ECHO Blogging Central

When ordering a cake.

IMAGINE sitting in a noisy restaurant, across the table from a friend, having a conversation as you eat your meal. To communicate effectively in this situation, you have to extract the relevant information from the noise in the background, as well as from other voices. To do so, your brain somehow "tags" the predictable, repeating elements of the target signal, such as the pitch of your friend's voice, and segregates them from other signals in the surroundings, which fluctuate randomly.

The ability to focus on your friend's voice while excluding other noises is commonly referred to as the cocktail party effect. Although first described more than 50 years ago, the brain mechanisms involved are unknown. But a new study by researchers at Northwestern University now shows that activity in regions of the brainstem are modulated by specific characteristics of the speaker's voice, and that this modulation is impaired in children with dyslexia.

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The Story Behind NYPL’s New Logo — The New York Times City Room blog sheds some light on how cultural heritage institutions are thinking about branding in the digital age with a nice little piece on The New York Public Library’s choice of a new logo.

On this podcast we’re delighted to introduce another two “irregulars,” Jennifer Howard, a writer for the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Josh Greenberg, the director of digital strategy and scholarship at the New York Public Library. Jennifer and Josh give us terrific insights into the challenges that digitization and open access are posing to libraries and publishers, and speak of new models that are emerging out of the chaos, including coalitions of publishers and the Internet Archive’s BookServer.

Links mentioned on the podcast:
Research Librarians Discuss How to Sell Scholars on Open Access, and More
Columbia and Cornell Libraries Announce ‘Radical’ Partnership
Open Access to Research Is Inevitable, Libraries Are Told

Running time: 44:25
Download the .mp3

Its been a while. In fact its been six months. I only have so much writing in me and I’ve spent the summer preparing, and the fall teaching, a course through Johns Hopkins online Museum Studies Program. The course is entitled The Management of Technology in Museums. Its really a boot camp in museum technology that tries to address the issue of technology literacy in Museums. Its also a small attempt to address a concern that I have for the future of technology literacy in museums. Its not that we don’t have some amazing technology talent in the museum community, its the base level of technology familiarity and comfort that many museum employees don’t have. My main worry is how the rounds of staff cuts that we’ve seen and are still seeing is affecting our pool of digital native museum employees. Our cuts went by the book, identify the areas that need cutting (most areas), offer voluntary packages, then last in first out. We had some uptake for the voluntary packages, but then we culled from our incoming talent. Our technology literacy pool had to have suffered, other institutions must have too.

I had a question from one of my students, a director of a small museum, “Do you feel in the next few years the Getty will hire more staff for technological stuff instead of the more traditional museum positions?”. My reply was that I want to hire traditional museum people with technology literacy, or at least comfort, hence my conviction for teaching this course. I’m currently on week 10 of this 14 week course, so its all downhill from here. I think its going well, but you’d have to ask the students and its been a lot of work, but I highly recommend it, from a teaching point of view rather than an enrollment point of view. If you’ve ever thought about teaching, I encourage you to investigate joining a faculty to teach online. You can do it from the comfort of your own home and you don’t have to be somewhere at a particular time. With the cost of education rocketing, I have to believe its a growth industry.

So the course is two-thirds done and I’m in Portland at MCN. I’m set for a presentation on Friday with the Smithsonian’s own Mike Edson and Carmen Iannacone on Strategery: The Realities of Strategic Planning. No, its not a spelling mistake, its a Bushism, or rather its a Will Ferrell-inspired Bushism. I have a number of definitions including:

Strategery: stra-TEE-jar-ee.
1. When you don’t actually have a(n exit) strategy
2. When you have a strategy that is rapidly losing support
etc, etc…

I’ll be talking about some recent strategic planning processes that we went through at the Getty around how we document, interpret and provide access to our collection including some personnel restructuring. I’ll try not to make it too navelgazery.

Part of the challenge in technology strategic planning is how to prepare for the seemingly endless technologies coming down the pike at us. In case you’re wandering what those are, I compiled a matrix of technologies Past, Present and Future from the past six years of Horizon Reports for Higher Education and the Horizon Report – Museum Edition, conveniently colour-coded for your viewing pleasure. In case you’re unfamiliar with the series, the horizon project report format presents six key technologies and their predicted impact over three horizons: Less than 1 year – meaning that examples are easy to find in current practice; 2 to 3 years – meaning that these technologies are established and easily supportable with actual examples; and 4 to 5 years – meaning that these technologies may only be found in research, demonstration, or experimental contexts. The six years of reporting gives us a body of past, present and future technologies spanning the period 2004-2014.

