Kathleen S. Wilson, October 27, 2023

Title

interviewee

Kathleen S. Wilson

interviewer

Deborah Schwartz

Date

2023-October-27

Subject

Museum Education Consortium (MEC)

Interactive Technology

Museum Education

Impressionism

Harvard

Bank Street College

Voyage of the Mimi

Prototypes

Art Museums

ARPANET

Description

Kathleen (Kathy) S. Wilson was a key participant in a project called the Museum Education Consortium in the late 1980s. At the time of the project, Kathy worked at Bank Street College in the Center for Children and Technology. She was the principal developer for a project called Palenque, which was an offshoot of a television show produced by Bank Street College, called the Voyage of the Mimi. Palenque, like the work of the Museum Education Consortium was designed to explore discovery-based uses for new technological tools including Mac II computers, video disc players, image capture boards, as well as high resolution digitized images and HDTV film.

After Bank Street and the MEC, Kathy went on to become Executive Producer, Paramount Media Kitchen; Vice President and Creative Director for Viacom Interactive Services; and then Adjunct Professor in the NYU Tisch Interactive Telecommunications Program.

She has a BA from Middlebury College, and her EdD in Cognitive Development Psychology and Media Design from Harvard University.

As part of an effort to recapture the history of Museum Education Consortium, Kathy agreed to be interviewed for this project, from her home in Colebrook, CT.

The Museum Education Consortium (MEC) was a project that involved a group of seven art museums working together from 1987 to 1990 to create experiments using interactive technology as an educational tool in museums and classrooms. The project happened in the years before the internet, and at a time when many companies (Apple, Bell Labs, and others) were hungry for content to test their new technologies, and museums were great partners for this. The project was funded by the Pew Charitable Trust and the Getty Education Center. The prototypes that were created were received enthusiastically by the public in various testing sites, but there was never a plan to produce a commercially available product. The project participants were eager to learn about the best pedagogical approaches, the possibilities of discovery-based learning techniques in the context of technology, the best hardware and software for such a project, as well as the impact of creating early HDTV images of works of art.

The active participants in the MEC were the heads of education and members of their staff. The project was spearheaded by the Museum of Modern Art and the six other partner museums were the Brooklyn Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery, and the Metropolitan Museum.

Kathy Wilson talks about her work in the early days of interactive digital media, her time at Bank Street College and her memories of the Museum Education Consortium project.

Time Summary

Track 1, 04:16.13 - Bank Street College and Sam Gibbon

Track 1, 05:10.182 - Early interactive technology

Track 1, 08:04.426 - Aspen Movie Map Project at MIT, funded by the Department of Defense

Track 1, 09:43.00 - Iterative design

Track 1, 09:57.322 - Voyage of the Mimi and Ben Affleck

Track 1, 14:47.382 - Kathy starts talking to museum staff, meets Philip Yenawine from the Museum of Modern Art

Track 1, 17:28.978 - The philosophy of Bank Street College, Discovery-based learning, John Dewey

Track 1, 22:54.67 - The field of Museum Education

Track 1, 23:54.39 - Museum Education Consortium (MEC) was highly experimental

Track 1, 26:36.49 - Decision making and setting goals for MEC, discovery-based learning

Track 2, 31:44.108 - Different approaches to teaching about art

Track 1, 35:41.898 - Characters who played lead roles in interactive technology in the 1980s

Track 1, 38:22.87 - A visit to the Getty Foundation (funding)

Track 2, 41:36.32 - Intersecting idea about visual thinking

Track 1, 43:38.922 - CNN comes to report on the MEC prototype

Track 1, 47:06.382 - Showing the prototype to visitors. Lack of familiarity with technology. How to use a mouse.

Track 1, 47:38.071 - ARPANET, precursor to the internet

Track 2, 51:03.292 - Computer kiosks in museums. MEC prototype

Track 1, 01:02:02.23 - Evaluation and Diagnostic Tool

Track 1, Track 1
Track 1, 01:05:56.226 - Kathy Wilson after the MEC: Paramount Pictures, Viacom, NYU/ITP

Creator

Deborah Schwartz

Publisher

Cooperstown Graduate Program, State University of New York at Oneonta

Rights

Cooperstown Graduate Association, Cooperstown, New York

Item