, since I’m part of the Vrroom team, you shouldn’t take my word for it. But these words are not mine. They were spoken by a history teacher, last week, at the launch of the site. It was an unsolicited accolade – I’m just reporting. Really.

So yea, almost two years after it was conceived, the National Archives of Australia finally launched its virtual reading room for teachers and students. The forum was the conference of Victorian history teachers, and the speaker was the lovely Ms Megabyte. Thanks, Mega!

Ms Megabyte demonstrates Vrroom

We also ran two workshops on using Vrroom, and (!) for the duration of the conference, we hosted the Vrroom room, an internet cafe where you could get a personalised introduction to the site – or check your email.

Vrroom room internet cafe

Whew… Check it out.

Oral history archive

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At a history teachers conference this week, Michael Caulfield spoke about the making of the Australians at War Film Archive.

This archive exists because of the Australian fascination (read obsession!) with war and war history. But the result is not military history. It is a rich source of oral history.

The archive comprises 12,000 hours of film interviews with 2005 people. Well-trained interviewers worked in pairs to elicit amazingly intimate and frank stories of lives before, during and after the subject’s war experience.

Better still, every interview is transcribed and therefore fully searchable by keyword. It seems like whatever term you search for – I tried ‘Depression’, ‘pregnancy’ and ‘worms’ – yields pages and pages of results.

Techno but not dialogic

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The South Australian Museum is implementing a kind of mother-CMS, so that collection items, once arranged and described, can be output to any screen device in the museum, be it hand-held, part of an exhibition display, on the web, whatever.

When this tech was being demonstrated at the MA conference, the presenters mentioned a facility to track changes made by users. I got all excited, thinking how great it would be for visitors to be able to interpret the collection too… but then I realised they didn’t mean visitor users; only staff users. The output is all centrally controlled.

Then an education officer from the museum said that the technology is convenient but that the template structure is fixed, so it can be a straitjacket.

That subdued me quite a lot.

Would anyone from the SA Museum care to comment?