Technology Matrix - Horizon Reports

Green is the ghost of technology past, amber is the ghost of technology present, red is the ghost of technology future. So you can see how good the horizon process was and is as a predictor for the future. So, looking at the ghosts of technology future what’s your prediction for the most impactful technology? Not necessarily just in museums, but wide-spread?

I’ve been um’ing and ah’ing about which one it is for me. I think the one that is going to make me buy the Christmas turkey for Tiny Tim is Social Operating Systems. Basically the concept is to re-organise the networked environment around the individual, but not in the way it was organised before with personalisation. (An aside: Despite Web 2.0, we’re in the third iteration of “The Web”. First it was simply “The Web”, people and organizations launched and surfed websites; then it became “My Web” with personalization tools and resources to tailor the experience to the individual; now it has become “Our Web” with tools, resources and platforms to create a shared experience.) The next iteration will still be “Our Web” – the concept is just too powerful, but it will be that much easier to engage wholesale with the network.

There are experimental initiatives in this direction, but Opera Unite is an interesting one. I don’t think its going to take off but they are obviously thinking along the right lines. Basically it turns your web browser into a web server, it allows you to serve up any content that you want, which means you are stating your presence and any other information that you want whenever you fire up your browser. Potentially this means that if you were to join Facebook for example, you would just join and all you history, preferences, images, friends, etc, engage with you. The networked environment then becomes an extremely transitory experience of those people who are “online” at that particular moment. Like Skype, when you log on to Skype it tells you how many people are currently engaging in conversation at that moment. It should be peer to peer networking in the extreme but the Opera people haven’t architected it in that way which is a shame, but nevetheless its a step forward. The powers that be hate P2P networking because (it can) circumvent established network connectivity and security, making it really hard to police and monitor – awesome.

There are countless iPhone apps that allow your iphone to connect with others for some discrete task, but imagine if they were all integrated with your own social operating system, that was your own handheld device. Awesome.

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German-speaking medical museum curators should be interested in a symposium on university museums and collections to be held at the Humboldt University, Berlin, 18 – 20 February 2010 , organised by the Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum fur Kulturtechnik and the Berliner Medizinhistorischen Museum der Charite:

Das Symposium setzt sich u.a. zum Ziel, gemeinsam nach neuen Aufgaben fur Universitätsmuseen und -sammlungen zu suchen, Strategien zu entwickeln, um den Fortbestand der Sammlungen sicherzustellen und Zukunftskonzepte zu erörtern, die traditionelle Universitätssammlungen besser in den Hochschulalltag integrieren und den heutigen Anspruchen von Forschung, Lehre und Wissenschaftskommunikation gerecht werden. Daruber hinaus soll ein Netzwerk fur Universitätsmuseen und -sammlungen im deutschsprachigen Raum etabliert werden, um den dringend erforderlichen Austausch von Erfahrungen und Kenntnissen in Gang zu setzen.

See further: http://universitaetsmuseen.hu-berlin.de (conference language will be German)

Google Programming Language: "Go" — Not sure if this is new or I just missed it somehow, but Google has released an open source systems programming language called “Go.” Noting that languages like Java and C++ are years (decades, even) old, the Go team aims to make the new language friendlier to today’s problems and styles of coding. Hat tip @n8agrin.

Mrs. Washington Meets Omeka — CHNM and George Washington’s Mount Vernon Estate and Gardens are proud to announce the launch of a new website chronicling the life of Martha Washington. The site includes a rich archive of primary sources, a biographical exhibit, and three teaching modules. In addition to being a tremendous resource in its own right, the site is a powerful example of Omeka’s capabilities.

MediaWiki How To — Lifehacker provides a step-by-step guide to customizing MediaWiki, the open source wiki platform that powers Wikipedia. The guide is written by Lifehacker founder Gina Trapani, who recently used MediaWiki to publish a “book-in-progress,” The Complete Guide to Google Wave. Useful reading for anyone thinking about self-publishing his or her next book online.

