Yesterday I went to Te Papa Tongarewa, the Museum of New Zealand, in Wellington, to see the T-Rex dinosaur exhibit. Goodness, those dinosaur fossils were huge! And small. There were tiny ones that came up to my waist. I only came up to the ankles of the biggest dinosaur.
There was a host of school kids present, dozens upon dozens of them. And the weird thing was that not many of these kids actually looked at the fossils that were millions of years old. With hardly an exception they raced to the inter-active displays in front of the skeletons and starting tapping the screens.
Weird? Anyone can do this on a home computer, surely ("Don't call me Shirley." ... no prizes for anyone guessing where that popular quote came from!). Me? I just wanted to peer at the real life (real dead?) dinosaurs for a long, long time. It was almost irrelevant that the inter-active sceens were in front of me.
There is a new head honcho at Te Papa. He says he wants to concentrate on bringing inter-active activities to the museum. How sad.
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