Pachyderm: Learning Objects Dialogue Day

For residential faculty, this event has been pre-approved for 2.75 clock hours of Faculty Professional Growth (FPG) non-academic advancement.

Pachyderm: Building Meaningful Content with Learning Objects Dialogue Day

January 30, 2004
Paradise Valley Community College
Room B208 and the Library (E building)
Lunch will be provided.

What are "learning objects"? One could spend a lot of time wading through definitions, but they can be looked at as potentially small chunks of digital content that can easily be found and re-used in different contexts of learning. Over the last few years there has been a growing number of efforts at building collections or "repositories." This has resulted in an emphasis on the describing of learning objects ("meta-data standards"), and unfortunately, not very much work has been done to develop the tools that will help people construct meaningful activities from these objects.

"Pachyderm" was originally developed by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) to create a tool that museum curators (non-technical people) could use to easily build engaging web, CD-ROM, and kiosk exhibits built upon the digitized assets in the museum's database.

Pachyderm projects are created via a web interface, a collection of pre-built interaction templates and are presented as Flash format. SFMOMA have created an impressive number of examples.

The Pachyderm 2.0 Project is being coordinated by the New Media Consortium with a number of higher education and museum partners to build a second generation, open-source version of Pachyderm that would be a general tool for use by educators. Maricopa is participating in this three year project and we will have access to the software as it develops.

At this Dialogue Day, special guest Peter Samis, from SFMOMA, will provide an overview of how the museum has used Pachyderm, what it can do, and most importantly, he will share the planning processes his teams use to develop new projects. This event is taking place at the Paradise Valley Community College Library, which is home to the Jo and Warren Buxton Art Collection (see the Dream Catcher). For a number of years, there has been attempts to find the best tool for the college to build web-based informational and learning activity content from the collections assets-- and we think Pachyderm fits the bill.

As part of the activities in this Dialogue Day, Peter will lead us in some story boarding activities using the SFMOMA planning tools, so participants can try and map their ideas for online content to what the current Pachyderm tools can create.

In our follow-up Epilogue Day (April 23 at Phoenix College) we will convene again and this time work hands on with the Pachyderm software.

Agenda

About the speaker...
Peter Samis is Associate Curator of Education and Program Manager for Interactive Educational Technologies at the SFMOMA. He served as art historian/content expert for the first CD-ROM on modern art and was appointed to lead SFMOMA's interactive educational technology efforts in 1994. Since then, Samis and his team have developed over a dozen interactive programs, including the flagship website Making Sense of Modern Art. SFMOMA's programs have received numerous awards from sources as diverse as the American Association of Museums, the National Educational Media Network, and I.D. Magazine. Points of Departure: Connecting with Contemporary Art, the Museum's 2001 exhibition that experimented with the integration of new technologies directly alongside the art in the SFMOMA galleries, was awarded AAM's 2002 Gold Muse Award for best use of new technologies in an art museum setting.

More recently, he has been working with the NMC to upgrade Pachyderm, SFMOMA's multimedia authoring and publishing tool, for widespread use in museum and university education. Samis holds a BA in Religion from Columbia College in New York, and an MA in the History of Art from the University of California, Berkeley. He lectures widely and writes on both multimedia- and art-related topics, and his team continues to produce innovative content for SFMOMA's galleries, website, and the museum's new Koret Visitor Education Center.