Bursary report 2 melbourne seminar

Submitted on 2009/03/05 at 3:45am  on behalf of Amanda Coleman

Learning Opportunities and Museum Seminar

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.

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.

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 .
Amanda

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.

A climate change web 2.0 idea

The Aus Pacific Network of Science Centres and Questacon have created a tool for sharing your climate change observations and stories. Using a Google map to locate people you can watch videos, see images and text describing people’s initiatives to reduce their climate impacts.

I know the Powerhouse is trialling a mapping tool for people to search for objects in our collection but climate x change is engaging the community in creating the content. If we could get people to publish materials associated with the objects in our collection – historic footage of our machines working, photos of themselves in a frock from the collection, or podcast of an event discussing museum things I think it would be wonderfully engaging for everyone.

I have always liked the idea that our collections are the tip of icebergs when compared to the knowledge and material in homes and offices around the globe. I am not alone in a desire to see the public at large able to provide meaning and interpretation of museum content, see:

• Reading the textbook is not enough
• Not learning, making
• A collection of secrets

just as a start.

Into the desert – audio blog

The National Museum of Australia is exploring new territory, staking a claim in the blogosphere. It is a mission echoing its new blog’s focus – an expedition into the desert to find – amongst other things – fossils of the large marsupial lion, Thylacoleo.

Into the desert contains regular audio reports by desert archaeologist Dr Mike Smith, sent back to the Museum via satellite phone. As well as hearing about the party’s progress – including how the camels are going! – you can visually trace the path of the party via a dynamic expedition map.

I knew there used to be BIG things out there in South Australia. I had a charming paleontologist uncle who once gave my sister some little pieces of dinosaur egg. But I’d never heard of this big marsupial lion. And one thing that does not appear on the blog is a picture of the prized object of the search. So here’s a great drawing that appeared in a book published by the Australian Museum on prehistoric animals in Australia:

It was drawn by Peter Schouten, but appears here via a website on Thylacoleo.

It is good to see the Museum out there like this. I imagine there will be many followers of the mission via the blog. Pity there seems no scope for in-blog discussion. That would have been good to see, too.

How Web 2.0 will change history

As an editor of archival websites, I’m interested in the tools available for historical publishing, research and interpretation. And the advent of Web 2.0 means that such tools are proliferating and becoming easier and more fun to use. Social software is making search interfaces more intuitive and clever; it is making publishing dialogic – readers can also be writers; and it is enabling many new kinds of collaborations to occur in interpreting collections.

Last month I addressed a small group at the Australian Historical Association conference in Canberra on this topic of How Web 2.0 will change history (PDF 312kb). The paper was framed by this mindmap I made

(inspired by other mindmaps on Web 2.0, like the one on Wikipedia).

There are plenty of exciting things the National Archives of Australia could do with these technologies, and it is starting to happen, but the path is long, resources are limited, and in some ways a cultural shift is necessary – it does not come naturally for a cultural institution to radically trust its audience.* So the paper is a bit imagin-ary. But didn’t Einstein say that imagination is more important than knowledge?

* Deep bow here to the Powerhouse Museum and its new collection interface, which you can read more about on the fresh + new blog.

Folksonomic findability

It is a pet peeve of mine that museums so rarely draw on the knowledge and understanding of visitors to help interpret their collections. Ever since I read Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture,¹ I’ve sought out initiatives that facilitate community interaction. In global terms, there are plenty of examples, especially in terms of public programs. But in terms of the core business of museums – collection management, and exhibitions, it remains rare for a museum to involve audiences in the process of making collections meangingful. (Your examples are welcome!)

In the world of the web, though, the story is different. Social software enables visitors to the site to help make the site. And the cultural heritage sector is starting to explore the possibilities.

Steve is a project of a group of seven museums.² It emerged out of the mismatch between the classification systems of museums and the way users tend to think about collection items. A museum might describe an artwork in terms of the artist’s proper family name. Whereas a visitor might search for an artwork according to how they remember it – its shape, or the fact that a painting had some nice clouds in it.

The Steve people are researching and developing a tool that will enable website visitors to add descriptive tags to any item they are viewing. The tags then join in with the official description of the item, so that the collection takes on a hybrid official and vernacular classification system. And henceforth each item becomes more findable for more people. And more collectively meaningful!

Have a look at, and join in, this wonderful experiment. (You need to register if you want to do some cataloguing.)

But wait! Here’s another example, closer to home. Our very own Powerhouse Museum invites users to help describe swatches of fabric, dating from the 1890s to the 1920s. You can enter your thoughts on their colour, pattern, mood and/or ‘other facts’.

1. Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kreamer, and Steven D. Lavine (eds), Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992.
2. Steve stands for Social Terminology Enhancement through Vernacular Engagement.

Playing Flickr

In September, diners at a restaurant in Amsterdam could choose a word and SMS it, and Flickr photos tagged with that word would be projected onto huge screens around them. Truly interactive public art, I love it. For pix and detail, see playing Flickr.

Va va Vrroom!

Vrroom is the best educational resource on the web, in the world.

Ok, since I’m part of the Vrroom team, you shouldn’t take my word for it. But these words are not mine. They were spoken by a history teacher, last week, at the launch of the site. It was an unsolicited accolade – I’m just reporting. Really.

So yea, almost two years after it was conceived, the National Archives of Australia finally launched its virtual reading room for teachers and students. The forum was the conference of Victorian history teachers, and the speaker was the lovely Ms Megabyte. Thanks, Mega!

We also ran two workshops on using Vrroom, and (!) for the duration of the conference, we hosted the Vrroom room, an internet cafe where you could get a personalised introduction to the site – or check your email.

Whew… Check it out.

Oral history archive

At a history teachers conference this week, Michael Caulfield spoke about the making of the Australians at War Film Archive.

This archive exists because of the Australian fascination (read obsession!) with war and war history. But the result is not military history. It is a rich source of oral history.

The archive comprises 12,000 hours of film interviews with 2005 people. Well-trained interviewers worked in pairs to elicit amazingly intimate and frank stories of lives before, during and after the subject’s war experience.

Better still, every interview is transcribed and therefore fully searchable by keyword. It seems like whatever term you search for – I tried ‘Depression’, ‘pregnancy’ and ‘worms’ – yields pages and pages of results.

Techno but not dialogic

The South Australian Museum is implementing a kind of mother-CMS, so that collection items, once arranged and described, can be output to any screen device in the museum, be it hand-held, part of an exhibition display, on the web, whatever.

When this tech was being demonstrated at the MA conference, the presenters mentioned a facility to track changes made by users. I got all excited, thinking how great it would be for visitors to be able to interpret the collection too… but then I realised they didn’t mean visitor users; only staff users. The output is all centrally controlled.

Then an education officer from the museum said that the technology is convenient but that the template structure is fixed, so it can be a straitjacket.

That subdued me quite a lot.

Would anyone from the SA Museum care to comment?