MoMA and YouTube

MoMA reaches out to the YouTube network with The Residents: The River of Crime,
an online community art project October 19–23, 2006. It’s over but you can still view the short films at the following places:

On YouTube.com
The Residents and NY Museum of Modern Art present a Community Art Project

At MoMA.org
The Residents and MoMA’s River of Crime online community art project

Interesting to note that only one of the 6 winners is from the USA, a community art project used to signify something small, initimate and local. Taking it online now makes such a project massively accessible but strangely it still retains that intimacy factor. I guess that’s what makes some (not all) UGC (user generated content) so engaging. 

Test site

MetalOriginally uploaded by man_is_cargo.

Oh how I wish I could slide down Carsten Holler’s Test Site at the Tate Modern in London. Some things you just can’t do online. Also I love how easy it is to connect my Flickr network to my WordPress blog. The pic above was taken by a member of my Tate online Level 2 group – an extention of an online course we did on Tate online.

Flickr game

I didn’t know that Flickr came out of the design of an MMOG (massively multiplayer online game) called Game Neverending. In an interview with Jesse James Garrett, Eric Costello, one of the Ludicorp team who developed Flickr, talked about these origins.

It wasn’t an immersive environment at all. It had interfaces that were really like Web interfaces or desktop application interfaces. The mode of interaction between users was in IM [instant Messaging] windows……We did a couple of things in the UI that were kind of neat, I think. You had IM windows where you could drag a person from your contacts list into any chat window and it would invite them to join your conversation. You could also drag game objects into an IM conversation and it would send to all the other members of the chat an image of the object. So it was a way that you could share the things you found in this world with the people around you.

That feature was where the idea for Flickr came from. We thought, what if instead of game objects, you could drag and drop other digital objects into these conversations, like Word documents, or PDFs? Photos were the natural thing to go with because they’re more visual.

These ‘conversational’ origins have served Flickr’s ongoing development well in that there is hardly any ‘usability testing’, as developments happen they are sent out to users for feedback. Eric Costello says that the Flickr team provided spaces for conversation to happen then listened and learned from ‘…People talking to each other about the site [and] people talking directly to us about the site.’

If Museums are connected to a strong and influential community such as Flickr’s then the feedback they could potentially receive to various initiatives would surely be invaluable, not to mention the turn around for on acting on that feedback much quicker than it is now. 

Another interesting point that arises here is that Flickr was an idea that started as something completely different. There is a wonderful potential for the connections and conversations that museums have with their visitors via sociable technologies to inspire new learning opportunities not yet envisaged…..we are heading into new territory.

museums 1.0 to 2.0 (part 2)

Have just been re-reading a post on the connectivism blog about learning ecologies which discusses a presentation to a group of museum professionals on connectivism and learning ecologies. The following par nicely sums up why it is a good idea for museums to explore decentralisation of their online content.

… A general concern appeared to be the desire to get people to use virtual museum resources.

I think this is the wrong question. People don’t want to visit your content. They want to pull your content into their sites, programs, or applications. This is a profound change, largely not understood by educators. We are still fixated on the notion of learning content, and we think we are making great concessions when we give learners control over content (and start to see them as co-creators). That misses the essence of the change: learners want control of their space. They want to create the ecology in which they function and learn. Today, it’s about pulling content from numerous sites and allowing the individual to repurpose it in the format they prefer (allowing them to create/recognize patterns). Much like the music industry had to learn that people don’t want to pay for a whole album when all they want is one song, content providers (education, museums, and libraries) need to see the end user doesn’t want the entire experience – they want only the pieces they want. We need to stop thinking that learners will come to us for learning content – our learning content should come to them in their environment.

View the presentation at http://www.elearnspace.org/media/CHIN/player.html

Powerhouse folksonomy

What does folksonomy mean? Wikipedia (Revision as of 14:20, 20 October 2006) defines it as follows: 

The term folksonomy is a portmanteau that specifically refers to the tagging systems created within Internet communities. A combination of the words folk (or folks) and taxonomy, the term folksonomy literally means “people’s classification management”: “Taxonomy” is from the Greek taxis and nomos. Taxis means “classification” and nomos (or nomia) means “management,” while “Folk” is from the Old English folc, meaning people.

If we contribute meaning to objects by naming them in a personally meaningful way then surely the curatorial gap between ‘us’ the visitor and ‘them’ the museum begins to close. The Powerhouse Museum has recently launched a collection database which allows users to just that, create personally meaningful descriptions of any of the objects within it.

The Fresh+New post Taxonomies of Tagging directed me to the paper ‘HT06, Tagging Paper, Taxonomy, Flickr, Academic Article,ToRead’ which lists possible incentives for users to contribute tags:

• Future retrieval
• Contribution and sharing
• Attract attention
• Play and competition
• Self Presentation
• Opinion expression

National Museums online learning project

Project Summary

Introduction

This £1.7m project has been developed by 10 national museums and galleries (British Museum, Imperial War Museum, National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Natural History Museum, Royal Armouries, Sir John Soane’s Museum, Tate, Victoria and Albert Museum, Wallace Collection) and is a 3 year project, funded by the Invest to Save Initiative from the Treasury.

