Raspbery Pi a small and cheap computer meant to encourage kids to learn how to program . Photo by Jared Smith via Wikimedia Commons.

Helping Youth Geek Out | transforming youth from digital consumers into digital makers

Mairin —  May 14, 2013 — 4 Comments

You know that joke about how a liberal arts degree will get you a job as a barista at Starbucks? Well I’ve been thinking about what our education prepares us for in the work world. I’m not the only one. There is a growing movement that advocates for youth to be trained for the digital work world. But why do the ‘digital native’ generation need training? Don’t they intuitively understand everything digital? The short answer is no. They are digital consumers and understand it from a user perspective. Being a digital maker takes a different set of skills and knowledge.

The Report 

The Nominet Trust recently commissioned a report by Dr Julian Sefton-Green Mapping Digital Makers: a review exploring everyday creativity, learning lives and the digital. Nominet Trust is looking at ways to encourage youth to learn digital skills. In the report Dr Sefton-Green looks at “…the theory, practices and policies that underpin our understanding of digital makers and digital making in relationship to young people.” Dr Sefton-Green’s definition of digital making is quite useful for this conversation. He  defines digital making as “…the creative process of making a product or digital artefact – from websites, apps, games, and 3D animations to physical objects driven by microcontrollers.”  Unfortunately his conclusion – that more research needs to be done – is not.

Nominet Trust launched the report with a panel on digital making and youth which they recorded.

Schools vs. Museums 

Why am I telling you about this report and movement? Because museums have a role to play in helping youth become digital makers. In the discussion following the launch of the report, it became apparent that schools have not yet incorporated digital making skills into their curriculum and it’s not happening anytime soon. There is a void that needs to be filled. Furthermore, digital making skills, for the most part, have been gained through informal learning – museums’ specialty.

Museums Are Already Doing It 

Museums can and already do offer programs for kids interested in learning more about digital making. The following is a small sampling of programs being offered:

The Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia has a lot of workshops around digital media in their digital learning lab Thinkspace:

After School Computing Club – After School Computing Club is a weekly after-school workshop series combining science, technology, engineering, maths and art, with a focus on discovering through hands-on creativity and collaboration. Participants will build animations, games and interactive stories using the free multimedia Scratch software.

World Scratch Day – Participants will be remixing projects from the massive global scratch community, and adding animation based on some of the weird and wonderful things in the museum’s collection, and coolest images from the museum’s historic photo collections. The Powerhouse will be sharing the creations on the museum’s exclusive Scratch Day Gallery.

Pro Game Design with Unity – In this two day introductory workshop participants will learn to code in UnityScript, develop an in-game character, menus and level.

New Museum in New York is living up to their cutting edge reputation with a workshop encouraging coding literacy.

Kitchen Table Coders Presents: Learn to Code from an Artist – A workshop exploring the practice of teaching and utilizing code in an artistic context.

Museum of London brings to mind Streetmuseum Londinium – an augmented reality app with animated videos, so it’s appropriate that they are passing on these skills to young people.

Romans Reanimated – Using the Roman London gallery as inspiration, create stop motion films in this digital workshop. Find out the basic principles behind stop motion animation and develop skills using iPads to capture and edit films.

More than Coding

Digital making is not all about coding; there are all sorts of different jobs and skill sets in digital making. As you can see from the sample above it’s easy to draw collection connections to these skills for many types of museums, from science to art to history. Also the Powerhouse and London Museum have their own in-house digital learning teams but the New Museum, which does not, is still able to offer a quality program by collaborating with outside experts.

Tools

There have been some great tools developed for this digital making movement.

Mozilla Webmaker

Mozilla has developed a suite of applications to support learning digital skills. X-Ray Goggles allow users to see the code that makes up a web page. Popcorn allows moving image media to be revised. Thimble is used to make and share web pages.

Scratch

Created by the MIT Media Lab, Scratch is a free programming language that teaches the logic behind programming without the need for more advanced language and math skills required for standard computer programming.

Raspberry Pi

A tiny and cheap computer for kids to use to learn programming skills.

Arduino

An open source electronics prototyping platform used to create interactive objects.

What About Adults? 

Why stop with youth? The conversation that the Nominet Trust report was born from mostly focuses on youth. But what about adults? From young adults to mature ones there are many who could benefit from learning digital making skills for their current roles in the workforce. So museums let’s help this audience learn what can be an intimidating topic but is entirely achievable for this demographic.

Are you teaching digital skills in your museum? Who are you teaching them to?

In Current Practices, Strategies , , , ,
permalink
Wine

#DrinkingAboutMuseums #Lichtenstein

Mairin —  May 1, 2013 — Leave a comment
Some of the Drinking About Museums attendees discussing #DavidBowieIs at the pub

Some of the Drinking About Museums attendees discussing #DavidBowieIs at the pub

I would like to report a wildly successful #drinkingaboutmuseums #DavidBowieIs at the V&A at the beginning of April.

Faye and LIz at Drinking About Museums

Faye and LIz at Drinking About Museums

Museum professionals from the Tate, Science Museum, Museum of London, British Museum (just to name a few) showed up for an interesting and informal chat with the curator and researcher who put together the David Bowie Is exhibition at the V&A. We then got to see it for ourselves and grab a drink at a local pub to reflect on the exhibition afterwards.

It was so much fun that we’d like to do it again! So save the date for our next #drinkingaboutmuseums on Friday May 10th starting at 7pm. It’s graciously being hosted by the Tate (Tate Modern location) thanks to Sharna Jackson. The Social Media Team will be talking to us about their campaign for the immensely popular pop art exhibition on Lichtenstein. Then we’ll get a chance to see the exhibition and afterwards meet up at the Founders Arms pub on the river.

We are now meeting at the River Entrance not the Turbine Hall as it is closed. Please arrive promptly at 7pm. 

Space is limited for the talk and exhibition viewing so email me (m.kerr at vam.ac.uk) to reserve your space ASAP.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

In Networking, Social Media , , , , ,
permalink

Museums and Teachers in the Digital Age

Erin —  April 23, 2013 — Leave a comment

Technology is beginning to revolutionize the way teachers handle instruction in the classroom. Differing levels of access to teaching technology, of course, deeply affect who, how, when and where teachers are adopting technology-based teaching but all indications are that adoption of digital and social media as teaching tools will follow the traditional Rogers’ diffusion of innovations curves.

