Updates
Codename Design Joins the Learning Lab Development Team
Happy to announce that our team continues to expand with the addition of Marc Baumgartner and Graham Dobson of Codename Design, a product, web, and graphic design studio based in Vancouver, Canada. Marc and Graham are helping the team think about all the details of the user experiences we are trying to develop, and then designing the actual user interface for the Learning Lab, ensuring that it is contemporary, simple to use, and ...
Sampling and Remixing
Something I have been thinking about, in terms of cultural heritage, and the kinds of things we take care of here at the Smithsonian, and how they might become more useful to you, is sampling. DJ and Producer Mark Ronson talks about music in terms of a “post sampling era:" We live in a post sampling era. We take the things that we love and we build upon them. That's just how it goes. When we add something significant and origi...
Who Is Our Audience: SmithsonianEducation.org
One of the foundational questions asked that led to the development of the Learning Lab was: who are we serving now? Who is our audience? Beginning in 2009 and running continuously for 2 years, a user satisfaction survey (using the American Customer Satisfaction Index) was conducted on the Smithsonian’s primary website for teachers, SmithsonianEducation.org. The study was originally intended to highlight areas of improvement t...
What We Have Learned So Far: The Digital Learning Resources Project
The Smithsonian Center for Learning and Digital Access (SCLDA) (formerly the Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies, and even more formerly the Smithsonian Office of Primary and Secondary Education) focuses on making the Smithsonian more accessible to teachers and their students. In the past this was done primarily through professional development and publishing. For 35 years, the office published, printed, and mailed t...
What Is the Smithsonian Learning Lab?
The Smithsonian Learning Lab project is the result of a major rethinking of how the digital resources from across the Smithsonian's 19 museums, nine major research centers, the National Zoo, and more, can be used together, for learning. It is a big dream, an aspiration to make these resources more accessible and more useful to teachers, students, parents, and anyone on a lifelong quest to learn more. It hopes to deliver the Smiths...
