ECHO Blogging Central

Here at the slides from my second presentation at the IB Heads World Conference: “More Data, Better Learning? A Balanced Look at Adaptive Learning Systems.” See also my bookmarks.

Rev: Added missing citation 10-5-13.

I’m honored to be presenting at the IB Heads World Conference on global collaborative learning. Here are my slides. I’ve bookmarked many resources as well.

I might worry a bit excessively before and be afraid that I won’t be able to give an interesting talk or teach students anything, but then while I’m doing it and afterwards I realize that I really enjoy it. Teaching.

Its been a year now since the public health masters course in Public Health Science Communication at University of Copenhagen took off. Since it finished in December 2012 I have only taught science communication a few times. Last week I got a new dosage of interaction with students to discuss the communication of science.

I was invited to give an introduction to science communication to a group of 14 PhD students under the Marie Curie Actions Initial Training Networks (ITN). The students all had a background in biology (or similar) and were just into the second year of their PhD. Most of them (if not all) were deep into lab science and were working at the smallest possible scale of the human cell and genetic materials. In my experience lab scientists often represents one of the most challenging group of researchers when it comes to arguing for why the should communicate science. Not because they don’t recognize it as necessary and useful, but primarily because they find it almost impossible to explain what it is they do. Overall these students were not much different.

Focus on you!

I had three hours at hand on what was equal to a Friday afternoon for the 14 students who after two weeks of presentations, social events and classes where looking forward to returning to their labs and weekends. Combined with the premises that this was an introduction to science communication I decided to try to make the class as fun and as interactive as possible and centered around the students themselves. My four main headlines around which the class was structured were therefore:

• Why is it relevant to communicate your research?
• Who would be interested in hearing about what you do?
• How can you benefit from communicating your research?
• Are there any tricks to making science communication easier for you?

We did a lot of common brain storming of why one should communicate science, who is involved in science communication and where it takes place. The students were actually pretty good at this at a general level, but when it came down to their own research it seemed like they ran into the barrier that their research field is just so difficult to explain… I hope that at the end of the session the students had gotten some new perspectives on how you can approach communication of your research. For example that research is not just about the facts, theories, hypotheses and results but just as much about curiosity, frustrations, hope, processes, challenges, dreams and collaboration. All things that can be easier to explain than the genetic description of what determines the structure of a receptor protein on a cell involved in the development of fat cells. Or at least easier for the outsider to relate to.

Practical writing tips

I chose also to allocate some time to some practical communication (mostly writing) tips. Little things that can make writing a little easier, which I learned in School of Journalism. I tried to include some fun examples with little YouTube clips (e.g. The Great Sperm Race as an example of the power of comparison) and sound clips (e.g. Radiolab’s podcasts and experimenting with sounds). And then of course I tried to open their eyes to social media as something that is not only useful in their private life but could play a role in their research and research communication! When I mentioned the word ‘blog’, I saw many rolling eyes, but arguing that even peer viewed journals like Nature uses blogs seemed to legitimize the blog just a tiny bit.

All in all it was great being back in my teaching mode and I hope that the students got something out of it too. I look forward to my next teaching job which is in Copenhagen at Informations medieskole, where I’ll talking to Danish researchers about social media’s role in research and science communication. More on that to follow.

As I wrote last week, Thomas and I are trying to work up a paper on the rhetoric of object agency (preliminarily entitled ‘Do Things Act?’). Here are a few thoughts from the reading process:

Most reasonable and clearheaded account of object agency so far:

Lambros Malafouris’ work on nonhuman agency. He has co-edited a very useful volume (Material Agency: A Non-Anthropocentric Approach with Carl Knappett) in which he has a paper called At the Potter’s Wheel: An Argument for Material Agency, which provides a reasoned, well-argued and detailed argument for how agency “is a property or possession neither of humans nor of nonhumans. Agency is the relational and emergent product of material engagement.” And he summarises nicely why we struggle so much with the concept of agency:

“The constant errors in our agency judgements are simply the price we have to pay for being skillfully immersed in a physical world and at the same time of being able to experience this world from a subjective first-person perspective. It is the price of being human.”

The ultimate cause of action is, as he says, none of the supposed agents, but the flow of activity itself. My gut instincts agree very much with this.

My biggest concern with object agency so far:

But I can’t help but think about what comes after the ‘merger’ of man and materiality? Is there a different argument beyond pointing to flow, networks, complexity, emergence and process? My concern with object agency being used in a strategic way to confirm complexity is that is potentially leads to a stifled form of analysis, in which pointing to complexity becomes both the theoretical starting point and the analytical end point – similar to how social constructivism often worked in the 90s. It is (perhaps not yet, but on the horizon) a possible dead end. But I can’t make out what lies on the other side of it yet – my instincts tell me that it is something more experimental, possibly focused on building things rather than constructing waterproof arguments. As theory needs to move beyond pointing to the hybrid nature of everything, then the next step might be simply making things. Crazier stuff, really (see last point).

Book that made me think stuff even if it has shortcomings:

Jane Bennett‘s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. I have encountered a lot of exasperation with and dismissal of Bennett’s work (just ask Thomas if you’re in the mood for a diatribe), but I quite like it. Vibrant Matter manages to get me excited about thinking about things, which I prefer any day to a solid but uninspiring correctness. Even if her book is sort of a hodgepodge of ANT and some Deleuzian ideas, it captures a vital and energetic concern with things, their weirdness, wonderfulness and ability to confound a lot of our knee jerk conceptions of ourselves and our relationship with the world around us. I thoroughly disagree with her call for a strategic anthropomorphism (I think we need to go the other way and ‘objectify/thingify’ us instead), but I appreciate the vitality she manages to infuse her text with.

Best books so far that explore a form of object agency in creative ways:

Ben Woodard’s Slime Dynamics and Thierry Bardini’s Junkware. Lovely and disturbing books. More on those coming soon. Cover of Slime Dynamics below.

I’m preparing a grant application for the Danish Humanities Research Council, which if successful will include a PhD position in science communication/media studies.

The project investigates ontologies of mind/brain in neuroscientific studies of hunger and obesity, via philosophical analysis, media studies, and exhibit making. The specific direction of the science communication/media studies PhD will be developed by the candidate within this framework. The project is based at Medical Museion (www.museion.ku.dk), which (as regular readers of this blog will know) holds an interdisciplinary medical humanities and science communication research group, where many staff members engage in curatorial or public engagement practice alongside their research. The project is in collaboration with the Department of Media, Cognition, and Communication, local neuroscience research groups, and international collaborators from the UK and US.

The rules stipulate that PhD candidates are listed in the application, rather than advertising positions after an application is successful. We’re therefore looking for a candidate to join our application, which if not successful in the first round will be resubmitted, and could also be rewritten as a specific PhD funding application. On the other hand, if it is successful, participation in the application would not constitute a binding agreement.

Candidates might have a background in media or cultural studies, STS, science communication research, or relevant interdisciplinary training. Interest or experience in cognitive science, psychology, or neuroscience would also be an advantage.

If you are interested, please send a CV and max one page explaining why this position appeals to you to *protected email* by end Wednesday 10th October (apologies for the short deadline), and we can arrange a time to meet or speak by phone/skype. Please also feel free to forward this on.

This is the last of the guest posts offered during this fall season, and it dovetails with last week's post about opening up collections access nicely. George Scheer is the director and co-founder of Elsewhere Collective, a fascinating "living museum" in a former thrift store in Greensboro, NC. Elsewhere is at the top of my list of places I would most like to visit. In this post, George grapples with the challenges of balancing the care for a museum collection with that of contemporary artists-in-residence who are constantly reinterpreting it.