File:Diffusion of ideas.svg

It seems to me like we’re still in the early adopters phase, and school districts, being bureaucracies, are likely to proceed through the curve more slowly than, say, the general public did in adopting smart phones. But it is inevitable that the classroom and formal education will be deeply changed by the accessibility and usefulness of digital media. This begs the question of how museum education is responding to these changes in regards to the services and support that we offer to teachers.

Many museums have long since been offering teaching resources online, generally in the form of static html pages or lists of downloadable pdfs.  A museum’s teacher resources are only as good as the search engine that accesses it, though, and search engines for sorting through these caches of lesson plans are generally effective, if not always great, at helping teachers find what they want.  Check out some prominent examples of these sorts of offerings:

Smithsonian Education

The Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

It’s not unusual to find museums whose teacher resources pages don’t even feature a search engine – and whether there is one or not isn’t always correlated to size and resources.  Take a look, for example, at the Field Museum of Natural History’s Educator Resources page.

What struck me most is that almost everything you can find are just digital versions of print materials.  Some museums have begun exploiting the dynamic possibilities of digital media, such as the Brooklyn Museum, which includes links to web interactives on their teacher resources page, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which has some nice interactives on their Student Activities page. The institutions listed above likewise have numerous rich digital resources throughout their websites which teachers can use in the classroom, but they’re not really helping teachers find them.

I clicked every link on several google pages worth of hits on “museum teacher resources”, covering museums located in the US, Europe, and Australia – and I’m a bit shocked at the primitive state of affairs. Having interned in Teacher Programs at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007 and being well-familiar with the teacher resources I’ve created over the years, I know what the traditional practice is – a room (or several) full of rich resources for teachers, generally offered free of charge to any teacher who wants to come to the museum and make copies. We, and the teachers we serve, have long lamented the necessity of physically visiting the museum to access those resources, which is what has caused some museums, such as the California Science Center, to offer to mail requested items to the teacher. But it seems strange that we aren’t availing ourselves more thoroughly and more quickly of the ease of delivery that the internet provides.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m in the middle of a digitization project to get all the object files and teaching materials for the relatively manageably-sized collection on display at the Getty Villa scanned just for the sake of use internally by the museum’s educators, meaning they don’t have to look all that pretty.  To get it done, we’re pretty much exclusively depending on volunteers and interns, so I can appreciate what a daunting task it would be to think about translating all a museum offers in the way of analog, pick-‘em-up-in-person resources for teachers into a digital format.  Frequently these days our museums are producing terrific digital media material that teachers would love to get their hands on, such as a new create-your-own tour feature which is a big hit with teachers, but which is only available on a kiosk at the Victoria & Albert Museum.  There is no online version for those teachers who can’t manage a field trip to the museum.

There are the rare flowers poking their heads out, which are turning their once static online teacher resources into dynamic websites with the potential to grow via interconnectivity, like MoMA Learning. The venerable ArtsConnectEd got a fairly recent facelift, which includes video and audio clips embedded in prepared slide show presentations, as well as some social features – tagging and user comments. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History Resources for Teachers and Students has an index page which looks deceptively like all the other static lists of lesson plans – click through though and you’ll find virtual tours, interactives, and the Wikipedia-like, community-generated Encyclopedia of Life, which may be the most impressive museum-associated (the NMNH is one of several partners working on the project) teacher resources I’ve come across. The Newseum’s Digital Classroom is excellent as well, focusing on video lessons.

In the meantime, consider this infographic and the PBS Learning  tech survey it represents. We might also want to give some thought to the fact that what we have to offer teachers online exists side by side with great digital classroom resources such as PBS Learning Media, TeachingHistory.org, and DiscoveryEducation.  Are we keeping up?

pbs

 

In Best Practices, Current Practices, Learning, New Technology, Online Learning, School programs, Teacher programs , , , , , , , , , ,
permalink
Image from Tate Kids website

So You Want to Make a Museum Game? Words of Wisdom from Sharna Jackson

Mairin —  April 2, 2013 — 2 Comments

“Games are a conversation opener,” Sharna told me over drinks at what she described as an ‘old man pub’ chosen for its reasonable prices and accessibility to the Tate. Sharna is the Editor of the Tate Kids website and graciously agreed to sit down and chat to me about games one brisk London evening after work. The Tate Kids website has four main components – My Gallery, Films, Tate Create and Games. I have been thinking about museum games and how I don’t think we museum professionals always have a good understanding of games and what we are asking of them so I asked Sharna if she would talk to me about that aspect of her work.

Our conversation continued with Sharna explaining that games are not a way to delve deeply into the collection, to learn extensively about an object, or follow a detailed story. Games are engaging and fun and can be educational but they have a limit. They are a way of introducing people to the museum. Like marijuana is purportedly a gateway drug, games are a gateway to the museum. You might just partake in recreational use of the game and never enter the museum but if you enjoy it you may consider stepping through the threshold and trying something a little harder, so to speak.

Throughout my conversation with Sharna there was a theme that became apparent – be aware of your museum’s brand and create a game that makes sense for you as an institution. For example the Tate has a graffiti game, Street Art,(I played it as part of my “research” and had a lot of fun). This game makes sense for the Tate because they are a cool institution. Sharna explained that she wants kids to know the Tate’s a bit naughty and it is a brand and place where you can come in and be yourself. In addition she had the teaching objective of understanding graffiti as art. This type of game would not work for a place that has a more serious brand and a more historic collection such as the National Gallery.

Sharna shared a wonderful analysis of games with me from her friend Mark Sorrell of Hide and Seek. Mark explains the interaction between stories and games for museums and in what instance a museum should use a game for a story.

If you’re looking to commission games, it’s of the utmost importance that you understand why you’re doing it. Games are fundamentally different to pretty much every other form of media. The biggest mistake I see is not giving games a clear job to do, or expecting them to do a job they are not suited to.

There’s an interesting thing to be said about how story and game (probably) play a zero sum game inside a product. So you can either have a lot of story (and little game) or little story (and a lot of game). In museum or gallery contexts, there is often a story to be told, so games can sometimes get in the way, unless they are designed very carefully, with distinct ‘story’ and ‘game’ phases. Stories tell stories to users. Games let users create their own stories. And they do this via giving users a system to explore – games enable learning through doing, rather than seeing or being told.

To boil this down into something small and useful – use story when you want to tell and games when you want to let others tell.

