Toby Tannenbaum

Jan 03 2011

Thank you again to the Center for History and New Media and to Kris and Scott for including me in this convening.

It was incredibly informative to learn in what ways colleagues are engaging with technology and that we share many of the same challenges. Many of the referrals and recommendations for websites, other resources, and grant opportunities have been and will be extremely useful. I was particularly amazed by what’s available on DiRT; who knew? And much appreciation to Lesley for sharing Randi Korn’s impact/resources table: a necessity.

In reflecting on our ideas for digital tools and following discussion with local colleagues, a program that could handle fieldtrip scheduling and related tasks, including scheduling museum teachers or docents, seems primary, allowing staff to use their time and expertise to greater impact. The ideas of an easily usable online exhibition template as well as an online tour-planning template, which could be utilized not only by staff but by educators planning visits, could provide platforms for, respectively, sharing the collection and related student or participant work and supporting more meaningful museum experiences. Finally, I would like to cycle back to a proposal made in response to the question, what are the kinds of scaffolding educators use that can be translated into technology? What a value to visitors if an in-gallery interactive could lead them through a scaffolded or layered discovery process that mimicked a socially-mediated experience.

I’d promised two documents: the Getty’s revised guidelines for interpretive materials for adult audiences, and a report on questions for visitor response areas in exhibitions. The former is still in final proof, so I will share it when complete. The latter is too large to embed here or send as an email attachment, so I have uploaded it to DropBox, where you are welcome to view/retrieve it.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15999302/Are%20We%20Listening%20Fayanne%20Hayes%202003.pdf

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15999302/Are%20We%20Listening%20F.Hayes%20Appendices.pdf

The most salient findings in the Visitor Response Area study were:

  •  Wording and physical presentation of a visitor response question strongly impacts the quality of the responses.
  •  Visitors responded more favorably when prompts were unusual or unexpected with potential to be thought-provoking and when the prompt stimulated them to make personal connections to their life, work, interests, or experience. Visitors tended not to like questions that they perceived as too open-ended, broad, simplistic, too cute, vague, or confusing.
  •  Physical format and presentation is an important factor in the increase in frequency and quality of visitor responses.

We put these to use in two LACMALab exhihibitions and the percentage of thoughtful, focused responses rose exponentially.

And I’d like again to voice support for a THAT Camp boot camp and offer the Getty as a potential west coast venue. Alternatively, this might be a relevant program for the professional group, Museum Educators of Southern California.

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Better late than never…….

Dec 28 2010

I apologize for posting so late.  As the saying goes…

Since our time together (which was great!) I have actually had some interesting tech things underway.  We launched our new Ab Ex teaching resource I mentioned at the meeting, check it out.  I also tried teaching with an iPad, thanks Scott!  I tried uploading the image but word press was not playing nicely.  Lastly, I am now a blogger, it’s official.   All to say, I was very inspired by all of your work and inspired by the stimulating conversation, which has further fueled my tech endeavors.   Hope to see some of you at Museums on the Web or AAM in 2011.   Keep me posted if you are  ever in New York, come for a visit.

Best,

Lisa

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Summit tweets are a good read

Nov 23 2010

Our summit tweets (#museumtools) are accessible here on TwapperKeeper if you’d like a quick review. Forewarning: it loads quite slowly.

And Happy Thanksgiving to everyone.

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Nathan Richie

Nov 12 2010

It was a pleasure connecting with each of you last week at GMU. Thanks to Kris and to the Center for History and New Media for inviting me.

I have a few passing observations about what I learned from the conference and more specifically how digital tools can impact small museums.

First, the diversity of backgrounds of the attendees underscores the variety within the field of museum education. It was interesting to learn how “education” is classified from institution to institution.  For example, few people haled from a general “education department,” but rather interpretation, school and teacher programs, family programs, new media, public education, and still others. It is fantastic that education is so well represented in different departments of the museum, but it also highlighted the fractured nature of our work. It seems that,  even within a single institution, separate departments whose entire focus is education frequently do not share resources, collaborate, or even communicate frequently. In some instances, technology departments forged a strong, independent identities. In others, it seemed like technology was compartmentalized and perhaps ghettoized. As a result, a divide emerges between “technology educators” and “hands on educators” (for a lack of a better term).

As a result, different educators seek out different professional realms to share ideas and network. While that can lead to rich, content-specific discussions, it could also contribute to a compartmentalized view of the wider field. I definitely took away from the summit that the multiple museum education groups (EdCom, MER, Museum Ed, MEM, Museums and Technology, etc) really need to improve their communication with one another and share information.