Every Saturday, the curatorial team at Elsewhere, a living museum in downtown Greensboro, NC, reviews the project proposals of its artists-in-residence. Proposals involve sculpture, performance, participatory-projects, videos, and installation that use and respond to the museum’s collection.  This past July, artist Guillermo Gómez proposed to restore a piece of art.  
Restoration is a formal gesture for most museums. In this post, I hope to bring out some of the complexities of the idea of restoration as it occurs within an experimental museum supporting both a collection and the practices of emerging artists.
Elsewhere is a living museum, set in a former thrift store once run by my grandmother, Sylvia Gray, from 1939-1997.  During this period, she amassed a vast collection of inventories, filling the three-floor store, including a former 14 room boarding house, and third floor workshop.  In 2003, collaborator Stephanie Sherman and I “re-discovered,” the former store, declared nothing for sale, and began inviting artists to create works using the set, or collection of objects.  From the outset, we imagined an infinitely re-arrangeable puzzle, a three floor installation composed and recomposed from only what was at hand.  Both objects and art-objects would be part of this continuing transformation and evolution.  The objects, artworks, and the traces of past experience are all part of an unfolding continuum of the living museum.  
The artwork to be restored is a piece called the Glass Forest, (2009) created by Agustina Woodgate, composed of glass and brass cabinets and mirror-etched bark patterns.  The Glass Forest was itself an act of restoration. It re-set the room’s contents of glass mirrors and significantly restored the tired tongue-and-groove floor. Curiously, Guillermo is the current studio assistant of Ms. Woodgate, and is intimately familiar with Woodgate’s work, process, and thinking.  
The proposal was as much to restore an artwork as it was to “take back” the artwork, because after 4 years of slight interventions, film shoots, and an “unsuccessful” effort to create a new work that changed the tone, composition, and material content of the piece, it was determined a restoration-reset of the Glass Forest was in order. During the proposal it was discussed that certain elements of previous works and interventions should remain in the restored Glass Forest and it was further noted that Ms. Woodgate’s work undid a previous work, Mr. Stag’s Hosiery Museum, by Lucy Steggals, a period piece of an imagined hosiery salesman. At every moment the question of restoration was countered with the preservation of traces.
The restoration, which was championed by the curatorial team, has sparked an interesting debate about the intersecting challenges of making work in and from a museum collection, and the occasional incongruity with artists’ creative needs and formal structures of residency program itself.  
Elsewhere’s residency invites artists to use the museum as site, resource, and concept to create new artworks. Artists are explicitly asked not to have proposals before they arrive, but rather immerse themselves in the museum, its community, and collection. The artists’ challenge after a short three days on the ground is to design a response to the museum, press their experimentation with materials, and transform both object and artwork. To this effect the curatorial team works closely with each artist to support the process, guide the careful use of collection, push a continual reflection on site specificity, identify past histories, and ensure a relation to the various publics that the museum serves.  
Sometimes a work just doesn’t work, or the challenges of the residency don’t connect with the artist’s practice, or the timeframe for response is too short to fully engage the complexity of the museum’s context. While there is a strong resistance toward “fixing” a work, Elsewhere’s curators are all artists and view their role as collaborators in the overall creative development of the museum-as-artwork. They maintain a creative autonomy and intimate relation with the museum and its collection that empowers them to play with and transform the visual environment. Most importantly, the conversation about restoration brought to light the contingent values that support a site-specific, museum-based, experimental practice with a collection.  
As a guardian of a collection, Elsewhere breaks a marker of tradition by allowing art and object to be transformed. However, extreme purposefulness and resourcefulness are applied to the tiniest plastic bead, antique cloth, and wood scrap left from a cut made to century old lathe. “Successful” artworks draw out qualities in the collection, reflect material histories, and show the artists’ process and conceptualization. Each moment of material use is collection use, and represents an ethical and aesthetic decision for resource potential and the way we advance and perpetuate Elsewhere’s meaning to its artists and publics.  
Like other museums, Elsewhere is an interpretive space, constructed to secure and invest in cultural meaning, cultural objects, and creative expression. We willingly transfer this interpretive responsibility from the institution and its curators to the artist at the artist’s most precious, fragile, and critical moment of creative process. This demands that awareness and responsiveness be deeply embedded in the artist’s practice and thought. For curators, it means they must act as guides for the artists, supportive and challenging, but willing to continually reflect on the museum’s own institutional reflexes, aesthetic tendencies, and precious instincts.  
As I write this post Guillermo’s restoration remains in mid-process. Strangely, I am the only one on the team who saw the Glass Forest in its original inception, and I’ve remained quiet about small details that are different between Guillermo’s actions and what I remember to be Agustina’s original intent. Nevertheless, in those gaps of document, memory and intervention, Elsewhere evolves. Each artist brings a restorative and disruptive process. We welcome that. They often place pieces into the puzzle that unhinge whole sections of the picture, but they also restore and evolve the visual environment and the museum’s meaning. It is a living process, a deeply artistic process, and an exciting part of the museums’ imaginary--that a restoration is always already a new work of art.

Tom, Dan, Mills, Amanda, and Stephen returned for this week’s episode of Digital Campus, joined by Digital History Fellows Ben Hurwitz and Jannelle Legg. We began by discussing a JSTOR’s new individual subscription offering, JPASS, which allows individual users access to more than 1500 journals for a monthly fee of $19.50 or $199 annually. While our panel commended JSTOR’s efforts, Mills expressed concern that the cost of subscription will effectively prohibit JSTOR’s target audience (including adjunct faculty) from access. Amanda pointed out that while JSTOR access has been greatly expanded through library and other institutional subscriptions, many people are unaware of the ways they can currently receive free access. The discussion then moved to “Signals,” a performance monitoring software from Purdue University. Signals is a data-mining program which collects information about individual students such as time spent in online assignments, completion of homework, and performance on quizzes and tests. This information is used to alert students to areas of strength and weakness within their academic schedule. While the program is showing early signs of success, the panel was concerned that this type of program will not encourage students to develop independent study skills.

Next, the group examined the growing complexity of free speech on the internet with two recent news stories. In the first, Facebook ‘likes’ were found to be protected by a fourth circuit appeals court in a case involving a newly re-elected Sheriff and six fired deputies. The second story involved a tenured journalism professor at the University of Kansas that was put on leave as a result of a controversial a tweet. Our final news story concerned the digital footprint that shadows us on the web. In this story a law in California requires the creation of an “eraser button” for minors. The aim is to give users under 18 the ability to delete content from websites, apps and online services. While some contended that the erasure of some data, particularly on popular sites like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, could be effective – our hosts expressed skepticism that these imprints can fully be erased from the internet. To conclude, Patrick Murray-John delivered a report from the Center about the release of the Omeka API, which will allow users to connect Omeka with other platforms.

NOTE: I mistakenly said that Patrick Murray-John is the Lead Developer for Omeka. Patrick Murray-John is the Omeka Dev Team Manager; John Flatness is the Lead Developer. See http://omeka.org/about/staff/. — Amanda

Links to Stories Discussed:

JSTOR individual passes - http://www.thedigitalshift.com/2013/09/digital-libraries/jstor-launches-jpass-access-accounts-for-individual-researchers/

Coursework nagging software “Signals” at Purdue apparently increases graduation rates - http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/purdue-u-software-prompt-students-to-study-and-graduate/46853

Court rules that Facebook “likes” are free speech –  http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/18/4744288/appeals-court-rules-that-facebook-likes-are-protected-as-free-speech

Kansas professor suspended after tweet – http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/09/23/u-kansas-professor-suspended-after-anti-nra-tweet

“Delete-button” for minors in California - http://gizmodo.com/why-californias-new-web-wide-delete-button-for-teens-w-1377730365

 

Related Links:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/27/fat-shaming-professor-geoffrey-miller_n_3509505.html

http://omeka.org/

Running time: 50:39
Download the .mp3

Dear Nico,

You and your mass of inexplicably blond curls passed out half an hour early today. We’d been playing hard all day, starting with a 7:30am (!!) breakfast with friends and ending with a housewarming, with a lot in-between. It’s been like that a lot. Here are some snippets.

