I guess the UN didn’t hear about Senses: A blog about the Thirdi Software Perception. The award winning website was developed for the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology by whiz kids and specialists from the Learning and Instructional Development Centre (LIDC) at SFU, Xa:ytem Longhouse Centre of Mission BC also contributed to ensure authenticity. That authenticity was regarding a virtual tour of the lower mainland as it was 3000 years ago; interacting with the Sto:lo people and the natural environment the way it was or at least as close to as what scholars, researchers and First Nations people of today believe it was. The collaboration was enough to ensure that out of 20,000 entries from around the world, the United Nations World Summit Award went to the Vancouver university. SFU is already respected for GIS software development and has a strong reputation in spatial information systems. This award will hopefully shed more light on the talented pool of innovative designers the school has produced.

The site is great and one of the reasons it received the award was because of its focus on serving the needs of a local population. It has a real utility to it beyond its attractive design, it’s interesting and informative and will compliment the collection at the  Virtual Museum of Canada very well- which you should take the time to check out if you haven’t seen it already. The virtual museum takes exhibits and presents them online through interactive and pictorial collections of historical documentation. The site from SFU is the ringer on this team.

Spongelab Interactive, a Canadian company out of Toronto also won an award at the WSA.  Their site is an interactive learning environment that teaches kids all about plants. It’s also a fantastic design and really fun to use. These kinds of web designs present to me, a turning point in education. Kids need to be engaged at the level of technology that entertainment and culture operates on. Schools need to realize that old mediums of teaching will have an increasingly hard time competing with new mediums of entertaining, and kids need to be engaged on a more interactive and captivating level. These kinds of software and site designs can take us in that direction. I bet  Marshall McLuhan would be proud of his countrymen for producing such quality and useful rich media content.

Related posts:

1. New cell phone software transforms learning here and in developing regions
2. Cool Firefox add-ons for designers (and civilians too)
3. Hello World

Tags: award winning website, Marshall McLuhan, SFU, United Nations, Vancouver university, Virtual Museum of Canada, WSA

This entry was posted on Monday, August 17th, 2009 at 7:12 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.