The Open Source Professor — Mark Sample has posted slides and audio for his provocative recent talk, “The Open Source Professor.” Sample’s talk is part of MITH’s excellent Digital Dialogues series.

Historians of medicine have largely eschewed notions like ‘progress’ and ‘advance’ in medical science and medical practice in favour of more historicist and relativistic understandings. But for medical practitioners and patients alike, the notions of ‘progress’ and ‘advance’ usually make more sense. Some philosophers too think it is time to refocus on the idea of ‘medical progress’.

A forthcoming conference at the University of Bristol (13-15 April 2010) will address the following topics:

To identify progressive trends in current medicine, we need to understand the nature of historical progress more clearly. Has medicine always progressed? If not when did it begin to progress, and why? Historians have long debated these questions. Most recently, David Wootton’s controversial argument that medicine only started to progress in the late 19th century, has renewed interest on the nature of progress in medicine. These questions invite the following further questions.

We need to understand how progress in medicine should be measured. The range and effectiveness of available interventions is an obvious metric, but there has been considerable recent interest in preventive medicine. What are the limits of preventive medicine? Are preventive strategies truly medical, or an admission of the limitations of medicine?

There is a need for greater clarity on the nature of health and disease, if we are to understand progress in promoting the former and treating the latter. Are these concepts biostatistical (as Boorse argues) or partly normative (e.g. Kingma)? What role do social pressures, such as conceptions of acceptable weight, height or sexual characteristics play in shaping the distinction between medically necessary and elective interventions? Is health just the absence of disease, or does modern medicine need to acknowledge a more inclusive notion of well-being?

There is a particular need for greater clarity on these questions as they apply to psychological disorders and the various psychiatric, psycho-therapeutic, and psycho-pharmacological interventions designed to deal with them. The distinction between health and disease is especially unclear in the psychological case, and the history of medicine shows it to be especially fluid.

It is necessary to differentiate the perspectives of medical scientists, clinicians, and patients concerning the nature of progress, and related notions such as a successful treatment outcome. The most dramatic illustration of this need is perhaps the recent controversy on voluntary euthanasia, where Hippocratic principles appear to be at odds with patients’ own desires.

To further medical progress, it is necessary to identify its causes. Is progress driven by advances in basic physiological science? Or by clinical need? By some combination of these—in which case how do they interact?

Insofar as medical knowledge progresses, is there a single, unified methodology for generating that progress, e.g. ‘the scientific method as applied to medicine’? Recent debates concerning Evidence Based Medicine and randomized controlled trials have highlighted the need for clear answers to this question. Is the RCT a “gold standard”, or are there a number of ways of coming to know in medicine? Are these ways incommensurable, or does can a “hierarchy of evidence” (such as that advocated by proponents of EBM) provide a clinically useful basis of comparison and ranking?

The conference will encourage the involvement of methodologically interested medical professionals, philosophers of medicine and historians of medicine. More here.

Last week, the Association of Science and Technology Centers (ASTC) held their annual meeting in Ft. Worth, Texas. I participated in three sessions: a Pecha Kucha design blitz, a dialogue on bridging online/onsite connections, and a discussion of the IMLS 21st Century Skills report. This post recaps these sessions, provides my slides, and shares what I learned at the conference.

Designing Questions

Kathy Gustafon-Hilton coordinated a massive Pecha Kucha session, featuring 19 design professionals sharing 20 slides, 20 seconds apiece. Beyond being totally exhausting, this session offered some highly varied insights into the value of prototyping, the dangers of the color red, and what happens when good exhibits go bad.



I spoke about the importance of designing intentional frameworks for asking visitors questions, based on this blog post. Exhibit labels in science centers ask more questions than any other kinds of museums, and yet the questions are often awful--teacherly, overly rhetorical, and totally meaningless. While questions like: "Where were you last night?," asked by a cop or mother, garners the full attention of asker and askee alike, museum questions like "what is nanotechnology?," are fairly meaningless to all involved. I shared examples of question frameworks designed for specific types of visitor experiences: personal framing of exhibits (as in Facing Mars), private sharing (like the Storycorps booths), public dialogue (as in the Advice exhibit), and so on. Download my slides here.