We went to Cape Cod the weekend after Labor Day, thanks to your babushka’s kind invitation. Yep, you’re still a water baby. I have mixed feelings about Cape Cod at best, but beach time with you is a bubble of pure happiness.

You love books like crazy. You’ve started pointing to letters everywhere and naming them, often correctly. Thanks to a Zooborns book, you can say “aardvark.”

The word explosion is impressive. Your sentences are getting more comprehensible. You call socks “slock” and stars “tai.” You know most of your friends’ names, my favorite being “Oony” for Romy. You know the name of George, the neighbors’ cat.

The guesswork isn’t gone from communicating with you, but you’re usually pretty clear about what you want. When we were at our friends Josh and Tori’s house and I asked you if you were ready to go home and go to bed, you nodded and said, “All done Josh.”

We’ve had conversations. “Would you like to sit in the stroller?” — “No. Push.” — “OK. Hey, can I put the bag in it?” — “Yeah!” Wait, was that just a… yes, it was.

You have a stuffed giraffe you’ve named Fluffy. Or maybe you were trying to say “giraffe” and it came out as “Fluffy,” and I extrapolated. Anyway, we’ve named him Fluffy. He has a knob and some buttons on the back, and makes noises. Really, it’s intended to be white noise for crib babies, but you weren’t much interested in him until recently. One of Fluffy’s noises involves a drum. You’ve started doing a little beatboxing to it. It’s the most adorable damn thing.

Sometimes we’ll be in the kitchen, and you’ll go away behind a wall to eat or poop in peace. I try to respect your privacy.

You say bye-bye to everyone and everything: me, other people, cats, Pici the great dane, fans, flowers, those little decorative garden twirlers.

You’re a curious mix of extrovert and observer.

We’ve been going to friends’ houses past your bedtime a lot this month. These days, when I wake you to go home, you stay awake until we get in bed back at our place. Sometimes the moon is out. Once we saw a raccoon. I love these tiny dark just-us moments.

One day this past week you took a three hour nap and woke up naming all the letters you could see. I feel like we’re hovering on the brink of the next thing. I’ve been feeling that way most of the time you’ve been alive.

Love,
-Mama

PS pix

Infogroup - one of the leading providers of business listings - has an interesting post on their site about the problem of errors in local data. In this article they talk specifically about the error of business closure and the frustration that consumers experience when they look up a business, travel to the location only to find that the business is closed.

A report released today by  Infogroup, the leading provider of high-value data and multichannel solutions, finds that 52 percent of consumers using local search services have visited a closed business and 44 percent have had a social outing ruined by outdated business listing information.

You can read the full article here.

Now, upon reading this, you might reflect on your own experience and grumble in recognition of this problem. However, the probability of failure can be misleading.

Let's imagine we have some event that has a probability of .99 success. This means that if we attempt this once, there is a .01 chance that we will experience failure. If we attempt this twice, we will have a failure probability of 0.0199. This is computed by calculating the probability of two successes and then subtracting that from 1 (i.e. 1 - 0.99^2).

If we interpret the survey data from Infogroup as meaning consumers have a 52% chance of experiencing an error (on the closure of a business) then we can ask - for a given quality of data, how many unique businesses would a user have to experience in a search engine such that the probability of seeing a single error was 52%?

For example, if our data's accuracy for being open was .99, we find that 1-.99^73 is approximately .52. In other words, a user would have to see only 73 distinct businesses before the probability of having seen a single error reaches 52% as per the Infogroup article.

As data is never perfect, we can then ask - for any corpus of data - how good is it? To be able to determine that a corpus of local listings has a precision of .99 for some attribute (e.g. being open rather than closed) is actually very difficult. Firstly there is the size of the sample required to get reasonable error bounds at 95% confidence; secondly there is the error in labeling (which at this degree of precision is a very tricky issue).

All told, while this is an interesting article, it is important to step back and look at the big picture both in terms of interpreting the results and in terms of understanding not just the challenges in getting accurate data, but even the problem of determining how accurate that data is.

The most important thing in data engineering (the job of building systems that aggregate data and improve it in some regard) is building a system that can respond to change and apply updates and improvements in a fluid manner. When evaluating a data provider, while it is important to ask them for details on the quality of their data (surprisingly, many of them won't be able to tell you) it is equally important to learn about the processes they have in place to update and correct data with as low a latency as possible.

North Carolina Museum of History 1988.39.4 I’m always amazed when my colleagues tell me that the biggest barrier they face to “opening up” the content at their museums is from registrars—the people who care for collection objects. In this courageous guest post, Adrienne Berney, a Collections Care Trainer who works primarily with history museums, gives us an insider’s guide to these issues. 
Followers of Museum 2.0 are well versed in new ideas for audience engagement and committed to opening up their institutions to increase public access. But this is not always the first priority for professionals in the museum field. Some collections stewards, steeped as they are in professional artifact-protection standards, are reluctant to shift toward the more open version of institutional access that engagement advocates promote. Do these two directives and perspectives have to be at odds? Can collections access be a way to entice new audiences?
Recently, several subscribers to the RCAAM (Registrar’sCommittee of AAM) listserv posted concerns about professional photographers and museum visitors taking photographs of objects on exhibition. One announced her intention to seek legal recourse against a photographer, and another warned that in the past her institution’s legal council had dissuaded that museum from seeking action. “Unfortunately,” that subscriber advised, there are no legal avenues to stop visitors from photographing objects or images in the public domain in public spaces where photography is allowed.
To me, this seems both discouraging and ungenerous to visitors. I stirred up a debate by raising the question “why not allow access?” I believe the museum field as a whole should do more to encourage reproductions of collection objects and images, regardless of whether reproducers hope for profits. I encountered strong push-back on the listserv, with one subscriber calling my fitness for my job title, “collections care trainer,” into question. Respondents flexed their protective muscles to limit access to the artifacts they have pledged their professional lives to preserving. I’m listing most of the concerns voiced in that debate so that readers can assess the severity of each obstacle and can help generate ideas for surmounting them, toward a goal of more open collections access.

• Increased risks for deterioration: most of us are familiar with the agents of deterioration and understand the varying risks to collections materials that access poses, especially as a result of increased handling and light exposure. Digitization can help offer safe access to collections.
• Staff time: allowing access can be labor intensive for those in charge of collections. Institutions may not want to invest work hours into providing access for visitors who may then turn around and sell reproductions for their own profit. But if collection reproductions are a potential cash cow, then why aren’t more institutions pursuing product creation? Some history museums, including the Brooklyn Museum and the Sandy Spring Museum, have implemented innovative programs inviting artists into storage and galleries to create new works with collection items. But what about the potential creator who happens into an exhibit, gets an idea, and takes a picture? What if objects are already on exhibit and their reproduction involves no additional staff time? Should the museum impose a fee on reproducers or limit their pursuits in other ways? Keep in mind that enforcing limited-access policies requires significant staff time too, along with possible legal fees.
• Copyright infringements: A large portion of historical collections are in the public domain. The Library of Congress advises collection users to go through a risk assessment process for each image they seek to reproduce. The LOC provides open access as a public service and the user assumes whatever risks may be involved in reproduction. Why can’t all collecting institutions take this position?
• Misrepresentation of the artifact: I’m not sure what this means, perhaps reproducing only a portion of an artifact or splicing its image with another. If the reproducer includes a reference to the original source, does that offset the concern or increase it? In the case of documents, historians regularly argue about the meanings of various passages. If a scholar misrepresents a document, it’s his/her reputation on the line, not the repository’s. Why should museums arbitrate or otherwise limit creative vision?
• Relatedly, poor quality images of artifacts in collections may harm the reputation of the museum and do a disservice to the original donor. In a footnote in her Legal Primer on Managing Museum Collections, Malaro mentions that a museum might not want to be listed as the source of an image in certain reproduction applications for fear of appearing to endorse the product or its creator. A risk assessment may help clarify the danger: Is it riskier (in terms of failing to fulfill a museum’s mission) to allow access, with the potential for audiences to generate poor quality products, or riskier to keep tight control over collection materials? Can you think of any cases where a reproduction harmed an institution housing the original?
• Contractual issues or donor restrictions: These are red flags for placing an artifact on exhibit or an online database. Experts advise museums against accepting restricted donations, and they are rare in history museums. The most likely donor restrictions prescribe access and call for “permanent exhibition.” In addition, some museums have worked with native tribes or other descendant groups to establish access guidelines for sensitive anthropological materials. Do you know of other donor contracts or restrictions (besides copyright) that would allow the display of an artifact and disallow its reproduction?

