Bursary reports – melbourne learning seminar

5 March 2009 at 3:45 am On behalf of Amanda Coleman

Learning Oppotunities and Museum Seminar Some time ago, in the deep dark past. I attended a seminar in Melbourne. A fellow college, Gabrielle and myself, were the resipricants of a Bursary funding us to attend the Learning Opportunities and Museum seminar down in Melbourne in September 2008. It was a fantastic opportunity that I am very gratefully for. Thinking back on the seminar I remember many inspiring talks. It is hard to comment on all of them so I will mention a few.

I felt very inspired by many presenters and how they think abstractedly to make museums a appealing, challenging and assessable for all, particularly school learners.

My most lingering thoughts from the seminar (and I have had a bit of time to reflect) were the discussions on how to tackle the vast sea of the World Wide Web, blogs and the internet. How these could be used to enhance the experiences of museum goers. On a personal level I have a great fear of the CYBER world and I am overwhelmed by the enormous possibilities.

Brett McLennan gave an insight into how today we have “Twitchers”. A generation of learners learning in a new way. He talked about how “twitcher” work on many levels at once, with quick responses. In the past we have learned slowly and cumulatively. These two types of learning may be at conflict. Brett mentioned the use of websites to help with continuing learning after the museum experience.

Angelino Russo added that as educator we can be a great help to teacher by using blogs allowing our resources to be accessed before or after the visits to add to the overall experience. Projects like Andy Braid’s from Tasmanian Museum were an inspiring example how blogs are an essential part of his ice.e.mystery program, linking Tasmania to the other side of the world.

Dr Lynda Kelly, from Australian Museum Sydney, spoke passionately about the need for blogs and the internet. She backs this up with survey evidence showing that people who attend museums are also logging on. I personal am trying harder to embrace all the possibilities of these connective mediums.

My only problem now is not the know how, not my fear as I have conquered that (yes I have a face book page!) but my lack of time to explore all the inspiring possibilities. This may explain why it has taken so long to add to a blog! Thanks to the speakers, organisers and to IMAGE for allowing me to attend the seminar.

I am a new educator and have learnt and been inspired. I now am scanning for new seminar possibilities for this year. Amanda

Summary of the MA ENVI seminar

Overall observation that format of seminar enabled a clear focus on learning in museums and participants embraced the opportunity to network and share practice. Using a constructivist approach to the summary, participants were invited to share with the person next to them one thing they had gleaned from the two days and one thing they wanted to explore further.

The presenters highlighted the following key concepts that emerged throughout the seminar.

1.  The learner must be at the centre of the experience…

• need to personalise meaning and perspectives so it links to the learner/visitor understanding        and experiences
• provide opportunity in programs/events for a social and/or collaborative interchange between  participants

2. The learning process needs to be…

• authentic
• inclusive of a range of thinking and learning styles and perspectives
• constructivist in design

3. The changing role of learning in museums and organisations….

• the role is shifting more towards a focus on learning process and audience needs…evaluation informing outcomes

• museum educators now play a key role in exhibition design and how museum knowledge and expertise can be accessed
• the need for a learning culture throughout the organisations
• staff are all learners….

4. The importance of developing partnerships…..

• Emphasis on developing learning programs in partnerships between museum educators, teachers, students and communities

• A constructivist approach was considered important and necessary to establish strong links between school experience and excursion in respect to content, process and the curriculum eg VELS

5.   Evidence of a shift in power relation ships with audiences: addressing the needs of students, families, communities and parents……

• Museums partnering with young people in developing their own inquiry-based learning programs

• Discussion about social media and social networking which is now valued in the museum context- the notion of sharing the learning, understandings and experiences at museums, in the classroom and communities including online eg teachers sharing museum lesson plans
• Collaboration with community groups eg festivals or corporate sector, local government departments  and subject associations

• Evidence of a democratisation of information and how its accessed.

6.   There was a strong focus on learning programs delivered using a range of platforms on site and online

• eg web 2 and 3 tools, loan kits, audio mp3, digital storytelling, machinima, and other multimedia

7.   The need for museum educators to be advocates

• In shaping the national curriculum – a rare opportunity for Museums Australia to have input shaping curriculum
• Within their own organisation regarding:
  • what ‘learning’ is and how it translates into positive visitor engagement,
  • youth culture and ensuring museum staff have a positive attitude to young people (particularly in school groups)

8.   Need to work holistically and collaboratively

• Develop partnerships with and relationships with:
  • schools – particularly with teachers and students to develop programs and support pre & post visit learning
  • communities
  • related sites for ongoing or special events
  • other staff & departments in-house

9.   Use a conceptual approach when programming for learning

Plan around the big ideas rather than the ‘topic’ or objects. Start with questions, not answers.

