What Am I Learning: Interning at the Smithsonian (#3)

I’m about 2 months in now, and all is going well (except the background check stuff, which is taking a long time).

What new skills am I developing?

While I had learned about ArcGIS Storymaps through my colleagues in the certificate program, this is my first time creating my own, and I’m already created a second Storymap for the trunks.

I’m also learning a bit more about teaching for K-12. It’s not easy to learn about education K-12 when it’s all theory in a classroom, but I’ve been on a field trip and saw how the students interact with the materials, and it has helped me to reconsider how to layout and phrase the digital materials I create to be more accessible to the topics they are learning and vocabulary they might have. (I tend to write very academically, unless I specifically try to be casual, and even then its hard to stop some more complex terms from slipping in.)

Learning the intersection between physical materials and digital materials. Since this project is very tactile, it’s sometimes a challenge to figure out how to incorporate digital materials in a way where they don’t detract from the physical materials at all. In some cases it seems to repeat a lot of the information that is found in the trunk but in different ways. One way that I justify this is that many students learn differently from their peers, so having a primarily audio and touch format of the trunk may work for some, but having a much more visual version of the materials may help some students who don’t learn through touch. The idea is not that one means of interactivity is best, but that a variety of learning styles can help the most students.

Have you identified other skills to develop in the future?

I have identified some skills I would like to develop in the future, though I’m not sure I’ll be able to get them directly from this internship.

I have so many ideas, and I would love to be better at implementing them, but sometimes my raw creation skills, especially my inability to effectively code, seem to hold me away from these ideas I have. So I would honestly love to learn a bit more about coding, especially the C family of code (C+, C++ and C#), maybe If I have time it would be nice to brush up on my java and HTML which I briefly learning in my teenage and early undergrad years, but I never got past intro to java, so even those rusty skills weren’t very far reaching. (Personally some of my favorite video games are written in Python, so it would be fun to learn Python mostly for video game modding too).

I’m also interested in learning more CMS (content management systems). I was taught and had to practice WordPress for the certificate, and I know enough basics to get by, but I think I would be interested in adding Drupal which is more customizable than WordPress, but has a steeper learning curve. I also believe that Drupal is used by more public history institutions than WordPress. Like the Smithsonian uses Drupal, and I’ve seen it on a few job applications that I’ve skimmed for market research. I’m not sure I would be able to really learn Drupal with the Smithsonian though, since that’s not what my internship is for, and we have a member of the team already working on the CMS.

There’s of course other skills I would love to learn, but these are two of the more difficult ones that have been on my mind.