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By a strange and lucky coincidence, I was at the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum (EMPSFM) in Seattle for a two-day workshop. EMPSFM is one of a handful of museums worldwide for which the death of the King of Pop is a very big deal. Are museums only relevant when they can serve our most pressing needs?
Diane is both visionary and no-nonsense about deconstructing the barriers that many low-income and non-white teenagers and families face when entering a museum. Most large American museums are reflections of white culture. Guards staring at black teens and grumbling about their clothes. YES students defy expectations.
Last week, I gave a talk about participatory museum practice for a group of university students at UCSC. During the ensuing discussion, one woman asked, "Which audiences are least interested in social participation in museums?" Many teens love to perform for each other. First, teens often have incredibly tight social spheres.
Over the past year, I've noticed a strange trend in the calls I receive about upcoming participatory museum projects: the majority of them are being planned for teen audiences. Why are teens over-represented in participatory projects? Why are teens over-represented in participatory projects?
Submitted by Nina Simon, publisher of Museum 2.0. I’ve had it with museums’ obsession with open-ended self-expression. And yet many museums are fixated on creators. Museums see open-ended self-expression as the be-all of participatory experiences. This is a problem for two reasons.
Recently, I was giving a presentation about participatory techniques at an art museum, when a staff member raised her hand and asked, "Did you have to look really hard to find examples from art museums? Aren't art museums less open to participation than other kinds of museums?" I was surprised by her question.
I’ve had it with museums’ obsession with open-ended self-expression. And yet many museums are fixated on creators. Museums see open-ended self-expression as the be-all of participatory experiences. First, exhibits that invite self-expression appeal to a tiny percentage of museum audiences.
I tell the story of the one-man band because I think many museum professionals feel like him. But, most importantly, few museum professionals have a free hand or moment. Museums rarely have the funding to replicate positions. If you have a teen program running, there are no second teen programs person out drumming up business.
But I’d been scribbling notes for an art museum label post for awhile, and then yesterday, the NY Times had a review of a new show at MOMA, Comic Abstraction. MOMA has standard art museum labels. When I asked an art museum educator about this (“How should I look at art?”) Tags: storytelling exhibition design.
From a museum perspective, I think there's a lot to learn from these venues' business models, approach to collecting and exhibiting work, and connection with their audiences. In 2003, writer George Scheer inherited his grandmother's thrift store and decided to turn it into an artists' center and museum.
These are some thoughts on a very small museum called the Brazos Valley African American Museum. I was fortunate enough to visit it during the Texas Association of Museums conference, and it brought up some reactions and emotions that I wanted to share with you. I felt lucky it existed.
I’ve received a few inquiries over the last year about museums and geocaching. to ask him all the dumb questions about geocaching and museums you can imagine… and a few more. Sounds like there might be some overlap with your museum audience? Both geocaching and museums are fundamentally about exploration and discovery.
Thanks to Bryan Kennedy from the Science Museum of Minnesota for providing this overview/reflection on the Museums and the Web conference that recently concluded in Montreal. Museums and the Web 2008 guest blogger Bryan Kennedy here. The Walker Art Center is turning its teen website over to the teens.
I've long believed that museums have a special opportunity to support the community spirit of Web 2.0 This month brings three examples of museums hosting meetups for online communities: On 8.6.08, the Computer History Museum (Silicon Valley, CA) hosted a Yelp! Me: Have you ever been to this museum? meetup for Elite Yelp!
Found via the NpTech Tag at blip.tv. It will be interesting to see if this advice holds true for the voters of the future based on Dannah Boyd's post " What i mean when i say "email is dead" in reference to teens. Meanwhile, library geeks are talking about tagging. Click To Play.
James Yasko is writing an article for an upcoming issue of Museum News on museums and Web 2.0. Here's the question: What advice do you have, as one who keeps up with technology as it relates to museums, to a group looking to incorporate Web 2.0 Start thinking about tagging and folksonomies. into their repertoire?
This week, the Denver Art Museum (DAM) opened a new temporary exhibition called The Psychedelic Experience , featuring rock posters from San Francisco in the heyday of Bill Graham and electric kool-aid. It is an incredible museum experience. The visitor is given a copy of her poster and the museum keeps a copy as well.
One of the best personal brands that I’ve seen on Instagram from a nonprofit leader is Thomas P Campbell the CEO of the Metropolitan Museum. This shot is a painting at a museum visited during a professional conference for museums. This shot is from a program for teens that the met sponsors, #metteens.
This summer, I worked with the Chabot Space & Science Center on a design institute in which eleven teens from their Galaxy Explorers program designed media pieces for an upcoming Smithsonian exhibition on black holes. There was no initial design, no graphics, and no idea of where the teen' work would fit into an overall structure.
Which of these descriptions exemplifies participatory museum practice? Museum invites community members to participate in the development and creation of an exhibit. Museum staff create an exhibit by a traditional internal design process, but the exhibit, once open, invites visitors to contribute their own stories and participation.
Rabinowitz commented that "as a 40-year veteran of history museum interpretation, I can say that I never learned so much from and about visitors." This is the opposite situation of the previous design goal, one typical in science and children's museums.
Unsurprisingly, some of my favorite museums are small, funky places run by iconoclasts—but that’s not useful to most professionals who work for organizations in which they have little control over size or leadership matters. I worked on one project in which the client institution thought they wanted unfettered teen expression.
