what will the museum of the future be like?

Informal learning, web 2.0 and museums

I gave a paper on this at the Social Media and Cultural Communication conference on 29 February. Basically the argument was that given:
* the principles of informal learning, constructivism and social media match very closely,
* museum visitors use these tools,
* visitors want to have more two-way interactions with museums, and
* the physical and on-line experiences are very closely linked, then
* why hasn't social media been taken up in greater numbers by museums??

My paper is attached to this post

Tags: 2.0, informal, learning, media, museums, social, web

Attachments:

Kelly Museum 3.0 paper.pdf, 44 KB

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Seb Chan on March 27, 2008 at 5:52am

I'd recommend reading Brownbill & Peacock's MW07 paper on segmenting museum web audiences. (http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/peacock/peacock.html). Their work is useful because it demonstrates the need to understand that online visitors come with a range of different intentions and motivations.

Definitely museum websites need to become more like platforms - indeed my personal feeling is that 5-10 years from now museums will likely only have a marketing-oriented website and have their collection and interactive content deployed to many other online platforms neither run by or controlled by the museum.

Whether museums themselves should be building the platforms is debatable. In my view we shouldn't. Instead we should be making our content usable in, on and by other platforms. Think of Facebook - it is like a bar. You go there because your friends are there, you accrue (or lose) cultural capital, social capital by being there. But then another cooler bar opens elsewhere, your friends move . . . Stretching this metaphor to breaking point then, museum websites shouldn't get in to the bar trade, instead they need to be the alcohol or the soft furnishings trade. Our content needs to be able to become the social lubricant or the backdrop to what is generally communicative and social motivations.

We've started seeing this with things like the Artshare application on Facebook, and, at a technical level in some of the work my team and others have been doing around API development (nothing really to *show*) whereby anyone can take content and repurpose elsewhere easily.

There's more to this than I'm going to squeeze in here - a future blog post will cover some other directions things are progressing though.

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Permalink Reply by Lynda Kelly on March 27, 2008 at 7:30am

Vaike - your research sounds very interesting and similar to what Angelina Russo and I have written about in our M&W 2008 paper. You can find that paper here.

Can you share more about what you are doing?

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Permalink Reply by Vaike Fors on March 27, 2008 at 7:42pm

Hi Lynda

Thank you for sharing your paper. From what I read in the abstract, it seems that we are at the moment struggling with the same type of issues.

Sorry to say, I haven't updated my website for a very long time. Instead, I have used a lot of time to update my new physical workplace here in Gothenburg. However, you can download my thesis "the missing link in learning in science centres" (2006) here:

http://epubl.ltu.se/1402-1544/2006/07/index.html

Vaike

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Permalink Reply by Vaike Fors on March 27, 2008 at 7:33pm

Thank you so much for sharing your ideas, I love your bar metaphor. Considering museums as alcohol, do you think one can have too much of the stuff? ;)

It would be interesting to hear more about how the museums' physical environment could be given form as a platform, and how this way of re-conceptualize the museum is experienced by visitors.

By the way, I had a meeting with Carol Scott at the Powerhouse when I was visiting Sydney in March last year. She told me that I should contact you, and here we are one year later!

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Permalink Reply by Des Griffin on March 27, 2008 at 1:37pm

There are two relevant articles in the latest issue of Museum Management and Curatorship (Vol 23, no 1 March 2008).

Museums and the culture of new media: an empirical model of New Zealand museum websites
David D.M. Mason and Conal McCarthy

Museum websites and museum visitors: digital museum resources and their use
Paul F. Marty

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Permalink Reply by Des Griffin on March 27, 2008 at 2:52pm

In the flurry of posts today I forgot to mention that there is a post on my site dealing with use of personal digital devices in the interpretation of art. "Visual Velcro and Interpretation in the Museum" summarises an article in the November/December 2007 issue of Museum News published by the American Association of Museums (p 57-62, 68-73) entitled “Visual Velcro: Hooking the Visitor”. Peter Samis, associate curator of interpretation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) develops a very interesting metaphor to describe the way visitors to museums engage with art. The article contains an excellent summary of the latest thinking about interpretation, especially the use of electronic devices such as audio guides, PDA’s and mobile phones. My summary is at http://desgriffin.com/2008/01/20/velcro/