ECHO Blogging Central

I’m still trying to figure out what holidays I celebrate. For that matter, I’m still trying to figure out the shape of my understanding of divinity, but that’s a much bigger and less concrete problem. The holidays are easy: just have to discover and honor my own responses to days that are special to some large number of people.

Samhain is like entering a lucid dream. It’s deep sleep—winter is coming—and also reflection, contemplation, rediscovery of still awareness. I’ve imagined that it might be conceptually similar to the state vipassana yogis achieve when they rest without sleeping. If that hubristic notion turns out to be true, that’ll be cool.

Yesterday I baked an impressive number of cheesecakes: four small eight-inch ones and 14 ramekins of varying sizes. Yesterday I went to a Halloween party, where the cheesecakes got an enthusiastic reception and I got to bask in dear friends’ tenth wedding anniversary. Yesterday ended with a puppy pile of fascinating, half-drunk conversation about socially important topics. The conversation was defeated only by sleep.

Today I was thrilled to acquire two new housemates, who will likely be moving in gradually, and who are excellent, and oh yay. Today a friend who lives in Oregon came to visit with his six-month old and his toddler, both of whom he carted over to this coast all by himself. That was some impressive kid-wrangling fu, all love and concern. Today I had bonding time with my housemates and a scary, ultimately affirming and warm conversation with a beloved.

I also thought of my dad, because today we think about big cycles, and his is over, but mine with him is not really. I thought of the grandparents I’d known (my mom’s side) and ones I hadn’t (my dad’s side), of war and peace, of the pricelessness of time, of equilibrium.

The three first weeks in November, we are holding three internal staff meetings here at Medical Museion to discuss our plans for the next three years, 2010-2012 — with respect to research, acquisitions, collection management, exhibitions and web-based outreach. Starting Tuesday, then again next Monday and next Monday again. Here are five headings for the discussions:

1. Focus outreach on the core audience = Danish health system
2. Focus on small, experimental physical exhibitions
3. Stronger presence on the social web
4. Encourage participatory museum practices – a public experimental museum
5. Research focus on the subjective, material, and aesthetic aspects of the participatory museum

I’ll be back with details

It’s not coming up with the idea… we all have great ideas.  It is about making ideas happen.  Successful people start and complete projects.  You don’t succeed unless you’re not afraid to start and not driven enough to finish.  Here is a great video from Seth Godin on that subject:

Seth Godin: Quieting the Lizard Brain from 99% on Vimeo.

I love this stuff. Big news from Xerox:

“With the development of a new silver ink, Xerox scientists have paved the way for commercialization and low-cost manufacturing of printable electronics. Printable electronics offers manufacturers a very low-cost way to add “intelligence” or computing power to a wide range of surfaces such as plastic or fabric…

Using Xerox’s new technology, circuits can be printed just like a continuous feed document without the extensive clean room facilities required in current chip manufacturing…

The printed electronics materials, developed at the Xerox Research Centre of Canada, enable product manufacturers to put electronic circuits on plastics, film, and textiles. Printable circuits could be used in a broad range of products, including low-cost radio frequency identification tags, light and flexible e-readers and signage, sensors, solar cells and novelty applications including wearable electronics.”

I am so looking forward to a wearable iPhone and a cool leather handbag / e-book reader. No more gadgets to shlepp around! A keyboard printed on my desktop. Everything printed on my desktop! No more clutter!

Museum applications, anyone?

In reading this post about using Twitter’s lists instead of a feed (blog) reader it occurred to me that there are two measures one can make about content. Firstly, how well does it pass the time or entertain you. For example I get quite into reading stuff that surfaces on TechMeme – it all seems pretty interesting right? Secondly, how accurate, informed, useful is the content and reading experience in aggregate. I have no reason to believe that what I read on TechMeme is the be all and end all of what I should be reading and what is out there.

Like many, my reading habits and channels change over time. However, having read some of the literature and science behind how things propagate through social networks, the differences between how informative something is and how popular it is, and the distinction between influence and authority, a world in which I’m as informed those other guys is not compelling.

Perhaps we would do well to remember that an anonymous one way tie (e.g. following someone on Twitter) is not the same as a weak tie.

Will we continue to move towards socialized content because it is good enough without trying to find the best picture of the world?