Given that public and non-profit private institutions hold collections in the public trust, a large portion of collections (at least in history museums) are public domain materials, and most donors give with the expectation of preservation and access for perpetuity, museum professionals should have a wide range to engage the public with collections. Allowing for exceptional cases where limited access would be necessary, can’t most of the above concerns be managed within an overarching open-access approach to collections?
This image, created by artist Courtney Bellairs
by photographing an artifact in the Sandy Spring
Museum collection,  was for sale as a limited edition
giclee print in the museum’s gift shop for the duration
of the related exhibition and remains for sale via the artist.     Without broad access, why should any community or institution go to the trouble and expense of preserving artifacts? Visitation has decreased significantly at historic sites and institutions since the 1980s and yet artifact-featured forms of entertainment like collector reality television shows and auctions have proliferated. Potential audiences feel connections with artifacts, so why don’t they participate in or support collecting institutions more often? The Rijksmuseum of the Netherlands sets an exciting example by providing high quality collection images online and encouraging product creation. By allowing open access for creative reproduction, I suspect institutions could become more welcoming, and collections can function more fully as relevant and engaging resources.
How has your institution balanced collection concerns with its efforts to engage audiences? Do you view collections as a problematic juggernaut to avoid, or an indispensable resource base, or both? How can we safely steer the reflexive “no” toward a “probably” and open the door to more collections access?

Thanks to Allison Weiss, Executive Director of the Sandy Spring Museum, John Campbell, Collections Section Chief of the NC Museum of History, and RCAAM listserv respondents, for their contributions to this post.

One of the ways I clear my head on the weekends is by doing trail maintenance for the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club in the Prince William Forest Park. There is nothing like getting down and dirty with a chainsaw, a Pulaski, or a McLeod, to help you forget for a minute that you have so many and various job responsibilities. And, once all the committees, compliance reports, and other minutiae of higher education vaporize, I find that I get some of my best thinking done about my teaching when I’m out on the trail digging, felling, and fighting erosion.

Last month I was fortunate enough to have a crew of Marines come out to the trail I oversee to help me out. The four men and four women of that crew got more done in four hours on the trail than I could have in three weekends of work. About an hour into our morning together one of them came up to me and said, “Sir, you need to understand. I just want to move some shit.” I pointed him at a large tree stump that was in our way, and half an hour later it was history.

This weekend I was up in Shenandoah National Park moving some very large rocks to help build a culvert out of a spring along the Appalachian Trail. While I was working, I got to thinking about that Marine’s desire to just move some shit, and it occurred to me that one of the things we don’t do very well in post-secondary history education is give our students the opportunity to do that—just move some shit. They spend far too much time sitting in a classroom listening to lectures, circled up with others in the class discussing a primary source, or reading, analyzing, and writing about sources we give them and not enough time just moving shit.

Don’t get me wrong. While I’m on the record in dozens of places opposing the continued reliance on the lecture/listen format, I’m not entirely opposed to some lecturing, so long as it is not the be all of our courses. And there is a lot to be said for discussions, learning to analyze texts, and the other things we do. But I think it’s also important that we give our students opportunities to move some shit as part of their history education.

By that, I mean, we need to give them space to create things beyond the many papers they’ll write for us, to make things such as exhibits, websites, public displays around campus, 2nd grade curricular materials, digital stories, or any number of other tangible things that historians can do beyond analyzing sources and writing about them. Employers value these sorts of tangible outputs as demonstrations of our students’ ability to get things done. Students value them because through making and creating they learn in ways that let them apply the traditional skills and knowledge we give them to real world contexts that look and feel like what they’ll be doing after they graduate.

One of the best examples I have of the value of giving students the freedom to be historians is a photographic exhibit my former student Natasha Müller created in 2009 for an event commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall. My only contribution to the project was pointing her at the collection of photographs at the Library of Congress and then acting as her mentor along the way. Everything else was her effort—from coming up with a concept for the exhibition, to selecting the photographs, to contacting the photographer, to getting space on campus, to launching the opening.

In a world where the vast majority of American adults think that college is not worth what it costs, giving our students the opportunity to move some shit is one way we can contribute to changing that perception. The more those outside our campus can see tangible outputs from our students as opposed to being told that we’ve done an excellent job of teaching them critical thinking skills, the better off our students (and we) will be.

This August/September, I am "rerunning" popular Museum 2.0 blog posts from the past. I'm amazed at how well most of the answers in this post hold up two-plus years later (though I would revise my answer to #8 if I were writing this today). Originally posted in April of 2011, just before I hung up my consulting hat for my current job at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History.

Note: the title of this post pays homage to Elaine Heumann Gurian's excellent and quite different 1981 essay of the same title.


I've spent much of the past three years on the road giving workshops and talks about audience participation in museums. This post shares some of the most interesting questions I've heard throughout these experiences. I like to use half of any allotted time slot to talk and half for Q&A, so we usually have time to get into meaty discussions. Feel free to add your own questions and answers in the comments!

BROAD QUESTIONS ABOUT AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION
1. Have you seen attitudes in our field about visitor participation shifting over time? Yes. Granted, I live in an increasingly narrow world of people who are exploring these topics and want me to work with them, but I still learn a lot from the questions and struggles I hear from colleagues and people who comment on the blog.
The Museum 2.0 blog has been going for almost five years now, and I've seen people's concerns and questions evolve over that time in the following way:

• For the first couple of years--2006-2007--most of the questions were about the "why" of participation. Why should institutions engage with people in this way? How could staff members justify these approaches to their managers? I've seen this line of questioning almost completely disappear in the past two years due to many research studies and reports on the value and rise of participation, but in 2006-7, social media and participatory culture was still seen as nascent (and possibly a passing fad).
• In 2008, the conversation started shifting to "how" and "what." In 2008 and 2009, there were many conference sessions and and documents presenting participatory case studies, most notably Wendy Pollock and Kathy McLean's book Visitor Voices in Museum Exhibitions. I wrote The Participatory Museum in response to this energy--to put together case studies in the context of a design framework so we could talk as a field about what works and why.
• In the past year, I've seen the conversation shift to talking about impact and sustainability of these projects--how we evaluate audience participation and how we can shift from experimental pilots to more day-to-day implementation.

2. Are there certain kinds of institutions that are more well-suited for participatory techniques than others?
Yes and no. I honestly think the only kind of cultural institution that cannot support audience participation is one in which staff members don't respect visitors or what they have to contribute. I've never heard people say they don't care about visitors, but I've seen it in how they pay attention to visitors' needs and contributions. This anti-participatory behavior is also sometimes manifest within staffs where only certain employees' ideas are recognized and solicited, floor staff are ignored, etc.

But for institutions with a genuine interest and respect for visitors, participation is always possible. It looks different in different types of institutions. Small organizations are often best at forming long-term relationships with community members, whereas large organizations can rally lots of participants for a contributory project. Art museums are the least likely to empower their own staff to initiate participatory projects but the most likely to work with artists whose approach to participation might be quite extreme. For more on the differences among different types of museums (with examples), check out this post.

3. A lot of these projects are about getting people to be more social and active in museums. What about traditional visitors and supporters who may not want to participate?

