Week 2 Reflection

It is the beginning of week 5 and as I received my log in details last Thursday I am using today to catch up on my reflections from the previous weeks. The blog post required for week 2 was our introduction however some people have posted a reflection so I am just going to go with a reflection also.

My reflection is based on the readings from Foster, Robertson and Sherratt. Firstly I think that Museum Selfie Day is a fantastic idea. The World Wide Web should be interacting with museums and museums should be interacting with the World Wide Web. When I first started this degree I completed a project teaching the hand written method for cataloguing museum and library objects. Clearly the presentation and documentation of historical objects is outdated as the world shifts to online resources. What better way to make history interactive, then to bring it to online mediums. I say, “If the people won’t come to the museums, bring the museums to the people.”

I did not understand most of Robertson article as I found this article difficult to read and I do not fully understand all this entire digital world ‘stuff’ in depth. However, the idea of hacking to discover what we are not allowed to know or to better present what is available in a more readable form had me thinking about history, Australian history and the way it has been taught to me up until this point.

Last week I went on a excursion (for another class I am studying this semester) to the National Museum of Australian (NMA) to explore the aboriginal displays, where we had to think about the way they were displayed and the way the displays spoke to the viewer. My overall impression from these displays was the effect white mans intrusion had on aboriginal communities, how these communities felt about the intrusion and a sense that aboriginal communities were reclaiming their identity by sharing their artwork and cultural traditions. Which brings me back to what I have learnt about history in school and the wider outside world. Most of the history I have learnt has been based on a white Anglo-Saxon background and as I think about it, surely other cultures have had a substantial influence on Australian history yet it is not heavily weighted in the teaching of Australian people. Would our history look different and therefore the formation of this country in particular be different, if history was documented without hidden agendas.

Perhaps as the online community for history grows, a more real world representation of history will be gained as opposed to the somewhat suppressed history that seems to be present.

 

 

 

 

 

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