Elsewhere in the session, I was incredibly impressed by:

• The new Dialogue in Silence exhibition, presented by the same group (Dialogue Social Enterprise) that created the incredibly successful Dialogue in the Dark exhibition. Where Dialogue in the Dark is a tactile and auditory experience led in complete darkness by blind guides, Dialogue in Silence is an exhibition of interpersonal challenges that must be completed in total silence.
• Two presentations (by Mikko Myllykoski of Heureka and Chuck Howarth of Gyroscope) that questioned whether science center exhibits should be cutesy and colorful. Both of these designers presented compelling images and evidence from exhibit work and child development experts about the idea that you can make sophisticated, muted exhibits that help children slow down, focus, and enjoy themselves with interactive content. Chuck offered a quote from an advisory psychologist who commented that "children should be the brightest thing in the space." Mikko noted that when Heureka switched to digital screen-based exhibit labels from graphics, they saw an entirely new behavior: kids reading labels, instead of their parents reading while the kids hit the hands-on elements. Mikko suggested that the kids saw the screens as being "for them" and felt drawn to read long paragraphs of text when presented digitally.
• Jane Werner, director of the fabulous Pittsburgh Children's Museum, talked about the Charm Bracelet project, a local collaboration among arts organizations that is both incredibly ambitious (with a goal to transform the troubled North Side neighborhood into a cultural and educational jewel of the city) and wonderful distributed (they make microgrants for small projects that make a difference in the neighborhood). We so frequently over-focus on our own institutions' problems, and Jane and her cohorts in Pittsburgh are thinking much more expansively about their collective power to make positive change in their community.
  

Bridging Online and Onsite Experiences


Tamara Schwarz (Chabot Space & Science Center), Seth! Leary (NRG! Exhibits), Rob Semper (Exploratorium) and I hosted a wide-ranging discussion session on design techniques for developing projects that involve both online and onsite elements. Rob shared some of the Exploratorium's forays into electronic guidebooks, Seth! talked about the Bellevue Sculptural Travel Bug project and geocaching, and Tamara and I both talked about content experiences that incorporate exhibits, social networks, and in the case of a newish project I'm working on, cellphones. Download our slides here.

I particularly appreciated Rob's thoughtful description of how people use guidebooks in real life - first, as inspiration for a hazily considered trip, then to really plan specifics, then on the ground as a guide to pre-selected and new opportunities, and finally, as a memento, peppered with comments on experiences sampled or postponed for future visits. How can a device-based guide offer the same range of experiences packaged in a small container?

This session also led to some discussion about physical infrastructure to support web-based experience integration. Many museums, especially those of the big old box variety, need guidance and help figuring out how to build data services into their facilities, and I suspect that these kinds of considerations will become a constant feature of new construction projects once a model is developed.

21st Century Skills

In the final minutes of the conference, Marsha Semmel (IMLS) hosted a session with myself, Julie Johnson (Science Museum of Minnesota) and Bronwyn Bevan (Exploratorium) to share the IMLS report on 21st Century Skills. Without getting too deeply in the weeds, 21st Century Skills is a phrase that has gained a lot of traction in US policy circles around education and workforce development. The basic idea is that there is a set of skills that need to be emphasized for kids today to be good citizens, workers, and leaders in the 21st century--skills like collaboration, global awareness, and media literacy. While most of the national discussion has focused on schools and enterprise, IMLS wanted to demonstrate to policymakers that museums and libraries already communicate many of these skills. IMLS also wanted to help museums and libraries improve their skills, both for audiences and for their own professional communities. So, IMLS convened a group of advisors (including Julie, Bronwyn, and I) to consult on the creation of a report and diagnostic tool for museum and library professionals, which you can download here.

During the session, we discussed how the 21st century skills report can serve as an actionable tool both for fundraising/advocacy activities and professional and program development at science centers. Marsha also gave a brief overview of IMLS grants available that support regional groups and institutions performing 21st century skills audits and professional development workshops.

The REFLECTS project at MOSI

In keeping with the session on 21st century skills in museums, I want to report on one other session I attended that really inspired me for its forward-thinking approach to professional development and visitor experience. A team of researchers and floor staff from the Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) in Tampa, FL, came to the conference to talk about REFLECTS, a huge initiative in which floor educators are trained to perform self-reflective research on their own interactions with visitors and adapt their behavior to improve visitor engagement.