In my experience, staff members are more sensitive to this issue than visitors and members are. I've met beautifully-coiffed ladies in their 70's who are hungry for conversation, and I've met pierced teenagers who prefer a contemplative experience. Most people who really love and support a museum want it to be loved and well-used by the larger community, and many of these folks are thrilled by techniques that engage new people with the organization.

That said, I think it's really important for all these engagement strategies to be "opt-in." It's common in many museums to offer cart-based activities that invite visitors (mostly families) to play a game, try an experiment, or make art. Just as those kinds of activities offer opt-in deeper engagement for some visitors, participatory techniques can offer opt-in social or active techniques for those who want them.

Sometimes, staff will claim that certain engagement techniques are so distracting for non-participants that they should not be offered even on an opt-in basis. I frankly think this is ridiculous. We know from research that people like to engage with content in different ways, and many museums tout the fact that they offer multi-faceted learning experiences. If we accept that sometimes people want to read the long label, sometimes people want to discuss things, sometimes people want to touch, and so on, then we have to offer a diversity of options. If we prescriptively decide you can only talk over here and you can only read the long label over there, we limit the quality and impact of the visitor experience.


4. Do you see any cultural differences in whether and how people like to participate around the world?
This is a really interesting question, and if I had any friends who were international social psychologists I would probably spend all my free time pestering them about this. My limited experience and research has led me to believe that people in every culture want to express themselves and connect with each other--the differences are how they prefer to do so.
Sometimes the difference comes down to preferred tools. In Taiwan, I noted that many more visitors and staff members were enthusiastic about taking and sharing photos than they were writing on a talkback board. In Denmark and Amsterdam, I experienced radical dialogue programs like Human Library, but also a strict formalism as to what happens in galleries.
Other times, the differences come down to social conventions. Some cultures value individual expression, whereas others prioritize the group. At the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology (search "Vietnam" here), staff have told me that participatory projects work best when a community of participants is engaged in a group process where they can come to consensus and defer to the group. In contrast, processes that engage individual participants as creators might work in a more individualistic culture like Australia or the US.
I'd love to hear more peoples' reflections on this. In every country I've visited, I've heard a version of this question that starts, "Maybe this works for Americans, but here in X..." After seeing so many varied and inspiring participatory projects from around the world, I can firmly state that this is not an American phenomenon, nor is participatory work even necessarily best-suited to U.S. culture. There are long histories of highly-engaged participatory governance and cultural work around the world, and in many ways, America's obsession with the individual may be more of a hindrance than a help to projects here.

QUESTIONS ABOUT RESISTANCE TO CHANGE
5. Where do you see the biggest resistance to incorporating participatory techniques? What's the biggest obstacle to more of these projects happening?
The first thing you have to tackle is fear of change. This isn't unique to audience participation; it's a reality that any new project or course of action stirs up all kinds of anxieties about organizational change.
Once you get past the fear of change to the specifics of audience participation, you have to separate people's expressed resistance from the actual obstacles. Resistance to audience participation is often expressed as fear of losing control. There's a worry, mostly on the part of content experts and brand managers, that their voices won't be as dominant as they once were when visitors are invited to participate. These fears are well-justified, but they're often predicated on the false conflation of control with expertise. You can be an expert and have a strong voice--a voice visitors want to hear--without being the only voice in the room. That's what it means to live in a democracy, and it's something we're comfortable with in news, politics, and other venues... why not museums?
And ultimately, loss of control is not the biggest obstacle to implementing participatory projects. I would suggest that the biggest challenge is the fact that they require fundamentally different ways of operating. If a traditional exhibition project is one in which a team "puts on a show," a participatory project is one in which a team "plants a garden" and then must tend and cultivate it over time. Participatory projects require sustained engagement between staff and community members, and that is not baked into our traditional job descriptions, staffing plans, and project budgets.

6. How do you evaluate participatory engagement strategies? My simple answer is: evaluate these projects as you would evaluate any new technique or program. If your institution cares about numbers, count participants and impacted visitors. If your institution cares about deep engagement, measure dwell time and survey people about their experiences. If your institution cares about delivering on mission, measure indicators that reflect your core values. This sounds flip, but the reality as I've seen it is that every institution has its own criteria for what makes a project a success. If you evaluate your project by something other than those criteria, you won't be able to make a convincing argument about whether to continue with these efforts or not.
Many evaluations of participatory projects focus solely on the experience for participants. I have yet to see a participatory project in which the direct participants who co-designed an exhibition or contributed their own stories to a program did not have an incredible, often transformative, experience. The problem is that these participants are often tiny in number compared to your organization's overall audience. To effectively and completely evaluate the impact of a participatory project, you have to look at how it affects not only participants but also the broader audience... and staff.
This question of evaluation is still very open. I wrote a chapter in The Participatory Museum about it, but I continue to seek out really good examples of participatory project evaluation. I strongly believe it is through shared evaluations and documentation that we will advance as a field overall in these efforts.

7. What kind of changes do you think have to happen for museums to really be able to embrace and support audience participation, not just in one-off experiments, but for the long term?

This comes back to the idea that participation happens fundamentally in operating, not in designing or developing programs. After a phase of experimentation and pilot projects, I think any organization that is serious about audience participation has to examine how it recruits staff and what their tasks and roles are.
We also have to become more flexible about how we engage visitors as partners on an ongoing basis. For example, I recently learned about the Science Gallery's approach to involving community members. They have a pretty explicit engagement ladder in which someone starts as a visitor, becomes a member, then an "ambassador" who is empowered to put on some programs in collaboration with the institution, and finally a member of the "Leonardo Group" -- an advisory group that meets a few times a year to tackle upcoming creative challenges the organization faces. Rather than having standing advisory committees representing various constituencies, the Leonardo Group is a nimble, diverse crowd of engaged participants who contribute significantly to the Science Gallery's programming and resources through one-off events. This kind of engagement ladder provides a structured framework for participation without overly constraining how people get involved.

QUESTIONS ABOUT WORKING WITH COMMUNITIES
8. When you are creating programming explicitly to engage new communities, how do you still satisfy your base?
I wrote a blog post on this topic last year, but it's one that still comes up frequently in discussions with colleagues. I've come to feel that the "parallel to pipeline" strategy is a solid approach. You start by offering a custom, distinct program for new audiences and then find ways to integrate what works for them into your core offerings. The important part of making this work is acknowledging that you do have to make some real changes to the pipeline when you ask that new audience to transition into it. The parallel programs are not a "bait and switch" used to hook new audiences into your traditional offerings. They are a starting point, and a testing ground, from which you should be learning new ways of working that can be applied more broadly and fundamentally to how the organization operates.

9. If so much of this work is about creating personal relationships with visitors, how do we sustain it beyond individual staff members?
This question comes up most frequently when talking about social media. There's a fear that if an individual staff member becomes the voice of the organization on the Web, and then that person leaves, the relationships she built will disappear. Interestingly, I never hear colleagues express the same fear when it comes to individuals who run specific key programs for an organization (even though those membership managers, educators, volunteer coordinators, and others have very personal relationships with many important constituencies).
When it comes to online community engagement, I always turn to Shelley Bernstein and Beck Tench as my luminary teachers. Both of them are very clear about the need to be personal AND to distribute the relationships throughout staff as much as possible. Beck in particular has done an amazing job of working as a partner to other staff members at the Museum of Life and Science to help them develop social media projects that they can manage on their own with only light involvement from Beck. The animal keepers run their blog. The Butterfly House manager shares photos on Flickr. And so on. In this way, engaging with visitors through social media becomes something that many staff members are involved with based on their content and programmatic skills. This leads to diverse projects and relationships--and a better safety net for the institution overall.

