On the Media is one of my favorite shows on public radio. I’m rarely around a radio when it’s on my local NPR affiliate, but thanks to the forward-thinking, media-savvy folks at OTM I can listen to their weekly podcast.
In a segment on their program from August 26th entitled “Museum Heist,” host Brooke Gladstone describes a really cool course at Marymount Manhattan College where students in Professor David Gilbert’s Communication Art course have created their own alternative audio museum tours for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). They call their project Art Mobs and their blog invites visitors to “Help us hack the gallery experience, help us remix MoMA!”. I love it. (All of this “hacking” is occuring with MoMA’s blessing, by the way.) I see that Will has some art students at his school already plugged in to this project.
The Twin Cities is full of great museums like the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Walker Art Center. There’s no reason we can’t be doing this too in my district. Maybe you don’t live in an urban setting with a large museum. I’ll bet your local historical society maintains some sort of museum. And they probably don’t have an audio guide at all! Why not contact your local historical society and volunteer your students to create that museum’s first downloadable, iPod-able, podcastable audio guide?
