The Metropolitan Museum of Art may be full of old stuff, but its curators want us to know that they're cool, they're with it — they're hip to the technological trends the young people are talking about. Let us explain: today the venerable art institution has launched a new interactive online feature that features "Connections," a series of webisodes starring Met staffers as they trace sundry micro-themes in the museum's collection. In the roughly four-minute segments — to be updated every Wednesday — voice-over narration by Met employees is paired with slide shows of works from the museum's collection. Add a zoom and pan, Met, and you'll be giving Ken Burns a run for his documentarian money.

On the new Met TV, there is no cutthroat competition à la Bravo's "Work of Art," and Jerry Saltz doesn't boot anyone off the show at the end, which is always a disappointment in any form of entertainment. Rather, the episodes — the first projects of their new digital media department — are charming in a schoolhouse kind of way. They're what, back in the 1970s, they used to call edutainment. In his introduction to the new series of shorts, Met director Thomas P. Campbell says that "some are playful; some are deeply complex." One need only look at the themes of the inaugural four episodes, up on the site now, to see that Campbell does not lie.

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On the playful side of the spectrum? My personal favorite, "Small Things," is narrated by associate director Carrie Rebora Barratt. In it, we learn that the Met's collection contains not only a lot of big artworks, but also a lot of tiny art, such as Japanese Netsuke animals. "What I always wanted was the thing I could put in my pocket," the associate director confesses. (We suggest the museum guards keep an eye on her.) The artistic highlight of this episode is Thomas Seir Cummings' "Mother's Pearls," a necklace the artist made for his wife whose "pearls" are miniature portraits of their children. Which, given the chance, I would put in my pocket.

The "Virtuosity" segment strikes a more complex note, with paintings conservator Michael Gallagher discussing why it's more "fun" to make a trompe-l'œil room by "killing yourself creating it out of fruit woods" than it would be to paint it. According to the specialist, a virtue of the Met is how much of its collection shows off a virtuosic "display of skill, of brilliance." While this may not be news, exactly, Gallagher does have a superb European accent, and includes in the slide show a stunning, intricately decorative  16th-century helmet.

In the "Maps" episode, medieval art curator Melanie Holcomb somehow manages, in just over two minutes, to segue from the New York City subway guide to how looking at maps makes her feel like God. Along the way we are shown a delightful 1938 Walker Evans photograph, taken in the subway (with a camera, Holcomb does not mention, was carefully disguised so that fellow passengers would not notice they were being documented). The last of the inaugural "Connections" episodes takes "Tennessee" as its subject, with art documentary producer Christopher Noey talking about his childhood in the southern state. While admiring some fine Edward Weston and Evans photographs, one can learn trivia about the city of Memphis, and how the pink marble floors of the museum are reminiscent of the bathroom tiling of junior high schools.

If you still need more reasons to stay tuned, later this month curators and educators will explore the colors white and black, religious art, "the ideal man" ("from ancient Rome to Hollywood"), and "the ideal woman" ("from Queen Victoria to Madame X"). And, as this new year progresses, the Met will stop being polite and stop getting real, with episodes on doors, smiles, Hemingway, and birding, to name a few. What other enticement could you need to go on a lovely technological-stone-age tour of the Met than the promise of birding-themed art?