Hello everyone! My name is Megan Wanttie, I'm an Art History master's student with a focus on 18th-century French porcelain and decorative arts. In addition, I am pursuing the Art Museum Education Certification. My internship this summer is at the Dallas Museum of Art in Interpretation, which, as I understand it, encompasses areas of museum education and the digitization program. The program/department seems to be an evolving field that works to accomplish many different tasks throughout the museum and online.
My two main tasks will be helping with Digitization project progress alongside the D3C team, which is a task that was funded by a large grant several years ago to help the DMA create content for the online collection and reorganize the website, as well as working on Teaching Ideas for the objects included in the Digitization project. Teaching Ideas are basically individualized teaching modules for each object that are designed to be accessible to all levels of learners. I'll be helping sort through past DMA teaching material and customizing content for the project.
I'm really excited to get to see how a large scale museum works; so far, I have really enjoyed the atmosphere and the tasks that I've been assigned. I've been able to tag along to various meetings and luncheons, so I already feel like I'm starting to be a part of 'the office'. I am really happy to get to combine my art history background within the education department to help create usable content. Going in to this internship, I hope to gain usable knowledge that will help further my career and other future positions that I may be interested in!
This week, I've been working on learning all of the programs and processes that I will be utilizing this summer and I think I'm off to a really great start. I've been able to choose the pieces I want to work on and research things that I am really interested in. I have yet to start working on Teaching Ideas but am set to start working on those next week, which seems to be yet another fantastic project to get to work on. One last thing, all of the work that I will be completing this summer is focused on being accessible to all levels of learners, from children, to adults, to scholars; I am truly ecstatic to be working in an environment that puts emphasis on this kind of content!
Hooray! I am thrilled to hear how excited you are to be doing the work you'll be doing! The Teaching Ideas project sounds really interesting and I look forward to hearing more. I hope you'll also share what those pieces are that you've chosen because you are most interested in :) Happy learning and doing!
ReplyDeleteSounds pretty cool and a great opportunity. Have a great summer and look forward to hearing about some of the items that you will be working with
ReplyDeleteDigitizing the entire collection and making it available on the website sounds really cool, I'm very glad that so many institutions are doing this, it's a great way to view the pieces if you aren't able to go there. I hope it all goes well for you and I'll look forward to hearing more about your experiences!
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