Chris Nobbs, Education Officer SA Museum
Bronwyn Sugars, Manager, Outreach Education, SA Dept of Education and Children’s Services

Teaching the teachers about Australian History

From 13 to 23 Jan 2008 the Australian National University, National Archives of Australia, Old Parliament House, National Museum of Australia and Australian War Memorial hosted 120 primary and secondary History teachers from across Australia. An initiative of the Australian Government, the Australian History teachers’ summer school provided a 10 day intensive program packed with amazing lecturers, research opportunities and site visits.

The National Archives of Australia provided two half day workshops which included dramatisation, demonstrations of experiential learning strategies, case studies and research opportunities. An evening event also presented ‘living archives’ – people who have stories to tell about their personal records in the Archives collection. Feedback from participants has been excellent. Here’s a recent article on the Summer School.

I was lucky enough to attend most of the lecturers associated with the ANU Summer School. The program was AMAZING. My personal highlights included:

• May Leckey, Precarious Empathy in Historical Understandings: Problems and possibilities
  
• Tracey Banivanau-Mar, Decolonising History: Hidden histories and silent voices
  
• Inga Clendinnen, Workshopping a Document for maximum results
  
• Ann Curthoys, Revisiting is History Fiction?
  
• Marilyn Lake, The Militarisation of Australian History
  

The Summer School really demonstrated how collections and cultural institutions cab be utilised by teachers. They are such valuable resources and are often at the cutting edge of education research, developments and theory. And of course the staff are always extremely helpful and approachable!

The ANU Summer School was a policy of the former government. It is yet to be confirmed whether the new government will take it on, although it looks a little doubtful. Follow up sessions and a website for participants has been set up to create a dialogue.

Museum Education and Social Media: 10 points from the conference

I was at the social media and Cultural communication conference last Friday which looked at the way the latest developments in internet interactivity (called web 2.0) could be used to enhance the reach and impact of museums. So here are 10 of the more salient points I took.

1. Kevin von Appen, Ontario Science Centre, gave examples of museums which are using web capabilities to engage their “community” in co-creation of content. Questacon’s own Climate x change being a perfect example.
2. Caroline Payson, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum’s online Educator Resource Center suggested that in the first instance at least we should not use the opportunity offered by social media to pursue new audiences but to creatively engage important current audiences with an “A+” experience.
3. Seb Chan, Powerhouse Museum, spoke about the opportunity of learning from the way our audience use and interact with our web presence to inform our “physical” museum activities. See Seb’s work.
4. Seb again, we need to look to the ability of web activities to build our impact and influence. That the effort may not generate direct physical visitors to our door, but can enhance the reputation of the Museum among different and enlarged audiences.
5. Lynda Kelly, the Australian Museum, highlighted research they have done which had teenagers explaining that museums do not need to try to be “cool” but rather the audience knows what we are, and if they are visiting our sites they are there to use us as Museums. They have plenty of other places to play games and socialise. Lynda has a very informative audience research blog.
6. Tim Hart, Museum Victoria, posed the question of how we will support 21st century learners, those people who are learning to be participants ion a future we can’t really see and certainly don’t understand.
7. Tim Hart again, from the film Shift happens, China has more gifted and talented students than Australia has students. How can museums be part of ensuring we don’t fall behind in the clever country race?
8. Brett McLennan, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, told us how the brains of “digital natives” think and act differently.
9. Brett again, as quick as we train teachers, new and old, in the new contexts of knowledge and understanding – that training becomes outdated.
10. Damien Tampling, Deloitte’s Corporate Finance Advisory group, encouraged us to see the highly innovative way the modern museum/cultural worker thinks.

I am sure others who were there will add their input soon. I will have more after a little time to digest it.

Memorable moments of the MA conference

So… Museums Australia conference 2007 has happened. For me, the bloodrush of the session-to-session dash was a welcome relief after sitting still for an hour and a half, so I enjoyed the multi-venue approach. And how good was it having an umbrella in your conference pack?

I also got a lot out of the presentations, and hereby present my list of memorable moments. (I’m leaving out the part where we learned about the reproductive cycle of giant squid, although I’m happy to share that too, on request.) I’d call this a list of favourite quotations except they’re mostly paraphrasings.

1. There is no longer any excuse for failing to consult with Indigenous people about museum practices – Jackie Huggins, historian/author from the Bidjara and Birri-Gubba Juru peoples
2. The Faith Bandler–Pearl Gibbs alliance is a critical part of Australian political history – Professor Marilyn Lake, historian at La Trobe University
3. Museums should develop a sabbatical approach to research – David Pemberton, Curator–Zoologist at Tasmanian Museum & Gallery
4. Zoos are worryingly bereft of intellectual curiosity – David Hancocks, consultant/author
5. You can demand plain English where you can’t demand good writing – Jennifer Blunden, consultant

Feel free to add your own items to this list.

