Technology’s Growing Role in Museum Education

Network Summer 2009
By Margaret Aiken, Museum Education Student, Tufts University

Reviews of “Using Web 2.0 to Reach Global Audiences: International Perspectives,” chaired by Laura Mann, Business Development Director, Mediatrope; “Idea Lounge: The Formalization of Museum Studies,” chaired by Redell Hearn, Founding Director/Assistant Professor, Masters of Arts Program in Museum Studies, Southern University at New Orleans; and “Technology Tutorial: Design and Maintain a Blog,” co-chaired by Charlotte Sexton, National Gallery of Art, London, and Perian Sully, Judah L. Magnus Museum, Berkley, at the 2009 AAM conference.

As an emerging museum educator, I am beginning to realize that one of the most marketable skills I can gain is the ability to understand, utilize, and promote interactive technologies. Just based on observations of my friends’ obsessive attachment their iPhones and middle school students’ addictions to MySpace, it is easy to see how important technology is today and how it is being used to promote social interaction. For this reason, I narrowed my focus at the AAM conference to sessions concerning education and technology. There were a surprising number to choose from. Below you will find reviews on three of my favorites.

“Using Web 2.0 to Reach Global Audiences: International Perspectives” illustrated how three museums are currently using technology to engage their audience as participants. For those who are not particularly web-savvy, Laura Mann, the director of Mediatrope, explained that Web 2.0 is the phenomena of using the internet to create conversations between the museum and its audience, the audience and museum staff members, and audience members with each other.

Catherine King, from the wholly virtual International Museum of Women, described her museum’s staff curates conversations, raises awareness of issues affecting women, and inspires action from audiences around the world. The lesson I learned from the IMoW is that if virtual museums can accomplish such strong connections in cyberspace, brick and mortar museums should also be able to engage their own audiences and reach out to non-museum goers by adopting some of the Web 2.0 strategies. Check out the International Museum of Women at http://www.imow.org/

Presenters, Malene Rordam and Rasmus Nielsen from the Danish National Gallery spoke about how they have used Web 2.0 to create an interactive site for teens with social networking and user-contributed content called “U.L.K.” which stands for “Young People’s Laboratories.” Their MySpace-like website created for teens, by teens is an off-shoot of the Danish National Gallery’s main website, http://www.smk.dk/ . I particularly appreciated the presenters’ honesty about the amount of time and energy it takes to maintain the site, and their difficulties in keeping the site’s content relevant and related to the museum. The U.L.K. website is in Danish but can be translated into English by going to the site and clicking the upper right corner. It can be viewed at http://ungeslaboratorierforkunst.dk/.

Andreas Henning, a curator at the Old Master Picture Gallery in Dresden, talked about a truly mind-blowing 3-D virtual museum project. The Dresden Gallery hired a design company to create a 1-to-1 digital clone of the museum in Second Life, a virtual world where avatars navigate 3-D virtual worlds and interact with each other. Apparently all of the museum’s details are meticulously reproduced, including the wallpaper and the parquet floors. Even the institution’s special exhibitions are offered for viewing in Second Life.

I downloaded Second Life in an attempt to find the Old Master Picture Gallery. Unfortunately I did not find the museum in my search, but I did find quite a few other galleries and museums in Second Life. The thing that is most bizarre is how hard it is to tell what “museums” are fictional, created by a group unaffiliated with the real life institution, and which ones are authentic and created by the actual institution. A few of the “museums” listed in SL were the Royal Museum of Art, Cyber MoCA, Lagna Art Museum, Austria Art Gallery, and the Manchester Art Gallery.

It is hard for me to believe that a brick and mortar museum would spend what must be exorbitant amounts of money to digitally reproduce their museum in cyberspace. While visiting a 3-D reproduction of a museum and its artworks is novel, it is certainly no substitute for the actual experience of being there in person. For me, entering theses spaces in Second Life was a very surreal and unsettling experience. Regardless of how eerie it felt to look at art in a virtual world, Second Life is increasingly popular and a truly remarkable platform. I will definitely keep my eye on it to see if and how museums will participate in Second Life.

“Idea Lounge: The Formalization of Museum Studies” was a roundtable discussion of students, educators, university program directors who shared their backgrounds and opinions on whether requirements for a museum studies degree should be standardized. For me, the most useful aspect of this session was realizing that there is currently no standardization in the field.

Roundtable participants discussed the value of establishing standards for training the next generation of museum professionals. Possible categories of standardization included creating a reading list of accepted texts, establishing a list of competencies, or focusing on particular themes. While standardization might make comparing programs a bit easier for potential students, the majority of roundtable participants seemed to be against standardization, arguing that it would limit options for students and restrict freedoms for university programs.

What I gained from this discussion was an appreciation of the diversity of the museum-related programs being offered in universities today. There is currently no website where information can be found about the burgeoning number of museum studies and other similar programs. Many of the students in the room, myself included, expressed frustration at how difficult it was to research and choose a program. I personally had no idea there were museum or arts administration programs at Brown University, the University of Toronto, and Columbia University until a few people in the room stood up and introduced themselves!

I think instead of standardizing museum studies, there is a dire need for a comprehensive website where potential students can access information about all of the programs available in museum studies, museum education, or arts administration and the ability to understand what these programs offer and how they differ.
“Technology Tutorial: Design and Maintain a Blog” was a hands-on workshop that taught participants step-by-step instructions for creating, launching and maintaining a museum blog. The speaker, Charlotte Sexton from the National Gallery in London, gave tips on ways to make a blog posting successful such as:

• Using mixed media such as photos, videos, and audio clips
• Coming up with catchy headlines
• Writing short sentences
• Formatting the page so its easy to read
• Writing slightly contentious material that will generate audience responses
• Updating the blog’s content on a regular basis (at least 2-3 times a week)

Charlotte also brought up important issues to consider such as blogging ethics and rules of engagement. She pointed us to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis which has excellent guidelines posted on their website. (These guidelines can be found by typing “Walker Blog Guidelines” into Google.) Other issues and questions the participants were asked to consider were:

• Will the blog be written by a single voice or multiple voices?
• Who will moderate the content?
• How much should the blog reflect the museum’s main website?
• How can you promote your blog to increase readership?
• How often will you update the museum’s blog?

Charlotte reminded us that a blog is merely a tool to communicate with today’s tech-savvy museum audience. One of the essential lessons I learned from this session was that the relevance of the blog’s content is what will ultimately drive traffic to your blog. So, if your museum is thinking about starting one, Sexton reminded us to “Start with the purpose, not the technology.” And so I did…

During this technology session I created my own blog as a way to document my experiences at AAM and beyond. Check out Margaret’s Museum Mumbles, http://museummumbles.blogspot.com/. I began the tutorial confused and clueless about blogs but came out realizing that they are a fun and relatively easy way to connect with your audience. Really, the hardest part about blogging seems to be remembering to update it regularly and keeping strong opinions and feelings in check. It is quite tempting to “let it all out” as you would in a private journal but it’s important to remember that because it is posted on the worldwide web, you never know who will be reading it!

Recap
As a first time participant I was both inspired and overwhelmed by the conference. There were so many sessions that sounded fascinating and I found myself wishing there was someway I could use my Second Life avatar to fly from one session to another so I could experience them all. I left Philadelphia feeling like I had learned about some possibilities for using technology to enhance visitor learning and interaction but ultimately realizing that technology alone is not the answer. I am definitely looking forward to the conference in Los Angeles next spring!

Margaret Aiken is currently pursuing her Master's degree in museum education at Tufts University. This summer she will be an intern in the education department at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.