Interactive Demos
From Chicago Museums
On the Web
Robb Murray,
Computer TrainingOn-Call
(773) 975-8020
Most of our local Chicao museums now offer dramatic and entertaining interactive web content. Try these great sites!
At the Oriental Institute site, you can embalm your own Egyptian mummy. It’s gross, it’s rude, it’s crude—and you’ll definitely show it to somebody else! You can also watch a cylinder seal roll out onto clay and analyze artwork and tomb fragments. Here’s the originating site.
It may be too late to walk the grounds of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. But try an interactive photomap. As you mouse over the photograph, click each building to get dramatic images of its contents. Thanks to this social studies exhibit from the University of Chicago library project, the grandeur of the Fair has been brought back alive.
The drawbridges over the Chicago River, animated and with sound, are used by the Chicago Historical Society to steer you through a basic Flash quiz game. (The other games displayed are purely kid stuff.)
A uturistic and scientific feel awaits you through the interactive games on the site for Fermilab’s Lederman Science Center in Batavia.
The ingenious Shedd Aquarium site has a new hobby for you: building your own new species of fish! That means you custom-design a new animal, based on the stated benefits of various physical traits. Try the new fish species game.
It guides you innocently through a quick assembly. But once you’ve snapped the pieces together, you suddenly face Deep Water. Now you guide your new contender around in the ocean, to see how well it can eat and not get eaten. The “fitness” (or not) of the choice of traits you've made may surprise or horrify you. You have to keep eating -- or run out of energy!
(Another exhibit here, though less interactive, shows that the seahorse species is in trouble. Keep clicking patiently down into this one because you’ll see awesome seahorse videos and interviews with scientists and conservationists. A slightly sluggish detective adventure game also appears on the site.)
What may be the w-i-d-e-s-t web page ever put forth lies at the bottom of the Museum of Science and Industry’s Coal Mine Page. See other current “On-Line Exhibits” (scroll down slightly) as well as the Archives of exhibits long ago taken down. Watch the famous display of chicks hatching on a page with still more videos covering cloning, the human genome, etc.
The Brookfield Zoo Adventure Trail (bottom center) offers you Flash dolphin games [temporarily discontinued, Sept. 2006] (pretend you’ve already played before to blow by the username/password rigamarole). Skip to the last two games. Here you learn dolphins’ social behaviors and how they fish. Then you try out your fishing skills as an animated dolphin, adroitly executing many a “porpoise” and “breach” A Flash adventure game (“Ways of Knowing Trail”) challenges you to survive the African rainforest.
When it comes to fine art, people can spend days at the Art Institute -- but its web site is equally entrancing. An area dedicated to the ancient world features hundreds of streaming video “stories”. A highlight at the “Artaccess” area is a segmented video showing the “Dashavatara Dance”. The Books and Media areas within various Artaccess topics suggest extremely well-chosen follow-on web sites, such as the “Interactive Meso-American Ballgame” (tip: play the game, don’t just watch).
If you have a thirst to behold and sniff a stargazer lily or a rhododendron, Chicago Botanic Garden gives you a quick search tool that pinpoints every bed on their grounds, with pictures aplenty, where your Beauties may be found. The site also offers a vast number of courses, as well as internship and volunteer opportunities.
The power of sound and image is also hardly lost on the Museum of Broadcast Communications, which offers hundreds of media clips, as you’ll find on the Chicago Television History site.
There’s ever more to see and enjoy on these sites, my friends, but let this brief glimpse prove that the cultural exhibitors of our fair city are never to be underestimated. Thank you to the Chicago museum community for these memorable and inspiring e-Learning presentations! Thanks also to the e-Learning in Illinois Conference for introducing me to many of these sites, and for inspiring me to explore further.
3-D "VIRTUAL TOUR" DEMOS YOU SHOULD SEE --
(click, hold and move mouse over photos -- they spin 360 degrees!)
-- Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple, Oak Park
--Cloister of Melk near Vienna, Austria -- see the library -- founded in 976 -- a grand sight!
--Tourist sites in Israel
--Historic sites in England
--The US Capitol -- select "high bandwidth" -- click on the floor map to change roms
--Rome -- links also to Naples, etc.
--Morroccan city views
--Elvis' Graceland near Memphis
--Cruise ship tour
Let me know how you like this material --
and please clue me in on other
neat sites you know about!
--Robb Murray ctoncall@aol.com