I was pointed to this by a couple of people and I thought it would be worth a quick post … The NY Times ran a piece about how a professor at Marymount Manhattan College has been remixing media to make museum tours more interesting to students, With Irreverence and an iPod, Recreating the Museum Tour – New York Times. Here’s a quick quote:

The creators of this guide, David Gilbert, a professor of communication at Marymount Manhattan College, and a group of his students, describe it on their Web site as a way to “hack the gallery experience” or “remix MoMa,” which they do with a distinctly collegiate blend of irony, pop music and heavy breathing. It is one of the newest adaptations in the world of podcasting – downloading radio shows, music and kitchen-sink audio to an MP3 player.

It got me thinking about the upcoming PA Governor’s School for Information Technology and how we could have the kids do the same thing … I was talking with my wife, Kristin — who by the way was quoted in the New York Times herself the other day — about how we could use this concept to have the kids create sound seeing tours of the PSU/PGSIT experience. What we’ve been doing each of the last six years we’ve been running the program is to task the kids with a large, overarching IT-related challenge. In the past we’ve had them figure out how to take a large bank online, how to create a next generation (legal) music distribution company, how to secure our airports, and more.

This is the last year for the PGSIT and we’d like to do something that pulls together all the stuff we’ve been looking at in the open source, podcasting, and the read/write web space. I think we’ll have the kids compete to create a design for the PGSIT Alumni Site that pulls together blogging, discussions, podcasts, and potentially a friendster like set of opportunities. You know, a space that they’d actually use … At any rate, that’s what I’m thinking … anyone have ideas out there?