Another take away from the summit was less an epiphany, but more of a reaffirmation of the disparity between large and small museums. While there is doubtless a difference in budget and staff size between MoMA and the Walters, the disparity seems less great than that between the Walters and the Golden History Museums for example.  There is most likely a critical mass that a museum must achieve before it can (or feel prepared) to foray into technology. It must be something akin to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Only when an educator has her fundamental tasks fulfilled (field trips scheduled, programs filled, docents trained) can she even think about incorporating technology into her interpretive work.

Which leads me to my two next points. First, technology could play a significant role in helping an education department reaching that threshhold. If an educator could spend less time on mundane tasks like fieldtrip and docent scheduling, then he could start devoting more time to more meaningful items. Second, large institutions can not only be great innovators in the realm of digital learning, but they can also lead by sharing. I loved the idea of sharing existing digital resources with smaller institutions. If a small museum could simply borrow and incorporate existing resources into their galleries, they could offer more enriching opportunities for visitors. For example, when I was curator at a small art museum in Indiana, I could have enhanced a Pop Art exhibit with an interactive about Andy Warhol borrowed or leased from another institution. I could have afforded the hardware, but never the costs and time for software development.

One of the conversation threads that emerged at the summit was a a larger, profession-wide ignorance or unfamiliarity and discomfort with working with technology. I think that idea merits further investigation, but I would challenge that it is endemic to just smaller organizations.  I think most people understand that they need and even desire to incorporate technology into their offerings, they just lack the time and resources to do so. And, to go back to the Maslow analogy, until certain threshholds are satisfied (or until the cost of development become more attainable) most small organizations will be unable to fully embrace digital tools.

I look forward to further dialogue. Happy Thanksgiving!

Nathan

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Deborah Howes

Nov 08 2010

It was such a pleasure for me to spend two days with all of you discussing technology and museum education. I learned so much and have now so many new ideas about how we can make our curriculum at Johns Hopkins Museum Studies program even better. I am the assistant director of this new graduate program with over 300 students who attend from wherever they are in the world because the courses are taught online, asynchronously, by working museum professionals. Attending this conference confirmed the importance of museum professionals  to be literate in both the museum and digital worlds. Museum educators have so much to contribute to 21st century learning, and, as we learned in the conference, our  informal learning approaches are, in fact, VERY compatible with digital tools. We must do more to integrate museum education experience with the digital domain, but it requires getting up to digital speed quickly so we can plan and control, rather than react and recede.  I look forward to seeing the sparks of imagination and ingenuity fly energetically along the way.

I want to thank Kris for putting this very congenial and intelligent group together and Sharon for leading our learning adventure so expertly; I do feel that working collaboratively we can achieve fantastic goals.

deb

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Tina Olsen

Nov 03 2010

I’m director of education and public programs at the Portland Art Museum, a mid-sized regional art museum with an encycolpedi collection in a dynamic and rapidly changing city. I oversee school, family, and adult programs, including all public programs and site-based interpretation. I’ve been here a little more than two years and in that time have centered our programs around conversation and collaboration, both with external partners and with visitors, and experimented with ways technology (and other things)  can further those goals. Some key initiatives have included a collaboration with smarthistory founders Beth Harris and Steven Zucker around conversation and multiple voices as an interpretive methodology; creating an iphone application for the delivery of museum-produced content; back-breaking work shifting our docent’s pedagogical practice toward slow looking and conversation; an annual collaboration with MFA social practice artists that seeks to broaden forms of participation in the Museum; and a nascent project and installation called Object Stories which records and publishes stories people tell about objects in their lives, along with personal stories about Museum objects.  

I share many of the questions others have posed, and would add a few more:

How do we sustain our technology-based programs and platforms, especially at smaller museums and at a time of diminishing resources?

How do we stay current of media and technology trends when those are changing so fast and professional development opportunities are scarce and expensive?

How do we thoughtfully reconcile the modalities of mobile and screen-based experiences with works of art that demand a very different –slower, single-focused–experience of time and place?

Like Sarah, I share an interest in exploring how we harness technology and media to encourage intelligent content production.

And what about media literacy? Don’t we have to take that on if our purview is visual literacy (a question itself) and our audiences are 21st century ones?