The REFLECTS project blends practical institutional demands with deep research. The point of the project is to train educator staff to be able to appropriately scaffold visitors' experiences at the museum. The team defines a "successful" visitor experience as one that is both active and engaged (as opposed to passive and disinterested). Floor staff are recorded via both video and audio as they interact with visitors, and then those floor staff go back later and code the recordings for cues that they define as indicating active engagement: visitors making comments about the exhibit, asking and answering each other's questions, making connections to prior experiences, and so on. The researchers don't judge the content of the cues (i.e. whether a visitor asks a silly question or a complex intellectual one), just their incidence. And then they head back out on the floor to adjust their behavior and try again.

In the session, MOSI staff showed video of themselves engaging with visitors before and after working in the REFLECTS program, and the difference was impressive. The educators weren't doing a better job communicating content in the "after" videos; in fact, many of them offered less content in these videos. Instead, they were doing a better job supporting visitors having their own content experiences, rather than trying (often unsuccessfully) to coerce visitors into engagement.

The primary researcher at MOSI, Judith Lombana, offered some hard-nosed business reasons for the REFLECTS project. She noted that in a region driven by tourism, MOSI must do whatever it can to deliver memorable experiences to visitors that will encourage repeat visits. She also noted that museums spend a lot of time giving visitors scaffolding that is not successful at improving engagement or learning, and that this is a business problem. As she put it: "waste occurs with activites or resources that some particular guest does not want."

But Judith also noted some other major professional development values of the project, especially that the floor educators who are engaged as researchers via REFLECTS feel empowered and validated, able to improve their performance as educators and understand the framework in which they do so. Sadly, there is little on the web so far about this project, but you can find a one-page brief at the bottom of this page. Hopefully, they will soon start publishing their findings for the broader museum audience.

I love my laptop bag. The kind of thing you pick up quickly in a rush without much thought, that turns out to be a well loved and trusty friend. Its tardis like capabilities never fail to amaze me (laptop and lunch and pair of shoes and 30 student essays and lecture handouts and an umbrella? sure!). I would share with you the brand, but it doesnt discernibly have one. It was cheap, and I've never ever seen anyone else with the same one.

Until last week on the train. I put my laptop rucksack up in the rack next to one which was exactly the same.

How tempted was I to do the ole' spy-who-loves-me switcheroo of the cases?

Then I imagined the work carnage that would ensue, and just went on my merry way, thinking when did I get so unadventurous. Mental note - must put a business card in my laptop bag in case it gets separated from me, in a cold war secret stealing stylie.

We here at Medical Museion are always on the outlook for new and interesting institutional experiments to learn from. This week’s announcement of up-coming events at OBSERVATORY is inspirational:

The Culture of Curiosity is everywhere these days. Wunderkammern appear in popular art, cutting-edge fashion, film, books and museum exhibitions. This aesthetic has proved surprisingly durable and popular for over 600 years. From temple to home to museum, the Culture of Curiosity continues to exert an irresistible pull on our collective psyches, and it shows no signs of falling from favor any time soon.

I guess our (formerly) own Camilla — who has specialised in how the practice of the Wunderkammer can be transferred to present-day museum practice — couldn’t have said it better. (By the way, her book on Ole Worm’s Wunderkammer, Genstandsfortællinger, is about to be published in Danish…).

So here is OBSERVATORY’s current event programme:

• Friday, November 13th: The Culture of Curiosity – with Evan Michelson, co-owner of Obscura Antiques & Oddities(AKA “The Morbid Anatomy Gift Shop”).
• Sunday, November 15th: Cranioklepty: Grave Robbing and the Search for Genius – with Colin Dickey.
• Saturday, November 21st: Opening of OBSERVATORY’s next art exhibition, ALL SORTS OF REMEDIES: work by Herbert Pfostl.
• Friday, December 4th: Occult America – a talk by Mitch Horowitz.
• Thursday, December 10th: Exquisite Corpses – Illustrated Lecture and Artifacts from the Mütter Museum with the museum’s director, Robert D. Hicks.
• Friday, December 18th: Art as Magic and the Cold Hard Facts of Life: Herbert Pfostl in conversation with James Walsh.

Wish I lived in Brooklyn, NY. For CO2-reasons, I wouldn’t even think of flying over there. For more information, see www.observatoryroom.org

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