Polycom® RealPresence® Video Solutions Help Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art Bring Content and Culture Alive for Schools and Organizations Everywhere
Polycom,
Inc. (Nasdaq: PLCM), the global leader in open, standards-based
unified communications and collaboration (UC&C), is helping bring the Smithsonian
Institution’s vast collection of African art to a global audience via Polycom®
RealPresence® video solutions.
Through interactive and real-time video classes, briefings, tours and
collaborative sessions of the National
Museum of African Art (NMAfA), guests are gaining a new perspective
not just on how artists in Africa have expressed themselves through the
arts over centuries, but also on the diverse cultures and peoples who
live on a continent comprised of fifty-five countries, three times the
size of the United States.
“Arts education in public schools has declined in recent years,” noted
Deborah Stokes, Curator for Education at NMAfA, one of 19 Smithsonian
museums. “Art has been squeezed out of daily class schedules, and school
time spent in art class has shrunk by nearly half since 2001. We knew we
had to get creative to find a way for schools to enhance their art
education without spending resources. With Polycom RealPresence video
solutions, we’re bringing content and culture alive to students around
the world – teaching students how to look at art, and engage with the
museum’s educational programs to enrich understanding, inspire,
encourage curiosity, and make connections.”
Combining Art and Science
An example of this approach is the museum’s popular African
Cosmos: Stellar Arts tour, which combines both art and science
to investigate celestial symbols, earth-sky connections and cultural
stories that date to the time of the pharaohs. The educational
programming was developed with astrophysicists from the
Smithsonian-Harvard Astrophysical Observatory and scientists and
educators from the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum. The teaching
module enables teachers to fulfill not only their curriculum
requirements in art, but also those for science, history and geography.
“One of our academic goals is to incorporate the arts into the STEM
initiative,” said Stokes, referring to a growing effort to sharpen
global competitiveness by improving students’ proficiency in science,
technology, engineering and math. “We did that with the African Cosmos
exhibition. We’re showing how both scientists and artists have for
centuries looked into the night sky to understand our place in the
universe.”
Equipped with a Polycom®
HDX® Series room system and a Polycom®
RealPresence® Collaboration Server, Stokes can conduct virtual
visits and collaboration sessions globally. In her video classes and
tours, she uses Polycom® People+Content™ to appear integrated with
images and artworks. She opens her classes by guiding students through
the entrance of the Washington, DC museum – located almost entirely
underground –introducing them to a small part of its permanent
collection of more than 10,000 works, then showing HD images of related
pieces and field photographs, encouraging interactive discussions with
the video audience.
Schools can register for the classes using the Center
for Interactive Learning and Collaboration (CILC) clearinghouse and
through Polycom’s CAPspace
portal, which is used by more than 13,000 educators in 47 countries to
access collaborative video distance learning programs.
In 2011, NMAfA also used Polycom RealPresence video collaboration
systems to virtually connect a group of young survivors of the 2010
catastrophic Haitian earthquake that devastated the island nation with
peers in DC. The NMAfA produced “The Healing Power of Art: Works of art
by Haitian children after the earthquake,” an exhibition of drawings by
Haitian children living in tent cities.
As a common link between students in DC and Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a
group of students in an award-winning DC elementary school French club
created pictures of hope and healing and wrote encouraging messages
about the rebuilding of schools. The pictures were shared with students
from Haiti in a face-to-face live ceremony over video at the U.S.
Department of Education.
Doubling the Number of Students Reached
The face-to-face video classes are proving so popular that Stokes has
already doubled the number of students reached in a school year – from
800 in 2011-2012 to an anticipated 1,600 this year.
“I could be doing this every day of the year, there’s such a demand for
it,” said Stokes. “Teachers have requested that I develop other modules
for them, so I’m working on an introduction to African art, a class on
African masks, textiles, and country-specific studies of the art of
Nigeria, Ghana and Mali.”
In conjunction with Earth Day 2013, NMAfA will host a collaborative
learning experience that focuses on artists who use e-waste and earth
materials in their works. Eventually, Stokes said, she hopes to arrange
video meetings between students, interested parties and Smithsonian
field scientists in Gabon and other African countries.
No matter the standard or custom topic, the museum’s Polycom
infrastructure helps Stokes deliver an exceptionally lifelike
collaboration experience, and Polycom’s support for open standards
allows the museum’s programs to be available to a broader audience.
“I’ve been surprised how great the Polycom technology has been to use,”
said Stokes, who acquired the Polycom equipment in 2011 using a grant
applied for with help from the Polycom
Grant Assistance Program. “I’m just so thrilled with it.”
About Polycom
Polycom is the global leader in open, standards-based unified
communications and collaboration (UC&C) solutions for voice and video
collaboration, trusted by more than 415,000 customers around the world.
Polycom solutions are powered by the Polycom® RealPresence®
Platform, comprehensive software infrastructure and rich APIs that
interoperate with the broadest set of communication, business, mobile
and cloud applications and devices to deliver secure face-to-face video
collaboration in any environment. Polycom and its ecosystem of over
7,000 partners provide truly unified communications solutions that
deliver the best user experience, highest multi-vendor interoperability,
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