10. When you build a relationship with a community for a project and then that project ends, how do you keep those people involved?
This is one of the toughest questions I've been grappling with lately, and I'd love to hear your reflections on it. It's a question that tends to come up only for organizations that have committed to audience participation over the long term. You invite a group of people to co-design an exhibit or co-produce a program, it happens, it's fabulous... and then what? In most cases, those partners were solicited for specific skills or attributes related to those specific projects, and it's not easy to naturally translate those same people to another participatory opportunity. In my experience, many of these people become a special class of members or volunteers, but that doesn't mean they're satisfied with a standard membership arrangement. These folks have had a taste of higher engagement and many of them want more. I'm not sure what the most sustainable way is to keep them actively involved as the organization shifts over time.
What are your answers to these questions? What are your questions that should be on this list?

I play football (soccer) every week in a recreational indoor league. While this is a pretty hectic game with no real time to breathe, I've noticed a few patterns that, in the moment, convince me that there should be a book entitles 'Strategy Metaphors in Soccer'. 

Here are some of the relevant patterns I've noticed:

When attacking, you always have a little more time to set up a shot. I see less experienced players who, when the ball is at their feet and the goal is available to them, panic and shoot. The lack of preparation often means the shot is misfired, the ball goes off target and the opponent gains possession. You always have more time than you think because you know something the defender doesn't - which is precisely when you are going to shoot. Every moment you prepare improves your chances and keeps them guessing.

When defending, take time away from the attacker. I see this rather awkward movement of a defender standing their ground and moving backwards at the same speed as the attacker. You are giving the attacker that extra time. By taking the time away from the them - by aiming to take the ball aggressively - you force their hand (foot).

Own the direction of attack - you're dribbling the ball and a defender runs back to protect the goal; they are running in front of you watching the ball; you dribble left, they turn left to follow - you turn right, they turn right to follow - they will never gain ownership of the direction of attack and you simply have to decide how long to run them around before shooting.

Use your brain not your legs - the fastest thing on the pitch is the ball. It is more efficient to pass to your team than to run, run, run. Your team needs the skill of making and owning space (options). Let the other team run.

Core competencies are not optional (here I'm talking above my station) - running, trapping the ball and passing are some of the basics of football. It is surprising that some players I see have trouble with these basics, including running (running efficiently is a learned skill).

Digital Campus is back! In the inaugural episode of the 2013-2014 school year, Tom, Dan, Mills, and Amanda welcomed RRCHNM’s new director Stephen Robertson and two of the Digital History Fellows, Amanda Morton and Amanda Regan. We began with the union between Google and edX, and the potential for change in the way that MOOC platforms are chosen, a discussion that included brief thoughts on Google Apps for Education and the collection of data on education. Moving on, we looked at the launch of a new platform for iPhone called Oyster, which offers a Netflix-like service for ebooks. The discussion revolved around what this new service might mean for the current state of textbook rental, deals with publishers, and efforts to combat the rising costs of textbooks. Mills suggested the possibility of a flat fee for a subscription to a semester worth of textbooks instead of students paying individually for ebooks.  We dug deeper into this topic with a discussion of the current state of ebook purchase and rental, citing the Kindle borrowing program as well as libraries’ offering ebooks through the Overdrive platform, and we wondered whether ebook subscriptions could be compared to movie and television streaming through services like Netflix and Amazon Instant Video.

Finally, we took a quick look at Topsy, an analytical service that allows users to search tweets from the earliest days of Twitter, an option that brings up interesting questions about how historians (and educators!) can use Twitter as a historical source. There was some suggestion that the release of this tool might be connected to Twitter’s IPO offering.

This episode concluded with a briefing on the state of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media by the new director Stephen Robertson, which marks the introduction of a new segment narcissistically titled “Reports from the Center.” Tune in two weeks from now (we promise) for more.
Links:

• Google and EdX Press Release
• Inside Higher Ed, “EdX and Google Develop Open Source MOOC Platform”
• Chronicle of Higher Education, “Google and EdX Create a MOOC Site for the Rest of Us”
• InfoDocket, “Oyster, a Netflix-Like Service for Ebooks, Launches
• ZDNet, “Oyster Review”
• The Verge, “Topsy Lets You Search Every Tweet Sent”
• Google Apps for Education
• Oyster
• Topsy
• Twitter’s IPO offering

Related links:

• Inside Higher Ed, “After Weeks of Delays, San Jose State U Releases Research Report”
• “Power Searching with Google”
• Inside Higher Ed, “Feminist Professors Create Alternative MOOCs”

Running time: 45:49
Download the .mp3

Hvis nogen leder efter et godt studiejob er det her måske noget. Medicinsk Museion søger i øjeblikket 4 nye omvisere/servicemedarbejdere på museet op via KUs jobportal (søg på Medicinsk Museion).  Vi bestræber os på at have en blandet flok af fagligheder repræsenteret – det vigtigste er, at vores medarbejdere har lyst til at bidrage til arbejdet på et museum, der ikke er helt almindeligt. Et kig rundt på hjemmesiden her kan give en fornemmelse af, hvilke udstillinger og aktiviteter vi har.

Opslagets fulde ordlyd kan læses herunder, men ansøgningen skal sendes ind via førnævnte hjemmeside.

Omvisere/servicemedarbejdere (4-8 timer/uge) søges til Medicinsk Museion, Institut for Folkesundhedsvidenskab

Medicinsk Museion søger fire fleksible omvisere som, i samarbejde med vores nuværende omviserteam, kan varetage museets publikumsfunktioner.

Jobbet er alsidigt og udfordrende. Du skal være omviser i vores udstillinger, fungere som museums- og kassevagt, og ad hoc varetage andre serviceopgaver. Jobbet kræver interesse og flair for mundtlig formidling samt blik for og lyst til at give vores gæster en god service.

Vi forestiller os, at du:

- Har to-tre års studier bag dig inden for fag som fx historie, etnologi, kulturstudier, arkitektur, folkesundhedsvidenskab, medicin, molekylær biomedicin, tandlæge, medtek, sundhedsfremme og sundhedsteknologi, antropologi eller lign.

- Har kendskab til eller interesse for sundhed, sygdom, forebyggelse og behandling i et kulturelt, æstetisk, teknologisk og historisk perspektiv

- Interesserer dig for museumsformidling

- Har lyst til at tage del i arbejdet på et museum, der i disse år undergår store forandringer

- Har gode mundtlige engelskkundskaber

- Er serviceminded, mødestabil og fleksibel.

Arbejdstiden er varierende og falder både som faste og ad hoc aftalte vagter, der kan ligge både i dag- og aftentimer, hverdag og weekend.

Da arbejdet som omviser kræver en vis oplæring, skal du kunne arbejde hos os i mindst ét år og gerne længere.

Løn og ansættelsesvilkår

Ansættelse sker som studerende HK. Aflønning sker i henhold til gældende overenskomst mellem Finansministeriet og HK/STAT med en anciennitetsbestemt timeløn på mellem kr. 115,96 – 121,64.

Arbejdstiden er 4-8 timer/uge med start hurtigst muligt.

Yderligere oplysninger om stillingen kan fås ved henvendelse til museumsinspektør Bente Vinge Pedersen på mail: *protected email* eller til administrator Mie Knudsen på mail: *protected email*

Send din ansøgning via hjemmesiden http://jobportal.ku.dk/tap/ under Det Sundhedsvidenskabelige Fakultetg vedlagt CV og dokumentation for uddannelse og tidligere beskæftigelse senest den 26. september 2013.

Medicinsk Museion, www.museion.ku.dk, er en enhed under Det Sundhedsvidenskabelige Fakultet, Københavns Universitet. Vores fagområde er studier af sundhed og sygdom, fødsel og død i et kulturelt og historisk perspektiv. Vi har fire funktioner; forskning, undervisning, samlinger og udstillinger.

Københavns Universitet ønsker at afspejle det omgivende samfund og opfordrer alle interesserede til at søge stillingen.