Like Mark suggests, museums need to be aware of what they want to achieve. Sharna’s advice is to not rush into games. Figure out your goal: do you want to engage a particular audience? Tell a story about object, or how it was made? Do something technologically different, new or amazing for your site? Pick one area and do it. You can’t do it all. At least not well.

Sharna’s advice to museums who would like to create games:

A game doesn’t have to be expensive. It doesn’t have to be a game in a traditional sense. Offline games are good – paper and pen games, ARG like Murder at the Met. These games can have digital components as a way of saving money (i.e. rather than having the whole game as a digital one, use mostly analog components with some digital ones). Be realistic about what you can achieve on your small budget. Keep in mind who you are what you are trying to communicate and to whom. Come up with concepts that work for who you are.

So who in Sharna’s opinion is doing a good job of creating museum games?

The Welcome Trust is doing a great job with games. The Met. SFMOMA Art Game Lab. Not quite games but really good stuff-  National Maritime Museum of UK. A really good game – Chicago Museum of Science and Industry’s Code Fred. It is funny humorous and a nice way of engaging with the audience and brand; it makes you feel warm to the brand.

Who do you think is doing a good job of making museum games?

 

 

In Gaming , ,
permalink

Top 6 Lessons from the 6th Museums & Mobile Conference

Erin —  March 22, 2013 — Leave a comment

Guest Post by Dana Allen-Greil

If you don’t know Dana Allen-Greil, you should. Her blog, Engaging Museums, where this post first appeared, is a treasure trove of great ideas about technology in museums. Dana is currently leading digital strategy for education at the National Gallery of Art. She’s a favorite of ours here at edgital when it comes to museum-ed-tech professionals, so we were thrilled when she asked us to repost her excellent recap of this week’s Museums and Mobile Conference.  Enjoy! 

Today’s Museums & Mobile event (the sixth in a series of online conferences) featured case studies from museums around the globe and some excellent food for thought. Here are my 6 key takeaways:

1. Keep it simple. No, seriously. Even simpler.

Think Angry Birds. Pinterest. Don’t overwhelm people with too many options. For example, the Museum Explorer app from National Museums Scotland features 9 objects. Nine; not nine thousand. It is based on a simple challenge: find the smelliest, oldest, ugliest, etc. objects in the museum. Have fun. Earn prizes. Done. The BMA Go Mobile website (optimized for smartphones) is another example. It is a simple and elegant guide to visiting the museum. As the BMA’s manager of interpretation, Gamynne Guillotte, said: Do one thing really well. Lose the functionality that distracts from that goal.

 

Museum Explorer

Museum Explorer app, National Museums Scotland

2. Design for “mobile first.” Or is that “tablet first”?

Here’s some good advice about web design from one smart cookie (Nate Solas of the Walker Art Center): Start with responsive design. Then add native/touch features like pinch+zoom and swipe. When mobile isn’t first, you tend to start chopping features out of your website until the design fits a mobile screen. And that’s no way to design an optimal user experience.

The Rijksmuseum took this philosophy a step further when they redesigned their website with a “tablet first” philosophy. With the goal of creating a “close” and “warm” experience, the museum built an app-style website that fits a tablet like a glove and brings people up-close-and-personal with the large and beautiful images in their collection. How? They designed an interface that makes the image primary and other information secondary. The minimalist navigation takes “keep it simple” to the extreme with only three options: Plan your visit; Collection; and About the museum. The art images are always displayed at full-screen regardless of the device. The result? A breathtakingly immersive experience. In just 3 months, over 32,000 “Rijksstudios” (a way to save, share, and create with works of art) have been created. Even more impressive: the average time spent on site on an iPad is a whopping 19 minutes. (An average of 10 minutes on other devices isn’t too shabby, either).

Rijksmuseum website on a tablet

Responsive website, Rijksmuseum

3. Design sites to be task-responsive, not device-responsive.

Once upon a time, in the early days of museum mobile, we used to place a snippet of code on our websites to “sniff” out details of a user’s viewing device. We’d then feed smartphone users only a small selection of content—hours, location, etc.—based on the assumption that they must close to or inside the museum if they were (desperate enough to be) browsing the web with such a (small-screened/slow connection/etc.) device. Fast forward a few years and now people use all kinds of mobile devices for all kinds of different things.

Peter Gorgels of the Rijksmuseum offered sage advice when he said: design sites to be task-responsive, not device-responsive. Which begs the question: now that people are using their mobile devices for any manner of tasks, how do we best design on-site and site-agnostic mobile experiences that are tailored to user needs? If (device) responsive design isn’t enough, does this mean we need to provide separate experiences for different use cases (tasks)?

First, let’s tackle on-site mobile users who are focused on geolocation functionality, today’s events, and other visit-specific needs. In this case, perhaps the best solution is to make a separate app or mobile website that is optimized for on-site experiences. This doesn’t necessarily mean a slimmed down version of your regular website. A better user experience might take advantage of the kinds of native tools available on the smallest and easiest-to-carry devices: cameras, GPS, social sharing tools, etc. The result? A highly specific feature set that scaffolds the visit without distracting the visitor from the reason they came: to see what your museum has to offer in person.

You might be wondering: to app or not to app? MCA Australia reports 15 times more usage of their mobile website than their MCA Insight app. Further, they found that the “What’s On” option was 20 times (!) more popular on their mobile website than on their app. Why? Here’s my guess: as a user, I don’t want to go through the hassle of downloading an app just to find out what events and exhibitions are happening today. I typically only download an app if it is something I’ll use again. An app gives you (the designer) the ability to hyper-control the interface: if an app is going to be worth the effort for you or your users you had better design it to do the one thing it is meant to do (make a museum visit easier/better) amazingly well.

MCA Insight App

MCA Insight app, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

Now, let’s move beyond that small slice of your mobile audience to the rest of the people using tablets and smartphones to navigate the web outside of your museum. For this group, you should build a website that is optimized for browsing, searching, sharing, saving, manipulating—all of the actions someone who isn’t busy running around a museum might have the time and inclination to do. I’m impressed by the immersive ethos of the Rijksmuseum site and look forward to seeing how other cultural institutions pull users into another world through their tablets.

But your mobile experience for off-site users doesn’t have to be all-encompassing, uber feature rich, or incredibly deep. You might serve this audience well by building something that brings wonder into their lives in ways that make them want to use it again and again. The Magic Tate Ball app is one of the most clever examples of this that I’ve ever come across. It is a simple concept (shake your phone and get a personalized “answer” in the form of an artwork) and doesn’t take much time per use. After today’s conference, I can’t wait to get my hands on another Tate app, Race Against Time. With 30 achievements to unlock, this game will give me plenty of time to get to know Tate’s collections while I’m having fun saving the world from Dr. Greyscale.