Summary

The purpose of the project is to get the vast amount of content already on these ten national museum and gallery websites better used.   We do not intended to create a new website or digitise more objects. Instead the project will focus on using existing databases, articles and functionality to encourage users to engage critically and creatively with museum and gallery collections.   Some tools and further functionality will be created to encourage this process. The target audiences for the project are schools and lifelong learners.

http://www.vam.ac.uk/about_va/online_learning/index.html 

del.icio.us Powerhouse

Fresh+new post Simple example of web 2.0 in a museum describes how the Preservation Department are sending up to date content out to the general public via del.icio.us.

Preservation get a lot of enquiries from the general public and also from small regional museums about preservation techniques. We needed quick and low-tech, dial-up friendly solution to offering the best and up-to-date information on preservation methods.

Traditionally this sort of issue would have been resolved with fact sheets and perhaps a static set of links. Both of these solutions would be time consuming but worst of all, ‘finished’ when they went online – and probably not updated for several years.

Using a del.icio.us account communally shared amongst the Preservation Department staff, staff can all bookmark websites of use to the public in answer questions about ‘how do I preserve . . . ‘. Each site is tagged with the type of object that it refers to.

From Tate online to Flickr

I have just finished an online course ‘Introduction to Modern and Contemporary Art’ Level 2, a closed course through Tate online . To keep the conversation going Tate online Level 2 has been set up as a public Flickr group. This is a good example of how we don’t really want to stop learning just because the course has ended. Sociable technologies make it a realistic option for learners to continue discussing their interests beyond the formal learning opportunities offered by museums.

Museum 1.0 to 2.0

Museums as Sources of Information and Learning
The decision making process
by Lynda Kelly

Lynda Kelly writes:

Much has been written about the educational and learning role of museums (Falk and Dierking, 1992, 1995, 2000; Hein, 1998; Hooper-Greenhill, 1994) and their roles in community development and access (Gurian, 1995, 2001; Kelly and Gordon, 2002). Yet, in this increasingly rich and complex information age, less emphasis has been given to the roles that museums have as credible sources of information (Booth, 1998; Lake Snell Perry and Associates, 2001). Access to information and knowledge is probably at the greatest point now in our history than it has ever been. Therefore the resulting problems and stresses that this brings, coupled with how to actually use information are core issues that museums need to urgently address.

Further to this there is a view that museums need to move from being suppliers of information to facilitators, providing tools for visitors to explore their own ideas and reach their own conclusions. This is because increasing access to technologies, such as the Internet, ‘… have put the power of communication, information gathering, and analysis in the hands of the individuals of the world’ (Freedman, 2000: 299). In this sense, the museum needs to become a mediator of information and knowledge for a range of users to access on their own terms, through their own choice and within their own place and time, a ‘… multifaceted, outwardlooking role as hosts who invite visitors inside to wonder, encounter and learn’
(Schauble, et al., 1997: 3)

I would add to this by saying that Museums should now be looking at sending out content to users, it can start small like the Phm’s use of del.icio.us and grow into something bigger like the Brooklyn Museum use of MySpace and Flickr. As Mike Ellis of the Science Museum in London pointed out in a presentation to the UK Museums on the Web conference 2006 called Web 2.0 Why Museums are excited and scared all at the same time if museums don’t engage with sociable technologies to send out content then someone else will create the content under the museums name and it may not be in the way they want it. 

Museums connecting to e-Learning 2.0

The following paragraph is from the introduction of the very recent (16th October 2006)paper Learning Networks and Connective Knowledge by Steven Downes. It provides a view of how the Museum and the Museum visitor connect to create the conversation network sociable technologies enable.

The purpose of this paper is to outline some of the thinking behind new e-learning technology, including e-portfolios and personal learning environments. Part of this thinking is centered around the theory of connectivism, which asserts that knowledge – and therefore the learning of knowledge – is distributive, that is, not located in any given place (and therefore not ‘transferred’ or ‘transacted’ per se) but rather consists of the network of connections formed from experience and interactions with a knowing community. And another part of this thinking is centered around the new, and the newly empowered, learner, the member of the net generation, who is thinking and interacting in new ways. These trends combine to form what is sometimes called ‘e-learning 2.0′ – an approach to learning that is based on conversation and interaction, on sharing, creation and participation, on learning not as a separate activity, but rather, as embedded in meaningful activities…

Later in the same paper he outlines in point form George Siemans Connectivism thesis:

• Learning and knowledge rests in diversity of opinions.

• Learning is a process of connecting specialized nodes or information sources.

• Learning may reside in non-human appliances.

• Capacity to know more is more critical than what is currently known

• Nurturing and maintaining connections is needed to facilitate continual learning.

• Ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill.

• Currency (accurate, up-to-date knowledge) is the intent of all connectivist learning activities.

• Decision-making is itself a learning process. Choosing what to learn and the meaning of incoming information is seen through the lens of a shifting reality. While there is a right answer now, it may be wrong tomorrow due to alterations in the information climate affecting the decision. (Downes, 2006)

When I read this I visualised the Museum as a huge knowledge planet that attracts smaller planets like the Museum visitor into it’s orbit which it then nourishes and is in turn nourished by.  The key is to not only find ways in which to open up the Museum’s knowledge resources online but for the Museum to find ways of sending it’s knowledge out to us the visitor. The Brooklyn Museum is trying to do exactly this by having a presence on MySpace and Flickr….I’ll have to search out other examples.

Reference:
Downes, S. (October, 2006) Learning Networks and Connective Knowledge. http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=36031 Accessed 12th October 2006