Det Sundhedsvidenskabelige Fakultet har ca. 7500 studerende, ca. 1500 ph.d.-studerende og beskæftiger ca. 3200 medarbejdere. Fakultetet skaber ny viden og formidling gennem sine kerneaktiviteter: forskning, undervisning, videndeling og kommunikation. Med grundforskningsområder lige fra molekylære studier til samfundsstudier bidrager fakultetet til en sund fremtid gennem sine kandidater, forskningsresultater og opfindelser til gavn for patienterne og samfundet.

I recently came across a new startup product called import.io. The product provides a site wrapping tool which allows anyone to create wrappers for sites with repeated structured information and thereby access the data on the site. For example, one might wrap a business listings page, a hotel review site or a weather site and convert the data into machine readable form.

I certainly recommend visiting the site and experimenting with the tool. However, I note that in 2000, WhizBang!Labs created a product called Wrapster, in 2006 Dappit / Dapper created a similar tool. Site wrapping is not a new idea, the technology is reasonably well understood (though the UX that guides a user through wrapping and data collection is challenging), so the question is really what is the business model? and will import.io survive where others with identical technology have failed.

I'd be interested to see how a data analysis and presentation product, like Tableau, could leverage large and varied data sets to enhance their products and whether a community of wrapper creators embeded in their customer base might provide something of a data gathering social network.

 

In 2010, Thomas and I wrote a paper titled ’Do Things Talk?’, published in Susanne Lehmann-Brauns, Christian Sichau, Helmuth Trischler (eds.), The Exhibition as Product and Generator of Scholarship (the volume is available as a .pdf here). In the paper, we discussed the problems and pitfalls surrounding the still current ‘things that talk’ rhetoric. Our central observation in the paper was as follows:

What we suggest, then, is that the current ‘things that talk’-vocabulary may have something to do with wanting to pay attention to the thing-ness of things – their ‘bony materiality’ and yet keep one’s language- and culture-centered approach intact. To allow things become actors with an uncanny ability to speak to us, is (we suggest) a license to maintain the set of scholarly tools and languages associated with the linguistic and cultural turns in the humanities, while still appearing to do something new. By claiming that things talk, scholars today can maintain a certain set of institutionally and traditionally enshrined ideas, while seemingly engaging with a new agenda. Rather than exploring the presence and effects of things qua things, things are turned into something which we, as academics that are trained in a hermeneutical and interpretational tradition, can relate to immediately. It is business as usual on a new subject matter, which still holds out the promise of being something different.

We argued that this talk-rhetoric was a way of making things more like us, rather than making us more like things. Endowing things with anthropocentric qualities – even if done with cautious hesitation or as a metaphor for something else – ran the risk, we felt, of two problems: On the one hand, it might obstruct a possible re-examination and re-evaluation of theories and practices around objects in the humanities; and on the other, it runs the risk of diverting research on objects away from the agenda of re-examining the sort of creatures we are and how we are embedded in the world and the things around us.

Since writing the paper, a deluge of writing on objects, agency and materiality have poured forth, much which is stimulating, important and worthwhile. But it has also increasingly made us feel a need for writing a follow-up paper called ‘Do Things Act?’ building on the 2010 paper and commenting on the theoretical developments since it publication.

What we will do is to blog and tweet this new paper forth, in bits and pieces, over the coming months. Our motivations for this come from a variety of sources, from evolutionary biology to new materialist philosophy, and we will engage with these in various forms as the blogging progresses. Hopefully this will also allow us to engage, both on the blog and on twitter (@Museionist and @AdamBencard), with those of you who have an interest in matters of objects, agency and non-agency, human and non-human, and materialism as we write.

What do you make of the current talk of objects as actors and agents? Is it a theoretical dead end, a productive way forward, a useful rhetorical strategy or something that mirrors a deeper insight into our relationship with the stuff around us? Do things, in fact, act, or do we need other vocabularies to talk about things? And if, which?

This week's guest post is written by Julie Bowen, VP of Experience and Engagement at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa. Julie is one of my true heroes--a creative systems thinker who has the intelligence, patience, and guts to make big shifts possible at large informal science organizations. I met Julie almost ten years ago, when she was leading the Agents of Change project at the Ontario Science Center, and I have admired her ever since. 

Years ago, I was running a workshop at a conference introducing a creativity technique to museum professionals. There was a lot of energy in the room, some very intense conversations and some great ideas were built. In the debrief to the experience I asked people what they thought they might take back to their institutions from the workshop. The comment that brought me up short was “This was great. I can see a lot of potential for how this could help us develop better stuff. But it would never work in my museum because my boss would never go for it.” 
This is a comment I’ve heard a lot over the years, and have wondered about what it takes to introduce or build more creativity into institutions. Having worked in and with a lot of different institutions, teams and departments, I’ve discovered that the secret sauce is different in each context – some places and people are distrustful of creativity, some get stuck in the planning, some need permission to be creative, others see creativity as the purview of a specific department, some are enthusiastically creative for a while and then fall back into more comfortable patterns and some embrace it as a part of their corporate culture. 
Based on a lot of experimentation (and a lot of failures), a whole lot of conversations and some amazing questions from people, here are some things that seem to contribute to getting creativity introduced and to having it stick. Not all of these are required in every instance, but having more of these seems to increase the likelihood of success (whatever that looks like). 
The leadership environment
Leaders (whether on a team, in a department or institution-wide) have to be open to taking risks, trying new things, evaluating and learning from failures. Discussions about what type and level of risk is acceptable and when risk is acceptable (early in the development process, contained to a defined time period or clearly articulated experiment) are useful here. The leadership environment is key. If your leadership can’t see value in creativity then try and work within your own sphere of influence to show how creativity can be valuable. You’ll have to be patient and persistent. If the leadership is actively disinterested in creativity, it will be hard to get whatever change you make to stick beyond what you can influence. To be a creative or innovative institution, with a lasting commitment to creativity, then creativity (and the inherent risk taking) needs to be supported at the top, valued for what it can bring to the institution, built into operating procedures, and reflected in the culture of the organization (through action, and aligned with values, mission and vision and reinforced through training and rewarding of staff and management).
Prototype lab at TELUS World of Science Calgary, 2011 The physical environment
The physical environment has to be conducive to creativity – and by extension to taking some kind of risk whether personal, professional or institutional. In fact, Sir Ken Robinson contends that “if you are not prepared to be wrong you’ll never do anything original”.  One way of doing this is to create a ‘skunkworks’ --a real place and time carved out of the day to experiment – where people can get comfortable being creative. This means a place that’s safe to try out stuff – where if something doesn’t go well, you’re not front and center in the museum’s lobby (once you get good at experimenting – then the lobby can be a fun place to try stuff with people), that is sturdy enough to invite experimentation (with robust floors, work surfaces, seating) easy to clean up, stocked with tools and random, cheap materials that can be used by staff to build and try stuff.

The idea environment

• Processes can get in the way of or can facilitate creativity. Sometimes changing the way you get to ideas, can change the kind of ideas that are generated. Think of a different way to brainstorm – for instance, build ideas out of things rather than words. 
• There needs to be a reason to be creative – usually in response to a problem or opportunity – that blank piece of paper in front of you can be more daunting than a well-defined set of restrictions. To get started, consider what your assumptions are about the problem at hand and then think about ways to question those assumptions (for instance, if you’re thinking about a new food service design, you’ll probably assume tables and chairs. What happens when you take away the chairs? Or the tables? Or the idea of ‘service’)

The individual

• There are a number of skills that can improve creative output – one study found the five skills that distinguished the most creative and innovative executives included association, observation, questioning, experimentation, and networking.
• If you’re trying to introduce creative ideas into your institution, something to consider is whether the ideas you’re introducing solve a particular problem that you are struggling with, or if they are aimed at your perception of someone else’s problem. Giving unsolicited ideas to the marketing department when you work in the exhibits department is unlikely to be successful (think of it as how you would feel receiving someone else’s idea on how to improve what you do before you throw the ‘you should try this’ at someone else). 
• Ask a lot of questions – to really get creative, asking questions of yourself and others, exploring different ways of looking at a problem or opportunity, observing behavior – all of these things can help you get more creative.
• Build something – take the idea out of the world of talking about it and build it (cheaply and quickly) – this can be a really powerful way to show yourself, your potential users and your boss what the idea could be. It also provides a really great test of whether something has any merit in being pursued.
• Recognize that ideas are a dime a dozen. Good ideas are a quarter a dozen and great ideas are rare. If you’re grumpy because “no one likes my ideas or ever implements them” then think about folks like Thomas Edison who is reputed to have tried and failed 10,000 times to invent the light bulb. Ideas that have merit are those that are subjected to rigor – observation of the problem and an understanding of its nuances, testing of possible solutions, iterating, re-testing, experimentation, seeking out critical feedback. Some ideas eventually make it out of that crucible to become something really amazing, and others die on the vine. Not to worry, there are dozens of other ones that will come up in the course of the exploration…that’s the fun part about creativity.