(Visit Dana’s blog for a lovely video of Race Against Time which I just could not figure out how to grab and embed here.)

4. “Success comes more from visibility than from quality.”

The intended meaning of the statement abvoe (by Agnes Alfandari of the Louvre) might have gotten a bit lost in translation. In fact, my jaw dropped a bit when I read the slide. We all know that high quality is a fundamental value of most museums. Quality is also quite critical if we want to encourage repeat use of a product. But Agnes had just given us a lot of insightful information about the people the Louvre is trying to serve with their Nintendo DS audio guide: first-time (and likely one-time) visitors. To get someone to use something for the first time requires awareness . . . and, therefore, significant promotional resources. The Louvre/Nintendo partnership was marketing genius and garnered a lot of press for both organizations. I think Agnes’s point was less that quality is not important and more that activities designed to increase visibility (read: marketing, advertising, PR) often don’t get the respect or the budgets that they deserve in museums. I have a marketing communications background and am a firm believer that we could spend all of our resources building the best mousetrap in the world—and it would be entirely useless if no one knows it exists.

Even with a small project budget, at least some percentage should be allocated to outreach. Hugh Wallace of National Museums Scotland offered a very valuable piece of promotional advice: spend some money on Facebook’s mobile app install ad format. He saw Museum Explorer app downloads double in just one month with a smaller budget than was put towards more traditional digital banner ads (which produced no measurable increase).

Speaking of publicity, I’m so sad that I didn’t hear about Open Air Philly until today. What a massively cool project. My favorite parts? First: The Association for Public Art was really smart in their incorporation of Philadelphia’s diverse voices—from inviting different community groups (e.g., advocates against domestic violence, teen poets, etc.) to kick off each evening with their own audio messages to partnering with public radio to record influential “Voices of Philly.” What impressed me even more was the fact that public submissions were completely uncensored (though there was a way for users to flag inappropriate content). A poll of today’s conference attendees asked if we had done a project with community submissions that were uncensored. 28% said yes, 25% said no but would be open to it, and 47% said no way. (One of these days I’ll write a post about museums’ persistent fear of inappropriate responses despite consistently and staggeringly few such submissions ever received. I’d also like to link radical trust with increased outreach and visibility. But these are topics for another day.)

5. Know who your audience really is and what they really want.

The National Museums Scotland tech team takes an interesting approach to designing for audiences: things like age and demographics are taken out of the discussion entirely during the planning phase. Audiences are defined as people already familiar with apps, people looking for a certain kind of experience, etc. These behaviors and preferences, as Hugh points out, could potentially belong to someone of any age.

During her keynote, Agnes Alfandari described the young, overwhelmed, first-time, and often foreign visitors that make up the majority of visits to the Louvre; this is the audience the Nintendo DS audio guide was designed to serve. The Louvre routinely designs quite different mobile experiences for visitors to special exhibitions; these visitors tend to be repeat users, French-speaking, and relatively non-technical. In their quest to meet the needs of the first group, the Louvre bounced around a few ideas which were subsequently rejected. One such idea was the ability to personalize a tour. In the end, this feature seemed too much at odds with the experience of first-time visitors, who are often anxious to get started after a long wait to enter the building. These visitors are also not typically familiar enough with the collection or facility to be in a good position to make selections for a custom tour. The bottom line? A good idea is only as good as its fit for your specific circumstances and the audience you are trying to serve.

Queue at the Louvre

Queue outside the Musée du Louvre. Photo by Chris Boland / www.distantcloud.co.uk

Despite similar content, in comparing audio guides to the mobile apps the Louvre offers for download, Agnes identified two distinct audiences. People looking for audio tours, she says, will just use what you give them when they arrive at the museum. People who purchase or download apps, on the other hand, are much more demanding. They are comparison shopping, are not necessarily time constrained, and are therefore in a position to be more choosy.

6. Stick to measuring what matters.

One of the most useful things I learned in graduate school was during a Visitor Studies course in which we were admonished not to bother asking a question or collecting data (e.g., on a survey or in an interview) on a subject unless we planned to take action based on the answers. Otherwise, collection and analysis could easily turn into a colossal waste of time. (Hat tip to Jessica Luke for that gem!) As I dug more deeply into web analytics later in my career, I became a convert to Avinash Kaushik‘s philosophy of focusing on “the critical few” and avoiding “paralysis by analysis.” And so I was prepared to filter as I gaped at the array of app analytics presented by the Tate’s Elena Villaespesa. The good news is that there are many tools to empower you to make data-driven decisions (see: App Annie and App Figures for store/download metrics, Flurry for tracking actions and engagement, and Distimo for what seems like everything you could possibly want to know). The trick will be to streamline your analysis using only those tools and numbers that will help you reach your goals.

One of the basic tenants of good evaluation is that you need to know what you are trying to achieve before you can know how to measure it. Let’s look at two different app examples to get a sense of how to map goals to metrics. The Magic Tate Ball app is, at heart, about marketing. Brand recognition and retention are key goals. In this case, downloads and frequency of use would be appropriate metrics. Tate’s exhibition apps, on the other hand, are about enhancing the on-site visit and not necessarily about getting the visitor to use it more than once. In this case, metrics like dwell time, popular stops, and click events would be appropriate data to track.

Just as fans and followers as metrics don’t offer much in the way of actionable insights for social media initiatives, neither are downloads the only metric you should be tracking for apps. You will need to dig in deeper if you really want to know what is engaging people most, what features are being used, and what people are sharing (or not). The MCA Australia analyzed app user behavior and found that the “Show only artwork around me” feature of MCA Insight was twice as popular as the keypad (in which a visitor types in a number associated with a work). However, the people who used the keypad used it like crazy. So that feature stayed. MCA also used analytics to investigate whether the app’s built-in social sharing features were being used. Answer: not really. But what MCA did find was that people were taking photos—plenty of them—and posting them to Instagram. In response, the museum begin promoting the hashtag #MCANow. Visitors quickly contributed hundreds of photos via Twitter and Instagram. The MCA even built a display system in the galleries to show a live feed of the latest visitor-contributed photos as well as a website to showcase contributions.