Prep School Library Drops Books in Favor of Kindles — Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Massachusetts (not far from where I grew up) is in the process of deaccessioning the books in its library in favor of Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader. According to USA Today (hat tip @BryanAlexander), instead of checking out books, from now on Cushing’s students will check out Kindles, pre-loaded with the books they require. Interesting, but I can’t help thinking it’d make more sense to give each kid a Sony Reader or Barnes & Noble Nook and have them download the books they need themselves. Many—if not most—of the book high schoolers need are in the public domain and available on the Sony and B&N devices as free EPUBs from Google Books.

Ubuntu 9.10 — The latest release of the Ubuntu Linux distribution (Version 9.10 “Karmic Koala”) is now available for download. Among the new goodies: 2 GB of free online file storage for syncing through Ubuntu One. I know what I’m doing this weekend.

Verizon Droid, Android 2.0, and Why Early Adopters May Get Burned — Anyone who has read this blog or listened to the Digital Campus podcast knows that I’m an Android fan and optimist. I know I should be cheering the release of the Motorola Droid for Verizon, which—with the help of Android 2.0—looks like it’ll give the iPhone a run for its money. Unfortunately, it looks like the original Android phone, the T-Mobile G1, of which I am a proud (if not always 100% satisfied) owner, may not be able to run the 2.0 version of Android. I understand the importance of improving the Android experience to attract converts, but early adopters should see those improvements as well as the newcomers. Burning your loyal user base doesn’t seem good business. Then again, maybe the Android folks know that many of us will just suck up the extra couple hundred bucks to break our contracts to get our hands on the slick new hardware.

Continuing this week’s media blitz . . .

The folks at the Center for History and New Media have, at their extreme peril, invited me to be an “irregular” on the Digital Campus podcast (think of a shirt that is discounted because it’s missing a button). This week, I joined Dan Cohen, Mills Kelly, Tom Scheinfeldt, and fellow irregular Bryan Alexander (Research Director for NITLE) in an episode entitled “Theremin Dreams.”

We’re pleased to announce that five MCN 2009 sessions will be webcast live, free of charge. MCN 2009 takes place week after next in Portland, Oregon. While we urge everyone who is interested to register and attend the conference in person as the only way to engage with its full array of workshops, sessions, events, exhibitors, and networking opportunities, we know that some are unable to do so because of especially acute funding issues this year.

If you can’t be with us at the conference, we hope these webcasts may enable you still to benefit from some of its knowledge sharing. If you find this useful, we encourage you to join MCN to help support these efforts for the wider community.

The webcasts will be on Thursday and Friday, November 12 and 13. We’ll use Twitter to harvest online questions during Q&A in those sessions, which are:

Museum Data Exchange

Tweets to Sweeten Collaborations for Archives, Libraries, and Museums

Libraries, Archives, and Museums: From Collaboration to Convergence

Ramping Up while Scaling Down: Strategic Innovation in Challenging Times

2009 Conference Roundup Roundtable

http://www.mcn.edu/mcn2009online has more information.
The short URL http://bit.ly/mcn09oL leads to the same page.

Please plan to join us online even if you can’t join us onsite!

Rob Lancefield (President, MCN)

1. I completed the entire draft manuscript. I'm currently slowly uploading the new text to the wiki, and it will all be there for you to review, edit, and explore by the end of this week.
2. I've retained Jennifer Rae Atkins, superlative graphic lady, to create the cover art and illustrations for the book.
   
3. The current schedule is to complete content development by the end of the year, copy-edit and layout in January, and go into final layout and production in February. You should be able to hold a book in your hand in March 2010.
   

1. Interactive activities, including an opening workshop with a group of designers associated with an extremely wonderful exhibition called Doing it for the Kids featuring sustainable toy designs. Participants sewed sock aliens, injection-molded army men, constructed robots, and drew animals. We also ended the entire event with one of my favorite exercises, the Exquisite Corpse game, in which participants co-created comics of their craziest museum dreams.
   
2. "Wild idea" sessions, featuring six dream projects, some already in motion, others firmly ensconsed in their creators' heads. Folks from the Utah Museum of Natural History, Worcester City Museum, Manchester Art Gallery, Centre for Life, Netherlands Architecture Institute, and the Knowledge Media Research Center (Germany) brought projects they wanted to make happen, and each worked with a group of about 10 other participants for about four hours over the course of the two days to work out plans and ideas to move the projects along. The projects ranged from activating a dead collection to developing a mystery game around a strange artifact to developing a hackerspace to planning for massive changes to institutions new and old. Click any link above to see the video from the initial pitch and final report from each group.
   