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Sarah Schultz

Nov 02 2010

Hi all.  I’m looking forward to seeing (or meeting) all of you on Thursday.  As the Director of Education and Community Programs at the Walker Art Center, I oversee interpretive strategies and education programming for audiences of all ages—from toddlers to  adults, to a sprawling three-month institution-wide public project called Open Field.  The department supports a robust Teen Program, K-12 programs, Tour Programs, as well as Adult, College and Family Programs. Under the direction of our New Media Initiative Department, the Walker pioneered two innovative online sites (now managed by Education) that serve as platforms for specific audiences to access, generate and share content.  ArtsConnectEd  is a deep and rich online tool for engaging communities of K-12 teachers with the collections and resources of the Walker and its site partner the Minneapolis Institute of Art. mnartists.org an online database and news and resource site for Minnesota artists and organizations from all disciplines.  NMI has also lead the way with Art on Call a cell phone guide, the Walker Channel and a range of other important initiatives. Like others, I am keenly interested in how social media and personal technologies can facilitate the museum experience for general visitors. Other issues on my mind of late are:

  • Using technology in ways that considers audiences as both producers and consumers of content.
  •  How are new technologies changing the way we approach learning?  What old ways of thinking need to be simply abandoned or possibly re-imagined? 
  • How do educators who have been in the field longer, gain the technical proficiencies, understanding and imagination to be effective and innovative in our work?
  • How do physical and digital learning and experiences intersect or integrate with on another?

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Toby Tannenbaum

Nov 02 2010

As the associate director for Education at the J. Paul Getty Museum I oversee programming for all audiences and didactic and interpretive materials for exhibitions and the permanent collection. The Museum’s Education Department develops a wide array of materials, activities, and communications for various audiences; some we create independently and some in collaboration with the Trust’s web group and the Museum’s department for technology and new media. Like you, we are interested in providing opportunities for onsite visitors to engage directly with works of art as well as provide access to the collection for off-site users. While we have identified target audiences, we are curious whether specific audiences are more appropriate than others. What are reasonable goals and objectives? How do we understand the outcomes and benefits of our work that utilizes technology? And what are effective systems for interdepartmental collaborations?

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Lisa Mazzola

Nov 01 2010

Hello everyone,

In my current role as Director of School and Teacher Programs at MoMA, I oversee all aspects of programming and resources for K-12 schools and teachers.  But, first and foremost, I am an educator whose passion is teaching and engaging people with objects.  Similar to your institutions, MoMA continues to integrate technology more and more.  These new forms of technology have not only given me new assets to draw upon for my own teaching, but also gives me new forms of content to introduce to teachers through on-site and on-line workshops.  It has also forced me to think about my teaching practice in new and different ways.

Collaborating with Beth Harris, in a newly created position as the Director of Digital Learning within Education, we are now using technology across the education department  producing digital resources in collaboration with the Museum’s Digital Media and Curatorial staff.   In addition, we launched our first adult online courses this semester  and continue to offer blended online learning opportunities for teachers.

Given the plethora of new resources available, I am now rethinking the redesign of our website for educators.   The existing structure was based closely on the format of the content.   Moving forward we are now considering ways to re-purpose the existing content, supplemented by these new digital resources to create flexible multi-media modules for teachers to integrate into their classroom teaching and curriculum.

I too, have many questions that I would love your feedback on.   Here are a few of them:

  • Now that more and more teachers have access to technology in their classroom, are their needs different?
  • What would informal learners be looking for in a site and how would that be different from teachers
  • Could we make the the teacher materials useful for informal learners too?
  • How should we re-frame our teaching methods for an online environment?
  • Can visitors have meaningful and transformational experiences with objects/content online?

I am excited to a part of this project and look forward to what I know will be incredibly rich and useful discussions!

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Anne Manning

Oct 31 2010

Hi everyone! As the deputy director for education at The Baltimore Museum of Art, I oversee three distinct yet interdependent departments–education &  interpretation, exhibition installation & design, and our library and archives. As the museum prepares to renovate and reinstall our Contemporary, American, and African collections over the next 4 years, I am particularly interested in how mobile technologies can help visitors connect with our institutions and and collections in the galleries and off-site. I’ve worked on Pachyderm-based websites, podcasts, and multi-media tours, but am first and foremost an educator who looks to engage visitors with meaningful content. As the director-elect for NAEA’s museum division, I look forward to brainstorming ways of building knowledge and capacity to use digital tools within the broader museum field.

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