The moral of the story: find out what’s going on and do something meaningful with the data.

MCANow

MCANow display, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

Want more?

These are just a few of the many fantastic insights shared during this short but oh-so-useful conference. Kudos to the conference organizers for another excellent event. If you’re yearning to learn more about this topic, check out the newly released 2013 Museums & Mobile Survey data that identifies and tracks key trends for mobile strategy within the cultural sector.

 

In Best Practices, Current Practices, Engaging Audiences, Gaming, Mobile Technology, Tools , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
permalink
Wine

The Time Has Come to Drink About Museums

Mairin —  March 13, 2013 — Leave a comment

I have finally gotten my act together and organized a Drinking About Museums event for London. It will take place on Friday April 5th and includes both a museum and a place to drink. So here is the plan:

7pm – Curatorial talk about David Bowie Is exhibition at the V&A (in the Digital Studio)

7:45pm – Viewing of the David Bowie Is exhibition (I will bring you to the exhibition and let you loose to explore)

9:00pm – Drinks at the Hour Glass Pub in South Kensington just around the corner from the museum. (If you want more than an hour in the exhibition you can wander over to the pub on your own afterwards).

Please arrive as close to 7pm as you can make it. We will meet in the Digital Studio which is in the Sackler Centre within the V&A.

For those of you who wish to only partake in the drinking (no judgement here!) we will meet you at the Hour Glass. We’ll be there around 9pm but feel free to show up anytime. It’s a small pub so you will see rowdy nerds and that will be us.

There are only 16 spaces for the V&A Museum portion of the night. To reserve your spot please email me – m.kerr@vam.ac.uk. First come, first served so email me ASAP!

The drinks are drop-in and anyone who’d like to come is welcome – the more the merrier!

A classic David Bowie song to get you pumped for the exhibition

In Best Practices, Cross-disciplinary, Lifelong Learning, Networking , , ,
permalink

MOOCs and Museums

Erin —  March 3, 2013 — 7 Comments

Video by Dave Cormier, coiner of the term “MOOC”.

 

I just participated in my first Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) – the University of Edinburgh’s E-Learning and Digital Culture. While the content was interesting, if somewhat more theoretical than I was looking for, the experience itself was the educational payoff. Forty thousand students enrolled for the course (and it felt like every one of them replied to the discussion thread I experimentally requested email me all responses – I was cleaning out my inbox for weeks!).  I don’t know how many completed the course. Full disclosure:  I didn’t since it turned out not to be quite what I was after. But one of the beauties of MOOCs for the student is a low barrier to enrollment.  This allows any student to freely experiment and explore various topics.

The whole experience has gotten me thinking about the possibilities for museums to offer MOOCs.  The downside of MOOCs for universities – no credit, imperfect grading, fall off of enrollees (about 10-15% of students who enroll typically complete a course) – are not downsides for museums since we already offer non-credit, non-graded, non-compulsory attendance and completion educational offerings.  The upside of MOOCs – vastly increasing the reach of your educational offerings – works just as well for museums as for any other educational institution.  In addition MOOCs appeal to our core audience: smart, creative life-long learners who actively pursue informal education. Furthermore, some commentators on the MOOC phenomenon, like Dr. Keith Devlin of Stanford, a veteran MOOC teacher, are convinced that MOOC students are “looking for education. Pure and simple”, without concern for certification or credit. It all sounds custom-made for museum education.

Think about our missions – check a few online and you’ll see phrases like “stimulate appreciation for and advance knowledge of works of art” (The Met), “to create a culture of learning through innovative environments, programs, and tools that help people nurture their curiosity about the world around them.” (The Exploratorium), “[provide] collection-based research and learning for greater public understanding and appreciation of the world in which we live” (The Field Museum). Teaching to remote audiences through digital means absolutely falls within these parameters.  Given our missions, we must make use of digital tools because of the way they allow us to greatly extend our reach and provide rich and deep resources for public learning. There’s basically no excuse for not offering MOOCs.

Okay – there is one, and it’s the one that generally plagues us: opportunity cost. The number of ways we could possibly educate the public is nearly infinite. So, we have to make choices.  If we do this, it means we don’t have the time, staff and resources left over to do that.  Generally we judge our effectiveness as educators by combining a couple of factors: how many people we can reach and the quality of the experience we can provide for them. These two factors can be in inverse relationship to each other and that is just as true in the digital realm as it is in the physical – though in a different way.

If it is possible to provide an educational experience to someone who will never have the time or opportunity to experience your collection in person, then you’re starting from a different point of origin than you are when you’re thinking about offering an in-person program that will serve 1000 people versus 10 people. Online offerings are by nature more about breadth of reach than in-person programs are. MOOCs offer a way to maximize the strength of what we do digitally. If you could present a high quality online class that encourages discussion, study groups and participant creation, and deliver that to 20,000 people (even if only 2000 finish the whole thing) – why wouldn’t you?

What’s Really Involved in Creating a MOOC

The very excellent site e-Literate recently posted a summary of and link to a report from Duke University outlining details from their first MOOC offering. It included useful gems such as how much time was required to create and teach the course (over 600 hours/ 420 hours put in by the instructor) on Coursera, which is just one of the many platforms available on which you can present a MOOC. Those are some hefty hours (on the order of 3 solid months of the instructor’s time), but it was also their very first MOOC.  I imagine there’s a significant difference between what’s involved in creating a new course, especially the first time you are familiarizing yourself with the MOOC platform, and teaching a course that is already established.

Coursera faired well in the instructor’s estimation with high marks for technical support.  Mention was made of Duke University’s Office of Information Technology and their involvement, which is definitely a consideration if you are a smaller museum without a lot of resources in that area.  What is also difficult to find is information about how one becomes an institution that offers MOOCs through a service such as Coursera. It has university “partners”, but no museums or libraries as of yet. I have little doubt that some brave institution will leap into the MOOC waters in 2013 because a few ripples are starting to be seen in the water.  If you’re in the LA area, you can attend David Greenfield’s Major Mayhem or Marvelous Match: An Introduction to MOOCs and Museums on Monday, March 11, or you can catch his presentation on MOOCs, Museums and School: Natural Partners and Processes for Learning at the 2013 Museums & the Web conference next month in Portland, OR. A review of a July 2012 webinar on MOOCs written by Robert Connelly, Director of the C.H. Nash Museum Chucalissa, also shows that at least a few museum professionals are starting to think about MOOCs.

