Through the cyberspace creations of Southern Illinois elementary and secondary students, the University Museum’s collections of art, historical objects and documents soon may transcend the limits of space and time.

A Museum Explorer program funded by the Illinois State Board of Education provides $15 million to team up museums and schools over the World Wide Web, allowing students to use virtual reality images of museum collections in their online research pages. University Museum administrators say this cooperative program, which went online this month, will make museum collections available everywhere at any time.

The first Museum Explorer student pages will go online in the fall and will be linked to the University Museum Web site, according to museum technical support staff.

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Lori Huffman, University Museum curator, said students are trained to use software that will allow them to design their own Web pages, which will combine information gathered by the students with images of related museum artifacts and documents.

This puts museums like ours at the forefront of education, she said. Students will see our collections, read about them, and eventually, we hope they will link to related information elsewhere on the Internet.

Michelle Mikyska, a social sciences teacher at Chenoa High School, in Chenoa, said her U.S. History and World History classes will use images from the University Museum’s Native Americans Collection and images of the museum’s statues from New Guinea.

Access to the Internet is completely new for us, and it gives the students a chance to be active learners, she said.

Matthew MacCrimmon, of SIUC Broadcasting Services’ computer support, said the University hosts groups of six students and two teachers from each school participating in the grant program, teaching them how to use their new computers and applications.

MacCrimmon said Broadcasting Services maintains the museum Web site and provides technical support and instruction to the museum and the visiting schools.

This is a valuable opportunity to recruit students by creating awareness of our programs, he said. Our students also get the experience of mentoring these (elementary and secondary school) students.

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The teachers and students visit the museum archives, where they choose items from museum collections they want to use in their instructional Web pages, Huffman said.

We are treating the students and teachers as researchers, Huffman said. With so many students researching a topic, we have access to information our museum would never otherwise have the resources to compile.

Robert DeHoet, University Museum education coordinator, said having students organize their researched information with museum collection items will add context to the museum’s online catalog.

Without coherence, a ton of information won’t help someone learn anything, he said. Here, parts of our collections are turned into instructional units that can be visited by students from all over the world.