Art2Life site overcomes time, financial hurdles to put Canadian history online

A trio of Canadian partners say they never imagined the difficulties involved in creating a pan-national educational web site when their project took shape five years ago. Yet, despite the challenge of overcoming regional biases and of arranging funding from public sources, the York Region District School Board-led project will be unveiled Sept. 24 in Toronto, and available free to the public. The Art2Life site, which also involved the participation of the McMichael Art Gallery and veteran web designers ecentricarts inc, is being touted as the first to bring a wide variety of Canadian primary source historical and cultural material to a single place. Its creators expect it to be equally popular among the school children for whom it was built as with the general population. Art2Life contains over 2,500 multimedia objects from over 200 sources such as Canadian galleries, the National Film Board, TVOntario, the CBC and others. Though it took years to arrange, most of the material on the site has been donated without copyright fees – a hurdle ecentricarts president Keith Durrant says is one of the reasons no other sites of this nature exist. Built with just under $500,000 in cash from the Millennium Bureau of Canada, the site represents one of the few cross-country web sites built with public funds outside the Virtual Museum of Canada. "The support is often targeted down at a regional level. So, if it’s federal money, they’re spreading the money out into Quebec and Ontario," says Durrant of other federal web initiatives. "And, the projects using the fund are either institutional-centric, or regional-centric. So, you don’t really see a lot of national online initiatives like this. I think this one is really quite special in that it is a pan-Canadian project." Durrant notes that while the Virtual Museum also posts material from across the country, the site is essentially a series of unlinked smaller sites representing the contributing institutions. The site was first conceived of five years ago over lunch between Bruce Richard, manager of learning resources for the York Region District School Board in southern Ontario, and his counterpart at the McMichael Art Gallery, Shelley Falconer. Richard explains that he and Falconer were lamenting the lack of a Canadian alternative to the then-popular Encarta CD-ROM offered by Microsoft Corp. Work then began with Digital Rennaissance on the project. Digital Rennaissance became ExtendMedia in the ensuing years, but two of that company’s staff and partners, Durrant and partner Michel Blondeau, went on to found ecentricarts a year-and-a-half ago, and the project went with them. Over the course of that history, the project evolved from a CD-ROM to a web site – and was significantly re-designed into its current, sleeker interface. Richard, one of the site’s chief architects, says the project has been chiefly driven by curriculum requirements, and that the site will facilitate inter-disciplinary studies at the high school level. Unlike traditional course-ware, the site encourages students to explore beyond strict definitions of history, art, or geography to gain a contextual understanding of events such as the Quiet Revolution or logging in the early century. Each of the elements of art, multimedia clips, and primary source documentation are arranged thematically including teachers’ resources for further study online and in the classroom. "One of the real goals of education is not content, but concept. So, to help a student grow their sense of being able to conceptualize the past, not history, but as events that included science and geography and technology…you need to have a lateral understanding… Teachers are looking at the value (of the site) in that way – as a means of giving students more of a bird’s eye view of what was going on around their core interest," says Richard.

Art2Life site overcomes time, financial hurdles to put Canadian history online

News | 09/20/2001 4:00 am EDT

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