Full disclosure again – the C.H. Nash Museum Chucalissa was probably the greatest formative museum experience I had as a child. I adore the place. It is a beautifully interpreted archeological site that I still remember vividly even though I haven’t been there in 30 years. It inspired my lifelong fascination with North American archeology which rules my vacation choices to this day. Just a reminder of what a powerful influence an educational experience at a museum can have on a person’s life.

For me, the really significant finding of the Duke University report on their MOOC was that “regardless of completion status, many students were primarily seeking enjoyment or educational enrichment.” Which sounds an awful lot like the motivations people cite for visiting museums. As noted, “most students reported a positive learning experience and rated the course highly, including ones who did not complete all the requirements.” After having participated in a MOOC, I saw that this kind of class is just as much if not more about your interactions with your fellow students as it is about the content put forth by the instructor. I realized that there are ways for your local audience, who could visit the museum during the duration of the course, to actively contribute to the teaching of the remote students since a MOOC involves such a great deal of student exchange, including meetups and study groups. MOOCs possibly offer a unique opportunity to co-teach with our visitors to the benefit of a much larger audience – which gets into the difference between a cMOOC and an xMOOC. More on that as the relationship between MOOCs and Museums evolves…

What are your thoughts on MOOCs? Have you taken one? Do you think it’s all a bunch of hype, or are there real possibilities here for museums?

 

 

For a thorough discussion of MOOCs, their possibilities, hazards, results, and questions still to be answered, read the white paper by Sir John Daniel, among other career achievements, the former Assistant Director of Education at UNESCO: Making Sense of MOOCs, published September 2012.

This article in the Washington Post is also great for its analysis of (and links to posts by) the various advocates, skeptics and agnostics about MOOCs.

And here’s an excellent TedTalk by one of the founders of Coursera, Daphne Koller: What we’re learning from online education.

In Engaging Audiences, Learning, Lifelong Learning, New Technology, Online Learning, Strategies, Tools , , , , , , , ,
permalink
twitter

To Tweet or Not to Tweet in the Museum

Mairin —  February 21, 2013 — 6 Comments

I recently had a conversation with a museum educator about how twitter can be used to engage audiences. We were speaking specifically about using twitter hashtags in an art history lecture-based course she runs (If you want to know more about using twitter this way read Tweeting for Class: Using Social Media to Enable Student Co-Construction of Lectures). This educator told me that she thought what I was proposing was very exciting but that she doubted any of her students had twitter accounts because of the demographic – she said most were over 40. She had a point. Why use something if the audience doesn’t? What is the point of investing time in a tool that won’t reach people? This led me to wonder if this is true only for her course or is it also the case for all visitors to the museum she works in?

Museum Demographics – Onsite Vs. Online

I figured the best way to answer my questions was to look at visitor studies. The first thing I did was start looking at the demographics of museums that have a lot of social media offerings to see if their demographics were younger. But then I realized that there can be a big difference between our onsite and online visitors so I started looking for visitor studies done on museums’ online visitors. I found quite a few but all on museum websites specifically, there was no mention of social media (we have done some studies on social media but none that I can find that look at the demographics of our followers and if our onsite visitors use social media).

Demographics vs. Psychographics

Furthermore, we aren’t looking at demographics anymore – it’s like so passé. The trendy thing to do (and most museum people I know are pretty trendy, I’ve been having to conquer my fear of hipsters because of this) is to switch to psychographics when segmenting visitors. John Falk’s visitor identity related motivations is the dominant visitor segmentation (an example of this type of study is Exploring the Relationship Between Visitor Motivation and Engagement in Online Museum Audiences – a study of the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s web visitors).

Ageism and Social Media Assumptions

Like a typical young person I’m working on the assumption that an older demographic equals non-social media users. But this is not the case. Maybe at one point it was (or maybe it’s just a generalization we like to think is true like how Canadians are polite, Americans are loud and Brits are repressed). I was recently visiting family up in Scotland many of whom I hadn’t seen in at least 7 years and was surprised at how many of my father’s cousins  knew what is going on in my life because I’m Facebook friends with them (these are 50+ year-olds). But don’t just go on my anecdotal experience – look at the numbers from the study Pew Internet: Social Networking (yes it does say young people are most likely to use social networking sites but it also shows that 77% of 30-49 year-olds and 52% of 50-64 year-olds use social networking sites).

What Am I Actually Asking?

Okay so I have been talking about two things here:

1)      Who are our social media followers? What are their demographics?

2)      Do our onsite visitors (i.e. those that physically visit the museum) use social media?

I’m curious about number one but to answer my initial question I think I need to focus on number two. We need to start doing visitor studies to find out if our museum visitors are using social media to determine whether it makes sense to invest in using these tools in the physical museum. It’s important to keep using these tools to reach online audiences as we already do but I’ve been wanting to apply social media tools in the galleries. Armed with research on if our audience would like this/is even interested, mangers could decide if it makes sense to devote time and money to developing it. I believe it could make the museum-going experience much more engaging but only if the visitors use it.

So if anyone knows of someone doing a study about onsite museum visitors and social media or if you know of someone who will fund me to do it please let me know!

Have you used social media in your galleries? Has it been successful?

 

In Current Practices, Engaging Audiences, Social Media, Uncategorized , , ,
permalink

MoMA Learning: A Model for Openness in Museum Education Digital Resources

Erin —  February 13, 2013 — Leave a comment

press_momalearning

A few weeks ago I interviewed Stephanie Pau and Jessica Baldenhofer of the Education Department at The Museum of Modern Art to learn more about their excellent twitter feed @MoMA Learning.  In the course of that conversation I learned that the education department had been up to something even more ambitious under the MoMA Learning banner: an all-new subsite of MoMA.org that aggregates educational resources on modern and contemporary art.

I had to know more because this sort of rich resource is exactly what excites me about the edge of museum education and digital media. Museums frequently partner and collaborate with other institutions of learning to strengthen the educational opportunities for everyone. Online, however, we’ve had a tendency to keep to ourselves, when the very ethos of the digital world is connectivity. MoMA Learning has embraced this basic principle, and is an excellent example to us all.