What have you found works or doesn’t to introduce or increase creativity in your organization, department, team? 

Click here for the newsletter, in Danish and English.

7th newsletter from Medical Museion in 2013.

• “Martial Arts event, September 19th”,
• “Operating room around 1900 – new exhibition opens in September”,
• “New associate professor in medical science communication”,
• “Videos from ‘The Data Body on the Dissection Table’ now online”,
• “The Gene Gun lent to Ars Electronica in Linz”,
• “History of medicine in Radio P1″,
• “Evaluation of The Natural History Museum in Berlin”,
• “Pill Dress in the making”.

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Newsletter archive – click here.

This August/September, I am "rerunning" popular Museum 2.0 blog posts from the past. This post is even more relevant today to the broader conversation about audience diversity in the arts than when it was published three years ago. If you like the post, please check out the thoughtful and complicated comments on the original post. 

Let's say you work at an organization that mostly caters to a middle and upper-class, white audience. Let's say you have a sincere interest in reaching and working with more ethnically, racially, and economically diverse audiences. What does it take to make that happen?

Last week, I had the honor and pleasure of giving a talk at an institution I've long admired: the Taylor Community Science Resource Center at the St. Louis Science Center. Besides having the longest name on the planet, the Taylor Center is one of my greatest inspirations when it comes to an institution authentically and whole-heartedly making a difference in the lives of underserved community members.

The Taylor Center is run by Diane Miller, who launched its award-winning Youth Exploring Science program in 1997. 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. There are expectations around what people wear, what they can and can't do, and how they relate to each other that may be comfortable for whites while feeling alien for people who don't grow up in a white culture. I'm white, and several of the things Diane told me about are things I don't notice because I'm part of the majority culture. Guards staring at black teens and grumbling about their clothes. People who feel pressured to sit quietly through a film when they've grown up in theaters that encourage vocal participation with the show.
When Diane started running community partnerships at the Science Center in the 1990s, she decided not to start with programs to bring more black and economically-disadvantaged families to the museum as visitors. Instead, she went out into local neighborhoods with low-income families and lousy schools and asked parents how they felt about their kids' science education. The parents told her they felt okay about what their kids were learning but were concerned about their children's job prospects as adults. So Diane asked them, "What if I hire your kids and pay them to learn science, teach it to other people, and gain professional skills?"
This is the root of the Youth Exploring Science (YES) program. Most teenagers join the program at fourteen and stay through their high school years. During the school year, they spend one day per week at the Taylor Center working on science projects and leading science programs for young children, seniors, and other community groups. In the summer, they spend 8 weeks working full-time at the Taylor Center learning and facilitating public programs. What started with 15 students in 1997 has grown to support 200 students per year. The program is rigorous, engaging students in serious scientific projects as well as personal and professional development workshops.
YES students defy expectations. They graduate high school in record numbers and the majority go on to post-secondary education. Diane told me several stories about teens who came in thinking of themselves as dumb but changed their perspective as their confidence grew in two areas they associated with intelligence--knowing science and being able to teach. If you can teach science, how can you be stupid? Diane told me about one young man who raised his grade point average in a single school year from 1.0 to 3.0. She asked him, "How did you do this? I don't understand what happened." And he said, "It's easy. I was misdiagnosed." Many of these kids come in mis- or self-diagnosed as dumb or incapable. YES changes that.
YES is carefully designed to support opportunities for disadvantaged kids to get involved with science. These kids are different from the mostly middle or upper-class white kids who volunteer at many science centers. Many YES teens don't come in with confidence about their own abilities. Many of them don't have the clothes required to go to a job interview. Many of them continue to be looked at suspiciously on the bus or on the street, even when they are traveling to and from a job site where they do incredible work for their community. Many of them don't come in focused on a particular topic or even science in general. The YES program helps teens not only learn science but learn how to articulate their interests and pursue new passions.
All these disadvantages don't mean that these teenagers can't be competent workers, superlative contributors, and successful learners. It doesn't mean that these teenagers are any less valuable to the St. Louis Science Center or society as a whole than others. But it does mean that they need different scaffolds and support mechanisms to succeed.
Diane pointed out several design features of the Taylor Center that uniquely serve these teenagers. Most of the walls are clear, so the space feels open, welcoming, and safely overseen. YES student projects last for several years, and teens are given dedicated space for their projects. Their work stays up on the walls and they have ownership over their project space for the long term; no one is going to reset everything or give up on them in mid-stream. There is healthy food in the fridge, and this summer, the Taylor Center became part of the city subsidized lunch program, offering a daily meal to local kids who receive free lunch at school but don't have a comparable meal source in the summer.
The Taylor Center is also explicitly not inside the St. Louis Science Center (although there are plans eventually to move to the main campus). The YES teens do most of their work as science educators within the Taylor Center, a place that they know and feel is "their" space. Some YES teens do work in the Science Center itself as well as providing outreach programs to other community centers, but for the most part, the YES program benefits from the controlled, safe environment of the Taylor Center.
The YES program doesn't just benefit the teens who participate and the community groups they serve. The Taylor Center is a testbed for the St. Louis Science Center to think more concretely about how to build successful community partnerships and how to confront internalized biases or obstacles that prevent more diverse involvement. At one point in the discussion last week, someone from the audience asked a question about whether "nontraditional" audiences really need a different kind of mediation than other museum visitors. The questioner noted that visitors have been using museums for their own diverse purposes since the beginning of time. Why can't new visitors do the same?
Diane told an amazing story in response. At one point, some YES teens told her that they thought more people from their communities would enjoy the Science Center and the other museums in St. Louis' Forest Park, which happen to be free. As they put it, "if there's one thing poor families are looking for, it's free things to do on the weekends." So the teens worked with the YES staff to put together a grant proposal in which they would partner with families at St. Louis homeless shelters to introduce them to the local museums.
The proposal was funded, and YES teens partnered up with individual homeless families on monthly outings to museums in Forest Park. The teens had an innate understanding of how it feels to be a new museum visitor, and they crafted the program carefully based on their knowledge. The teens paired up one-on-one with families, so that they could blend in easily and look like individual families instead of like a conspicuous tour group. They helped the families understand what's in the museums, how to approach exhibits, how to figure out when you can use an interactive element--all the cultural secrets that are easy for frequent museum-goers to forget. The YES teens were able to make a connection and design a program in a way that was more culturally appropriate and likely to succeed than traditional museum staff members likely could.
This story illustrates what advocates like Elaine Heumann Gurian have been saying for years: museums need to go to unfamiliar lengths to truly welcome and serve new audiences. You have to be open to listening, open to change, open to confronting unspoken biases about the "right" way to experience or engage with your institution. And you have to find ways to promote diversity, not as a nice to have, but as a must have. In the case of the St. Louis Science Center, YES teens have unique backgrounds, knowledge, expectations, and needs that positively enhance the all staff members' ability to serve wider audiences. Humble thanks to Diane, YES staff, and the teens for generously reminding me how illuminating and necessary it can be to see the world through someone else's eyes.