Herminia Din is a faculty member at the University of Alaska Anchorage. Prior to this position, she worked for seven years in the museum field with an emphasis on technology for children and families. This included designing the “Young at Art” Program for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden at the Smithsonian Institute. In 1996, she developed the first educational Web site for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition, she was the Web Producer at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis, the largest children’s museum in the United States serving more than one million visitors every year, and education technologist at the Indianpolis Museum of Art.

Dr. Din is on the board of the Media and Technology committee of the American Association of Museums, currently serving as the program chair. She was also the MUSE Awards chair for two years. She has served as a federal grant reviewer for the Institute of Museum and Library Services for 5 years. In addition, she has taught the “Museum and Technology” course at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Also, she serves as an adjunct assistant professor at Fu Jen University, Museum Studies Institute, where each spring she teaches a “Digital Museum” course using distance learning technologies.

Since 2004 she has worked with the University of Alaska Museum of the North in Fairbanks on the LearnAlaska project - an educational tool to sort, display and share digital museum objects and historical images selected from the Alaska Digital Archives. In 2005, she facilitated a docent-training program using Internet2 videoconferencing for a traveling exhibit in Alaska, “Light Motifs: American Impressionist Paintings from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

Most recently in collaboration with William Crow, Museum Educator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met), she developed and taught the Met’s first online workshop for teachers in summer 2008, Global Perspectives: Exploring Landscapes, an interactive online workshop for K-12 teachers.

Her research interests include art education for children and educational technology in non-traditional learning environments. Her research focuses on how the use of new technologies in education offer the potential to transform teaching and learning in art. Currently, she is studying aspects of emerging technology for implementing creative initiatives to enhance arts education, and using Web 2.0 tools to enhance teaching, learning, and social networking.

She co-edited “The Digital Museum: A Think Guide” published by the American Association of Museums that offers museum professionals an in-depth perspective on how and why museums are experimenting with new technologies. She presents regularly at national and international conferences on museums and technology.

Most recently, she published her second book, Unbound by Place or Time: Museums and Online Learning, with William Crow. It was available at the AAM Annual Conference 2009 in Philadelphia. It focuses on the interactive principles of online learning can provide, and the pedagogies that we have found to be useful. It is an invitation to museum professionals to explore these possibilities in their own institutions.

During Spring 2009, she was on sabbatical leave teaching a museum studies course in Taipei. Beside from teaching, she was working with the National Palace Museum developing educational media for gallery intrepretation and for online learning. She was also working with other museums including the National Museum of Natural Science on several technology-based projects. 

This past semester, she was working her with art education students to promote Junk to Funk art series that focuses on using recycled materials to create beautiful yet finished and functional artwork. They raised total of $835 for Kids' Kitchen, Alaska. 

Few months ago, I did a presentation in Second Life on VoiceThread: Collective Learning and Sharing of Art. It is a brand new experience for me in such environment. You can go to program to download materials from my presentation. 

During the presentation, I had also invited participants to leave comments on how we can use VoiceThread to improve our teaching either in face-to-face or online setting. If you had used VoiceThread before, how has the use of such tool improved your class or your teaching? Do you have a story to share? Click on the link below to let us know.