So, I got Stephanie back on the phone, along with her colleague Lisa Mazzola, Assistant Director, School and Teacher Programs.  The first thing I wanted to know was how did MoMA Learning come about?  Lisa explained that in 2005 MoMA’s School and Teacher Programs had begun creating a series of printed educator guides.  They wanted to make these also available online, so they created a website called Modern Teachers. Teachers who came to the museum for field trips or professional development would get the bound hard copy, but education staff could also direct others to the website, allowing the material to reach a global audience in a way the printed guides could not. It featured only a basic search, and teachers could save individual lessons.

This scenario probably sounds pretty familiar to a lot of people.  And like the kind of online spaces many of us have set up in the last 10 years, the website was fairly static because it was hard coded, making it difficult to change. It essentially functioned as a repository of the printed guides in PDF form. With the variety of tools available now, it was possible to imagine something much more dynamic. Lisa said, “We wanted to present our resources in a way that mirrored how modern art develops, with cross-connections and cross-pollination across space, time, and media.”  In addition, MoMA had generated lots of audio and video media for gallery- and online use, as well as MoMA.org subsites for temporary exhibitions and special projects, but these resources were not integrated into the Modern Teachers site. The site was very much a siloed experience.

Empowering Education Staff

School and Teacher Programs and the Interpretation & Research lobes of the Education Department work closely together to develop content for MoMA Learning.  One staff member takes the lead on developing content for a particular theme, then distributes an outline to the rest of the team.  Working collaboratively, everyone gives feedback and brainstorms ways to deepen and enrich the content.  The lead author then revises the draft and redistributes it, allowing content to go through at least two iterations before finally sending it to an editor.  Aside from text content, each author takes charge of integrating a plethora of digital assets – video, audio and images – that have been accumulated over the years. The Interpretation & Research team, who collaborate (along with the Department of Digital Media) on producing much of the Museum’s interpretive media, were very knowledgeable about these assets and made recommendations as needed, and  MoMA.org featured a good search engine where all the assets lived, so it was easy for the content authors to find rich multimedia for embedding, such as on this page, Performance into Art, featuring a video of artist Marina Abramović.

Lisa had many positive things to say about these changes.  “We are lucky to have Stephanie and her colleagues who have such intimate knowledge of this material and work so closely with Curatorial and Digital Media.  For someone like me who’s always teaching and in the gallery a lot, I don’t always know what the latest new media is being produced.  And because of the way the site is built in WordPress I’m in that process of learning to input and update content which is very empowering.”

I wanted to know more about how the site was built.  Stephanie explained, “It’s built with Ruby on Rails integration in WordPress. We worked closely with our colleagues in Digital Media to create a custom back end, which is very customized to the way our site is structured. Some in Education had experience in WordPress, some did not, but it was very much a learning process for everyone involved.  In fact, we were writing the content and developing the site in tandem. As we started uploading content we discovered, Oh that doesn’t work, but Dan Phiffer, the project’s in-house developer, was able to make iterative changes to the back end so that the logic aligns with how our content is structured. As we were developing the site we kept documentation, so now we have a MoMA Learning WordPress manual that empowers any staff member to go in and publish content on their own.”

I admire the learning process described here – everyone working together to find out what will be effective and what won’t.  Creating content and digital delivery in tandem likewise is a smart strategy because everyone benefits from the lessons learned. It is vital that museum educators expand their knowledge of digital platforms and content management systems so that we can use them ourselves to take advantage of the expanding possibilities for our field.

Democratizing Access

I wanted to know what were the driving educational ideas behind MoMA Learning? Lisa responded, “We had all this material we had developed, all of it modeled according to our principles in School & Teacher programs.  Everything was created based on how we engage with objects in the galleries; using the inquiry-based approach that we’ve always used.  So our goals were to create resources that encourage close-looking and inquiry into modern and contemporary art, highlighting the cross-pollination of objects and ideas. I wanted something that could do all of that which we do in the galleries, creating a narrative through these connections, and to let all audiences feel comfortable in this online environment.”

Stephanie added. “One of our main goals was to democratize access to art educational content.  The decision to rebrand from Modern Teachers to MoMA Learning signaled a shift towards greater inclusiveness of lifelong learners as well as teachers, especially since we know every person engages in multiple types of learning—teachers are lifelong learners as well. That was important to us, broadening the audience. We wanted to get beyond ourselves as well, so we linked out to non-MoMA resources like Ubuweb or content from other museums, pulling them together, doing the research for people who maybe aren’t so familiar with how to track down art history resources. We have a blog that tracks behind-the-scenes happenings in the Education department and the homepage features social media widgets [Twitter and Flickr] that tell the story of what’s happening and what we’re thinking about day to day.”

I cannot applaud this enough. The philosophy of interconnecting with other great online resources is one that museums are slowly coming around to embracing: much has been written about the Walker’s redesigned home page, and the Getty has recently redesigned its blog into an online magazine featuring article links from many sources.  Still, there seems to be a lingering habit among museums to remain self-contained islands on the internet sea which strikes me as self-defeating.  MoMA Learning enlivens its Surrealism section with audio clips like John Tavener’s Three Songs for Surrealists and supplements its photography section with WNYC’s archival Great Minds and Stellar Artists Consider the State of Modern Photography.  They link to SFMOMA’s excellent Interactive Feature Making Sense of Modern Art.  Page after page after page features a related links box filled with great material culled from around the web, including user-generated content such as on the What is Modern Art?: Rise of the Modern City page. Making these resources part of MoMA Learning truly puts the audience’s needs and desires first.

Stephanie went on to say, “Looking at larger movements like MOOCs and Khan Academy, democratizing access to educational resources – we think of MoMA Learning for being a kit for learning about modern and contemporary art.  Some resources, like slideshows and worksheets, can be downloaded and customized to user needs while audio and video are embedded for just-in-time access.”

Audience Input for a Better Resource

Another admirable aspect of MoMA Learning is how user feedback was integrated into the development process every step of the way.  When the idea to turn Modern Teachers into a more dynamic rich resource first developed, MoMA’s educators started talking to teachers about the kinds of things they would want from a digital resource, gathering information and ideas from the intended audience.  They also came to a crucial decision to make the new site appealing to the lifelong learning audience as well as teachers and students. The site was designed to be attractive and useful to anyone interested in learning more about modern art.

There were rounds of preliminary user testing in 2009 and 2010, in which members of all the intended audiences were asked to give their feedback to inform the process.  There were many informal talks with teachers.  They used Haiku to mock up the site and facilitated some guided scenarios in its use with small groups of teachers and informal learners in order to test the resources and theories of use they were coming up with.  They discovered that the open-ended questioning technique worked for teachers but was a little confusing for the informal learners. They took this information back to a contract information architect and created a 1.0 version of the site for a soft launch.  This was tested with a larger group of teachers and informal learners.