3. Unconference sessions, featuring topics as diverse as "playing an ARG" (with real labyrinth adventures), "engaging visitors who were dragged to the museum," and "measuring and defining success in participatory projects." We only did two rounds of these, but they were very active and I think a lot of people were surprised to find them so useful even though they were organized on the spot.
   
4. Facilitator bits. I gave an hour-long talk about participatory design practices (video here), and Jim gave a small tour of an exhibition he had organized nearby. We also had quite an extensive reporting-out session at the end with the Wild Idea session leaders sharing what they had learned and where they would go next. I was thrilled to frequently hear, "I started out thinking X, but my group convinced me Y."

1. Vary the activities. I like to incorporate talking, writing, and doing/making into workshops. This both breaks up the time and supports participants who feel most comfortable expressing themselves in different ways. By varying activities, you can involve everyone without putting quieter participants on the spot--instead, you find the activity where they shine. This started for me when I worked with a group that included some very vocal and very quiet folks - we used worksheets to balance out the skills and avoid always favoring the big talkers. And I'm a really active person, itchy if sitting too long, so I like to add in some physical exercises to get people moving (and, where reasonable, engaging with visitors). If you need a source for good activities, there's a world of training methodologies on the web.
   
2. Give a schedule and list of target goals, even if you don't entirely stick to it. People like to feel that they are making progress, and if you can "check things off the list" as a group, it helps everyone stay focused and motivated.
3. If you are working for several hours, slot it over two days. In my experience, one-day brainstorming sessions for new projects leave some people a bit uneasy because it moves so quickly. They feel like things are getting "decided" before they can really think things through. Sleeping on it often brings people back on day two focused, confident, and ready to work. At MuseumNext, we used this model, and while many people left on the first night in some form of despair, they were amazed at how everything came together on day two. I've seen this bear out in many kick-off meetings for projects, and that's why if you call me about a one-day workshop, I'll probably ask for two.
   
4. Always start and end with something creative. This may reflect my bias towards doing, but I find that if you get people doing something a bit silly, they get out of normal patterns and hangups and are more willing to think broadly. Also, how people feel at the beginning and end of a workshop significantly impacts how they feel about the overall event. At MuseumNext, these creative bits were the design workshop and the Exquisite Corpse activity, but I've done everything from social games to zombie yoga (seriously).

How and why do a critical mass of people adopt new technologies such as virtual worlds or the Theremin? That’s just one of the issues we discuss on a freewheeling podcast featuring another two “irregulars,” Steve Ramsey and Bryan Alexander. The news roundup includes an analysis of the Nook and the Droid, among other oddly-named devices, and an exploration of what real-time search could do for researchers.

Running time: 54:10
Download the .mp3

My undergraduate student intern has completed her installation of photographs from the first days of the Berlin Wall in a show she calls Halt! Grenze. She did fantastic work and the show is generating a fair amount of foot traffic already. Her show is part of a larger effort called Freedom Without Walls, sponsored by the German Embassy.

Speaking to my student today just before her show’s opening, it was clear that the internship accomplished everything that it should have. She gained a much greater understanding of a whole variety of issues related to both history and art history (we’re a combined department here at Mason). When I asked her what she thought was the most important thing she learned, she said it was the complexity of copyright issues in our two fields, particularly with respect to digital matters. Who knew that an internship in art history could end up helping a student learn a lot about copyright and fair use?

Needless to say, I’m very proud of my student and am already thinking about what new internships I can come up with. If you haven’t taken on an intern for this sort of one-on-one scholarly work, I highly recommend it as an alternative to the standard independent reading that is so ubiquitous in history departments around the country.

FOLLOWING the surgical removal of a body part, amputees often report sensations which seem to originate from the missing limb. This is thought to occur because the brain's model of the body (referred to as the body image) still contains a representation of the limb, and this leads to the experience that the missing limb is still attached to their body. Occasionally, amputees say that they cannot move their phantom limbs - they are perceived to be frozen in space, apparently because they cannot be seen.

Yet, research shows that the body image is malleable and easily manipulated. And according to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, phantom limbs can be altered by internal brain mechanisms alone. The study shows that some amputees can make their phantom limbs defy the anatomical constraints of the physical body, using visual imagery to make them perform movements which could not possibly be performed by a real limb.

A “team of pretty cool people” in Chicago are twittering and blogging under the name ‘Museumist’. “Putting the Museum World on Display” is their motto. We’ll twue them for infringing our precious trade marks (Museionist on Twitter and Biomedicine on Display) :-)