Melding the Web and the tactile
Alessa Moscoso and Mike Seward peered at the mountain lion just a few feet away. The animal didn’t peer back, or do anything else. That’s because the two Harvard undergraduates were looking at a specimen in the mammalogy collection of Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ). The mountain lion shares a cabinet in the basement of the Northwest Laboratory Building with jaguars and wolves, and a room with thousands of other specimens, carefully cataloged and arranged in the large, cream-colored cabinets that take up most of the floor space. The students were touring the collection as part of an unusual, multi-institutional class that seeks to better integrate the vast museum collections at Harvard and a handful of other universities into classroom teaching. After the tour, Moscoso and Seward returned to the Northwest Lab classroom where technicians had been setting up the videoconferencing equipment needed for the day’s lesson. Using built-in cameras and three...