Now that the site has launched, the MoMA Learning team is soliciting feedback through the site itself with a simple link at the top to a SurveyMonkey and in the coming weeks they will be soliciting responses to  extended survey target teachers both in formal and informal settings. Respondents are saying it’s easy, intuitive, and accessible. But Stephanie and Lisa both described their mindset as being that the site will always be a work in progress. Post-launch user testing (detailed in a blog post by The Emily Fisher Landau Education Fellow Jackie Armstrong) has been really helpful, allowing for correction since the launch.  They are already working on a new version.  They intend to continue to do iterative changes, with a goal of being nimble and flexible about how the site changes to meet user needs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Best Practices, Engaging Audiences, How To, Learning, Lifelong Learning, Teacher programs , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
permalink
QR code. Image from Wikimedia.

The Same but Different – Digital Labels with Analog Content

Mairin —  February 3, 2013 — Leave a comment

Should Museums be More Linear? This is a question Nina Simon asks on her blog Museum 2.0. Although in the post Nina muses that grounding visitors in a story is a reason why museums should be more linear, I was drawn to what Nina says about the web and its potential spiral out in infinite non-linear directions. This potential, Nina admits, has not been embraced as museums continue their membership in the “cult of linearity”.

This post, along with viewing some digital labels that I had been excited to see and then was disappointed in,  got me thinking about digital interpretation in museum galleries and how we are using the same types of linear content but claiming that they are different because of their digital presentation.

Singular Authoritative Narrative

In Grad School I learned about the movement in the 1990s where critical thinkers called for the end of the singular authoritative voice of museums and the advent of multiple voices including the visitor’s.

I read Witcomb who argued that

…many museums have traditionally organized their exhibits, with a strong linear narrative which allows space for only one point of view that of the curator/institution. (128)

And Hooper-Greenhill who talked about how museums were

…breaking down the long-established monolithic singular narratives that privilege dominant perspectives, and [were] introducing multiple perspectives. (Hooper-Greenhill 23)

It’s now 2013 and with the potential of digital to introduce multiple perspectives and visitor participation you’d think we’d have accomplished this by now. Every time I hear of a new digital interactive I have high expectations for it doing just that, and as a result, seem to be constantly disappointed.

I should say that there is definitely a time and a place for linear stories in museums. A strong storyline can stay with visitors after leaving an exhibition and help them take away key messages. Also, as Ed Rodney points out in his post about the theatre phenomenon Sleep No More (On immersion, theatre, and museums) a lack of cohesive storyline can lead to feeling lost and ill at ease.

What I’m talking about is not losing a story but giving the visitor more ability to control it. This is what seemed to be missing for Ed. And it’s what I keep expecting. When you use digital media regularly you become used to having this control. Being able to click on hyperlinks and follow your curiosity wherever it takes you. Maybe you want to know more about something, maybe you don’t understand a certain term that is used so you look it up and then go back with a better understanding. But YOU have the control. This is the potential that digital gives us. You can’t hyperlink an interpretive text panel on the wall but can do it to a digital one. So why aren’t we?

The Same

One example of how digital labels are the same as their print cousins is Live!Labels developed by the University of Leicester and National Galleries back in 2006. The labels are digital and are edited by museum curators with up to the minute information about the object.

It’s quite an innovative thing for a curator to have this amount of editorial control over the context of an exhibit.

The key words in the above quote are curator and control. How is this different from print labels? The voice is still that of the museum’s and the control is still in the museum’s hands. The information presented is the same curatorial driven content as before.

I was just at the BETT show in London – a learning technology exhibition – where I ran into the British Museum showcasing their digital trails created using QR codes. QR codes add a digital layer to the existing print labels. Seven years after the “innovative” digital labels of the National Museums are we doing anything different? These QR codes link to webpages on the museum site where information that is much like what you would find on the written labels is offered. It continues to be a single authoritative museum voice where although the visitor actively scans the QR code, all they can do after is passively read the information. There was talk of using the QR codes to link to pages on Wikipedia that were written about the British Museum’s objects by a Wikipedian in Residence at the British Museum; however, Matthew Cock, the museum’s head of web, said he would only feel comfortable using QR codes that linked to the museum’s own webpage. So we get more of the same.

But Different

But there is hope! UCL’s QRator takes advantage of the capabilities of digital media. On the QRator website the application is described as giving the visitor the chance to be the curator, to add their own interpretation to the museum objects, share their stories and generally join in the conversation. It’s about the visitor.

In a paper called Engaging the Museum Space: Mobilising Visitor Engagement with Digital Content Creation  the creators of the project talk about how QRator aims to construct multiple interpretations inside museums. They are tackling the problem we’ve been trying to solve since 1990! They express it nicely here:

The QRator project represents a shift in how cultural organisations act as trusted and authoritarian institutions; communicate knowledge to the community; and integrate their role as keepers of cultural content with their responsibility to facilitate access to content.

Visitors’ thoughts about objects can be typed into iPads in the galleries, or tweeted about using twitter and a designated hashtag, or contributed using the Tales of Things app on their smart phones.

To see examples of the QRator you can go to the Museums and the Web article and read Part 2 which has screen shots of the application.

But Can We Do More?

It’s great that visitors can contribute to museum interpretation and interact with the museum and each other but there is still a missing element in terms of control. The digital environment is completely contained within the museum’s network and does not link out to other sources. It would be nice to give the visitor the ability to follow hyperlinks on topics or terms they may want to know more about or need further information on. It is understandable that the museum would be wary of directly linking to outside sources from the galleries. I’m not sure if you remember but in the old days of the web many institutional websites would have a list of recommended links. The hyperlinks in museums in-gallery digital media (digital labels and QR codes) could link to websites the museum would be comfortable endorsing. It would also assist visitors in knowing where to go for trusted information.

I also think that the writing on digital labels can be less formal and academic, and more conversational. Like a blog versus an academic journal article. The culture of the internet and digital media is important to reflect in museums usage of it.

 

References

Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. The Educational Role of the Museum. 2nd ed. New York: Routeledge, 1994. Print.

Witcomb, Andrea. “Interactivity in museums: The politics of narrative style.” Re-imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum. New York: Routledge, 2003. 128-64. Print.

 

 

In Current Practices , , , ,
permalink