Stone art on the beach

World beach is a project of the V&A Museum, in which people on beaches all over the world are invited to make a drawing in stone and photograph the result, the people who made it, and the beach itself.

Read how it started, and keep up with where it’s headed at Concealed, Discovered, Revealed, the blog of artist-in-residence Sue Lawty.

[wondering when I can next get to the beach...]

Reading the textbook is not enough

Here’s an idea I like:

Students should not read textbooks; they should write them.

Bruce Tognazzini said it in the 1990s, and David Weinberger considers it in a story in The Filter, published by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School.

Weinberger was initially ambivalent, but since the advent of wikis he has warmed to the notion. He describes how the collective, collaborative – and no doubt contentious – act of crafting a coherent, accurate wiki on the subject of study is itself educational:

Let them argue about how to organize it. Keep the discussion pages up. Keep the differences visible. Let them fill it with links. Let them connect with other students in other schools creating related wikis.

A class’s wiki is not going to be as complete, well-grounded or well-written as a good textbook. But students will learn more by writing one than by cribbing and cramming from a professional textbook.

In my (by now, predictable) view, the same principle applies to museum exhibitions and websites. If you’re only ever engaged in a passive way, as a consumer, it’s hard to remain interested. But if you have the chance to think through the issues of what to put on display, how to arrange and describe the items, and what they mean, it’s a faaaar more interesting experience. A journey, rather than a sushi train of neatly prepackaged ideas. At 5 to midnight, my metaphors are failing me, but I hope you know what I mean.

I’d like to see more programs that work on that principle. I’d love to hear about yours.

(Thanks to Mal for the pointer.)

What makes a good leader?

I suppose that the concept of museum education could also extend to the professional development of staff of cultural institutions. So…

A couple of months ago I heard Allen Behm, a political and risk analyst from Knowledge Pond talking about leadership. Apart from a bunch of engaging stories about good and bad leaders he has known, the take-home message was that effective leadership requires three practices:

• maintain your integrity – be a decent human
• be comfortable in your own skin – recognise your strengths and your limitations
• welcome dissent – foster a culture of contestability

It’s simple, really. Which is not to say it’s easy.

A good exhibition is…

What constitutes a good exhibition? Last week I attended a seminar on this topic presented by Stephen Foster, an adjunct professor at the Australian National University, and former general manager with responsibility for content at the National Museum of Australia.

It’s a deceptively simple question. To answer it, you can draw on exhibition development guidelines, or you can think about the kinds of things people say in reviews, to come up with a list of criteria for evaluation. It seems a valuable exercise, and long overdue.

What I found interesting about the criteria tabled at this event was that, although some of them were about visitors’ experience, there was no mention of what those Assembling here might consider central to the mission of museum exhibitions – educational value. I’m not thinking here about how well an exhibition lends itself to having a non-formal education program built around it. I mean that an exhibition is itself a program for informal learning.

In that sense, a good exhibition is one that constitutes a good learning program. And for me, whether an exhibition/program is satisfying or deadly dull often depends on whether it involves its audience in the process of meaning-making – rather than simply presenting one thing after another, after another. To rate well in my book, an exhibition needs to generate a dialogue with its visitors. How it does that depends on the:

• content of the exhibition
• creativity and nous of the exhibition developers

But for me, an exhibition should have some kind of in-built audience participation. So that’d be my two-cent answer to the question. (To keen readers seeking a higher-cost rumination on this theme, I offer my doctoral thesis.)

One thing to clearly emerge from the seminar is the need to cultivate a culture of critique around museum exhibitions, comparable to – if distinct from – that around fine art, books, and film. The current paucity of critique contributes to the uncertainty over what constitutes a good exhibition.

In that light, here’s an idea: perhaps we should take inspiration from art mobs. Perhaps Collections Australia Network should offer to publish unofficial audio guides to Australian exhibitions. I’d like to see that. And my hunch is that an unofficial guide would add value to an exhibition or, in other words, help constitute its goodness.

Pobblebonkless

Museum Victoria has won the McFarlane Prize for excellence in Australian web design for its lovely site Caught and coloured, about zoological drawings from colonial Victoria. Nice one – I love scientific art / arty science, and there is great contextual info – and stories – here too.

My only disappointment is that the audio for Pobblebonk / the Sand Frog is a human voice about the frog, ie, it doesn’t actually play the ‘pobblebonk’.

This Botanic Gardens page on frogs has audio recordings of various frogs, and it claims that when Eastern Banjo Frogs croak in unison, they make a sound like ‘pobblebonk’. Unfortunately (again!) the recording is of a solo performance.

I remain pobblebonkless.