a personally professional portfolio
academic paper: the digital collection of the met on flipgrid
The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020
undeniably stumped the cultural sector. With the challenge of remote-only interaction,
many cultural organizations harnessed the reach and accessibility provided by
the digital world. For organizations that served as a resource for the youth
population, either through formal field trips and programs or through informal
visitation and self-guided exploration, the challenge of remote was especially
difficult. As Education Operations Manager for Naples Botanical Garden, one of
my primary job duties is to schedule and book field trips for schools. Whereas
spring and summer are peak months for this, communications from schools and
teachers this summer often asked for resources, guidance, and suggestions - all
in digital format, understandably so. This challenge in digital and remote
programming led me to discover Microsoft’s program, Flipgrid. While perusing
the possibilities for our botanical garden, I found that other museums had
jumped on this technology for the benefit of all. One in particular, The Met,
stood out as a prolific user to show their digital collections.
First and foremost, it is important
to note that Flipgrid is very much intended for educational purposes, and
strongly leaning towards youth education and youth audiences. Large text,
graphic-heavy, interactive with parental control options - why wouldn’t a
teacher want to use this for a “virtual field trip”? Queue the “punny” and
quirky object titles, simplified descriptions and bios, and creative prompts
for extra-digital interaction. Where simplification and surface-level
interpretation may come in handy for a world overloaded with virtual everything, spurred mostly in part to
limited attention spans and a zapped screen-brain, omitted are the richer and
more complex backstories that in-person museum interpretation might provide.
Take for example The Met’s Flipgrid Topic on Mäda Primavesi.[1] The bio
introduces Mäda as the subject, then shares a small tidbit of backstory on
Gustav Klimt:
The artist Gustav
Klimt made this portrait when she was about nine years old. He sketched Mäda
many times "from life," meaning that she visited his studio and sat
and stood in various positions while he drew.
The
1,000-character text box provided by Flipgrid is limiting, certainly making it
difficult for museums to fully provide background. However, this little blurb
hardly touches on the fact that Klimt most notably painted young, underage
girls as he explored artistic themes of eroticism and the female body,
fathering fourteen children along the way. The struggle between fair
representation and ease of learning is a fine line in the digitalscape, and one
that might not always be crossed when real-time discussion, tone, and dialogue
cannot occur so easily or smoothly.
Interpretation aside, Flipgrid’s
platform allows for a multitude of presentation methods for The Met’s digital
collections. In addition to easily accessible and viewable graphics included in
the Flipgrid Topic, administrative users (such as the education department of
The Met) can further provide links to documents, their own website, and other
supporting materials, all which make for a wholesome object presentation. The
Topic on the Mastaba Tomb of Perneb is a great example of taking digital
exploration one step further for youths.[2]Students can navigate from the Flipgrid Topic to the Met’s page on the Tomb and
can scroll down to “Watch,” “Discover,” “Imagine,” and “Create,” a great way to
introduce young learners to The Met’s webpage and other digital resources.
Flipgrid is a useful tool for educators as well. Searchable by subject area,
audience, and topic, educators can find target Topics for their needs. Access
to Flipgrid is entirely free (with either a Microsoft or Gmail account), and
educators can create their own lessons for their students using Topics from a
multitude of organizations on the website.
Accessibility is the name of the
game, however. Flipgrid is a web-based tool which requires that users have
access to technological equipment, account information such as an email or
rendered username, internet connectivity, and knowledge of the English language
(I have yet to see non-English digital museum collections). For students and
educators that may depend on funding such as Title I to visit sites in-person,
Flipgrid might be just another barrier to knowledge access.
If I were to use Flipgrid as a
museum professional, I might ask students and learners to interpret an object
without an intentionally-provided background with their classmates, which could
segue into learning about curatorial practices and object research. As an
educator, I might find similar objects from multiple organizations and have
students compare them (ex. Jewelry from the same era but different locations or
jewelry from the same location but from different classes of society at the
time).
For The Met, Flipgrid has provided
an accessible platform for object exploration in a safe, productive manner -
the documented hours of engagement and uses on Flipgrid says it all!