Museum 2.0

MAY 21, 2014

I''ve now been the executive director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History for three years. We talk a lot at our museum about empowering our visitors, collaborators, interns, and staff by making space for them to shine. Participatory work can be very labor-intensive. Making co-creation sustainable and powerful.

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Museum Director History Teen 49

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JULY 1, 2009

Submitted by Nina Simon, publisher of Museum 2.0. I’ve had it with museums’ obsession with open-ended self-expression. When I talk about designing participatory experiences, I often show the above graphic from Forrester Research. And yet many museums are fixated on creators. This is a problem for two reasons.

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Participatory Experiment Museum Teen 50

Museum 2.0

APRIL 1, 2010

This is the final segment in a four-part series about writing The Participatory Museum. This posts explains why and how I self-published The Participatory Museum. COST: Museum books tend to be expensive - because they are printed in small runs, the price for a 400-page paperback can be as high as $40.

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Participatory Museum Process Adobe 33

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 18, 2013

This August/September, I am "rerunning" popular Museum 2.0 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. I''ve spent much of the past three years on the road giving workshops and talks about audience participation in museums.

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Museum Question Participatory Evaluation 45

Museum 2.0

MARCH 16, 2009

I’ve had it with museums’ obsession with open-ended self-expression. When I talk about designing participatory experiences, I often show the above graphic from Forrester Research. And yet many museums are fixated on creators. Museums see open-ended self-expression as the be-all of participatory experiences.

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Participatory Experiment Museum Teen 44

Tech Soup

JANUARY 20, 2012

Our ability to collaborate effectively in the cloud and create meaningful media together is quickly evolving as more nonprofits expand their borders. For Nonprofits Live on February 8th we will explore how to collaborate on video stories across borders and office boundaries. Guests for Nonprofits Live: Collaborative Video.

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Collaboration Storytelling Video Thailand 44

Museum 2.0

JANUARY 16, 2013

It's not every day that a visitor buys pizza for everyone in the museum. Then again, Saturday was hardly normal at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. The sheet gave people a lightweight tool to use in social interaction, to trade and share stamps. The museum itself was well-integrated into the event.

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Reflection Community Museum Participatory 43

Museum 2.0

MAY 29, 2013

At our museum, we''ve gotten better at communication up from the front desk to the office. I doubt this would be the perfect solution for every organization, but it really is amazing how quickly it has changed the nature of cross-institution communication at our museum. What tools do you use to stay connected behind-the-scenes?

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Facebook Museum Participatory Adopt 55

Museum 2.0

APRIL 25, 2011

I've spent much of the past three years on the road giving workshops and talks about audience participation in museums. The Museum 2.0 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.

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Question Participatory Museum Evaluation 49

Museum 2.0

FEBRUARY 5, 2008

I was fascinated by our discussion, and Bob came to mind last month, when I was asked to write an article for the Association of Children's Museums quarterly journal, Hand to Hand , about children's museums and Web 2.0. To understand more, I turned to Elaine Gurian's article The Molting of Children's Museums? Why the uniformity?

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Classroom Children Museum Model 22

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 23, 2018

This project wove together many different participatory threads. We commissioned new collaborative artwork. You can download it for free right now. What did we learn? We co-created it from start to finish with community partners. There were over 100 partners. We invited visitors to take real action in response to what they saw.

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Issue Childhood Community Create 45

Museum 2.0

DECEMBER 1, 2006

Ready to turn your institution into a site of participatory engagement? specializes in designing museum experiences and exhibitions that are community informed, socially stimulating, technologically ambitious, and intriguingly experimental. Want to bring the spirit of this blog to your colleagues and projects?

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Museum Professional Service Participatory 21

Museum 2.0

MARCH 4, 2009

Jane McGonigal and the folks from IFTF have released a new future-casting game/collaborative experience called Signtific Lab. In other words, a new kind of talkback board or participatory educational program. What excites me is that Signtific provides a very deliberate framework that prioritizes collaborative thinking and dialogue.

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Game Experiment Participatory Museum 24

Museum 2.0

JULY 10, 2018

The museum was in huge financial trouble. My expertise was on inviting strangers to participate in public settings like museums. I had lots of creative formats for drawing people out, sharing stories, and working collaboratively. I had tools to achieve everything I wanted to achieve in that staff meeting.