Museums (and libraries) are trusted sources of information. In February 2001, AAM commissioned a study about the trustworthiness of museums and found that "Almost 9 out of 10 Americans (87%) find museums to be one of the most trustworthy or a trustworthy source of information among a wide range of choices.
First, I want to extend a huge THANK YOU to everyone who has contributed to the nascent Museum 2.0 We're still looking for your Museum 2.0-related There's a new Pew Research report on teens and gaming showing that 97% of American teens play some kind of video games (console, online, mobile, etc). Living Archive.
Last week, Elaine Gurian and I talked about radical change in museums. Former museum start-up queen, Jen is taking a small organization whose goal is to promote girls’ involvement in math and science through research and programming to new, innovative, exciting places. Braincake isn’t some fakey attempt to pander to teens.
You can upload photos to it, tag them, share them, comment on them, and search for them. Where else can you find Pakistani bathroom signage or Mexican biker teens while researching a project? Tagging makes photo search flexible and powerful. On Flickr, they are searchable both by title and by tag. Where do you go?
For many museums, visitor research--how people use the museum, navigate exhibits, and understand content--may be an equally important arena in which to adopt groundswell listening techniques. I spent an hour this morning "brand listening" to what the online world says about one of my favorite museums, the Exploratorium.
Last month, the Christian Science Monitor published an article entitled, "Museums' new mantra: Connect with community." It took me a couple weeks (and various museum blog responses ) to realize what bugs me about this article--it treats "connecting with community" as a marketing ploy, a "mantra" rather than a mission.
This week, thoughts on Chapter 12 of Elaine Gurian’s book Civilizing the Museum , "Threshold Fear: Architecture program planning." In this essay, Elaine discusses the various barriers to entry for non-traditional visitors to museums, that is, the threshold fear that keeps such potential visitors from walking in our doors.
Every museum has a number for its operating cost per visitor. Most museums don't strategically set this number--too many operating costs are fixed by building needs--but they can use it to assess how expensive each visitor interaction is and evaluate the efficacy of programs. So where do online initiatives fit in?
Sure, it's social, but people stick to their own "pods"--families, teens, adults--and don't diverge or merge. Out on the boardwalk, or at the zoo or a museum, there's a common experience of the sights, sounds, smells, activities of the place. Ideas participatory museum Unusual Projects and Influences visitors.
You can join the conversation in the blog comments, or on the Museum 2.0 This space definitely looked like a third place this past Wednesday night when we hosted an overnight teen event designed to help teens see how they can make a difference in the world. Tags: Book Discussion: The Great Good Place. What do you think?
For me, the experience changed my perspective on what teens want from social environments and encounters. It's easy to forget that teens are most comfortable being social with those they already know, not people who are unknown to them. Tags: Talking to Strangers. What's your experience?
On Tuesday, I reviewed Elaine Gurian’s essay, Choosing Among the Options , on museum archetypes and self-definition. Today, discussion with Elaine about ways museums choose their direction, how change is possible, and new museum types to be added to the list. What if you don’t want to be identified as one type of museum?
A museum experience I’ll always remember: In 2002, I worked at the Boston Museum of Science with a program in which high school students from a nearby charter school spent half their school time at the museum. They took regular classes, museum-specific classes, and had internship-style museum jobs.
The essays in this section, on “Expressing and Co-Creating,” present projects in which visitors create exhibition content, contribute to its creation, or get a heavy done of meaning-making in their experience of museum content. Who controls the content in the museum? Who controls the museum experience? First, museum content.
The recent flurry of restrictions that has sent teens fleeing? into the museum is the potential to encourage more positive in-museum interactions among strangers. I want in-person museum experiences to be more like experiences on social sites like Flickr, where strangers connect and form relationships around content.
I just returned from the American Association of Museums (AAM) annual meeting in Philadelphia. I led two sessions, one on visitor co-created museum experiences, and the other on design inspirations from outside museums. what is the value of the exhibition experience to non-participants, that is, regular museum visitors?
In many museums, comment cards are currently the most "participatory" part of the visitor experience. These services could be a powerful, cheap alternative to comment cards--especially those that are focused towards making suggestions about the museum. Simple, understandable functionality. Focuses users on prioritizing ideas.
This week, we're looking at the first section, Talking Back and Talking Together , which features comment boards, talk-back walls, and discussion forums at a variety of museums. At the Boston Museum of Science's video kiosk on wind power, 3/4 of people were most interested in making their own video (as opposed to watching others).
Photo from public photos tagged with macarthur in NMC flickr stream. This morning I attended the MacArthur Foundation Digital Learning briefing that was taking place at the Natural History Museum in NYC. "We are in a moment of time where 57% of teens produce and share media. local time). Media isn't just happening to kids.
When I talk with museum people about virtual worlds, the conversation usually centers on Second Life. If only museums' blogs got such a wealth of poorly spelled comments. " So what does this mean for museums? Tags: Technology Tools Worth Checking Out virtual worlds. Or, as the Club Penguin blog would put it, waddle on!
If you have a tween or a teen, I’m sure you’re familiar with TikTok. The majority of TikTokers, they’re so young, they’re so spontaneous, they’re so generous with reactions, with shares, with tagging. And not just museums jumped into that, it was a lot of different organizations. Okay, TikTok now.
There are lots of things visitors can’t do in museums. But what about the things that museum professionals can’t (or feel they can’t) do? This week at the ASTC conference, Kathy McLean, Tom Rockwell, Eric Siegel and I presented a session called “You Can’t Do That in Museums!” And so my question is, why are we keeping them away?
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