Items

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  2020-06-04

  Museums and Collecting COVID-19

  On June 4, 2020 the Curators Committee of the American Alliance of Museums presented a session focused on Collecting COVID. The session called attention to the importance of documenting significant history while living in a pandemic and discussed the Who, What, Where, When, Why and How of collecting objects, ephemera and materiel in the time of crisis. The presenters (Stacey Swigart, Drexel Lenfest Center for Cultural Partnerships; Thomas Lonnberg and Tory Schendel Cox, Evansville Museum of Arts; Juilee Decker, Rochester Institute of Technology; and Redmond Barnett, Historian/Consultant) reviewed best practices, safety measures, look at museums who are collecting and how communities can/are involved and what communities can do to document your local/regional history. This item is a PDF of their entire presentation.
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  2020-04-05

  Coloring Sheet

  Coloring has been therapeutic during COVID-19. Charlotte, NC-based artist Stephen Wilson distributed a coloring book over email and social media to encourage everyone during this time.
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  2020-03-22

  Planogram (i.e., how I revamped my semester midstream)

  My courses tend to be organized around weeks, modules, and learning outcomes that inform our readings, assignments, and free-form activities. I really enjoy teaching and the art of pedagogy. COVID-19 forced me to change course mid-stream. I know that I was not alone, as everyone had to do this, whether an instructor or student or ancillary staff. I kept trying time and again to simply re-write my syllabus timeline. What finally worked, after six days of fretting, was gridding everything out visually and then color coding the content around videos, assignments due, discussion post topics, and live chat discussions. This large post it (25" x 30") served as my planning guide. Here it is, after I had mapped out about half of the weeks in visual and textual form. I have called this piece "planogram" as that is the term for the visual layout used in retail so that staff can set up displays that mirror those at other locations. It's a visual plan of a layout. Well, I am happy to say, now that I am on the other side of this process, that the Post It Note version of the planogram served me well. And, I hope that my students were able to carve out a meaningful learning experience, even though it was not as any of us had intended in January—which now seems so long ago.