161 Museums in Oklahoma!

Published by in digitalstorytelling, history, web 2.0 on February 10th, 2009

I had a great visit this evening with Jason Schubert, a friend of mine from Lubbock who is the interim-director of the J.M. Davis Arms and Historical Museum in Claremore, Oklahoma. Jason told me about the Oklahoma Museums Association, which lists 161 Oklahoma-based museums on its website. This is an amazing list! I knew we had a lot of museums around our state, but had no idea the number was this large! Their annual conference is scheduled for September 23-25, 2009 in Lawton. I’m thinking it would be great to invite more Oklahoma students and teachers to create student-led field trips like Howe Public Schools did last year to Spiro Mounds and will again this Friday to the Fort Smith National Historic Site. Howe students’ VFT this year will focus on the history of Judge Isaac Parker, who was known as “the legitimate ‘Hanging Judge’ of the American Old West.”

It would also be great to find a way to partner with Oklahoma museums and involve local students in our Celebrate Oklahoma Voices project. We are discussing a “BYOT” model for the workshops (bring your own technology) which would involve the use of cell phones as digital cameras and portable audio recorders via Gabcast. A BYOT workshop model would certainly be more scalable than our present model which requires about $7000 to purchase supplies/equipiment for each workshop involving 25 educators.

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1 Comment »
  • http://www.wesfryer.com Wesley Fryer

    161 may be a low number. According to the PDF Advocacy flyer from 2008 for the Oklahoma Museum Association, “there are 233 Oklahoman museums and collections with Dun & Bradstreet.” This number was up from 2002 in 2007.

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