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Hosting Arts Help Museum 31

Museum 2.0

JUNE 18, 2014

I got into museum work because learning happens in many places and many ways. What kinds of tools and media they can access. When we talk about embracing participatory experiences at non-professional levels, arts professionals often get worried that the best work will get drowned out in mediocrity.

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Arts Build United States Audience 47

Museum 2.0

OCTOBER 12, 2017

It was even more useful to learn how participatory writing visions can be. A SIMPLE WAY TO TRY IT This week, we experimented with visioning at my museum in an all-staff meeting. A small group volunteered to take this work forward to establish a shared vision we can then use to guide us to more collaboration in the coming months.

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History Pennsylvania Michigan Indiana 26

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 24, 2019

This month we’ve been thinking about “What is a museum?” (I'm I’ve been visiting museums my whole life. Does that make me the best judge of museums? People are the defining characteristics of museums. I’ve worked with and at plenty of museums that can sometimes feel empty. I'm not alone there.

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Museum Place Life Ohio 36

Museum 2.0

AUGUST 25, 2009

We don't have the same limitations when designing talkback stations and other physical platforms for conversation, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't intentionally design the conversational tools offered. This is the opposite situation of the previous design goal, one typical in science and children's museums.

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Design Goal Difference Platform 31

Museum 2.0

JULY 2, 2009

How would you design a recommendation system for a museum? Recommendation systems are tools that offer suggestions, most commonly in the "if you like that, you'll love this!" When it comes to museums, recommendation systems are a natural solution for the problem of the customized tour.

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System Design Movie Museum 22

Museum 2.0

JUNE 12, 2009

In almost all cases, museums assure me that they want to be in conversation, that they want to be responsive, that they want to “really hear” what people think. Sadly, it was the second story that was about a museum. This afternoon, they issued a lengthy collaborative statement. Is this a research project? Is it a conversation?

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Conversation Museum Artist Minneapolis 21

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 8, 2008

Today, the Luce Center at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) is launching what they claim is the first ever alternate reality game (ARG) in a museum. Why would an art museum create an ARG? And the "stuff" of the game is real stuff, artifacts created by players and sent to the museum. To expand their audiences.

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Game Museum Arts Alternative 20

Museum 2.0

JUNE 6, 2008

On June 4, we opened The Tech Virtual Test Zone , a new 2000 sq ft gallery at The Tech Museum of Innovation featuring exhibits on the theme of art, film, and music that were originally developed in Second Life by a community of creative amateurs. Some museum pros have been puzzled by this.

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Virtual Tech Lesson Develop 21

Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 24, 2014

Inspired by Stacy, I wanted to share some of the work we are doing at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History to clarify what we mean by engagement. In early 2014, we developed a set of five engagement goals: Relevant, Sustainable, Bridging, Participatory, Igniting. Expands opportunities for deeper engagement beyond the museum.

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Goal Museum Evaluation History 48

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

DECEMBER 15, 2006

principles that has turned the web from pushed to participatory. Maybe for nonprofits, it is in the marketing area, where taking people into your world makes sense or for museums. There are better and more efficient channels for collaboration, conference calls for one. way to the future?

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Museum 2.0

SEPTEMBER 11, 2008

s Hawaiian son as applied to museums. While there are some criticisms of its consensus-based model for information-vetting, there's no doubt of its success as a collaborative knowledge-creation project. Consider these two stories of museum-related wikis that struggled. But wikis are a very specific tool. What's a wiki?

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Wiki Wikipedia Museum Doc 23

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

FEBRUARY 13, 2007

I personally want to move away from the metaphor of making movies of the computer screen to more shoulder-to-shoulder instructional media and perhaps something that is more participatory or for lack of a better word, social. Set up everyone with a bookmarklet tool and show them how to use it. Tagging in Art Museums. and then ???buzz

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Screencast Instruction Instructional Tag 50

Museum 2.0

JUNE 29, 2010

We share an abiding interest in exploring the community-enhancing roles of libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs), especially in terms of the practice of hospitality and service within the institution. Nina's research keeps finding that the right kind of constraints work to produce a better participatory museum experience.

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Place Discussion Library Museum 30

Museum 2.0

MARCH 6, 2019

While I originally wrote this post to advocate for more participatory practice (i.e. letting museum visitors contribute and collaborate in museums), I now see this as a crucial issue also for more democratic and inclusive practice (i.e. Other person: "But doesn't that erode museums' authority?" Me: "Sort of."

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Authoring Share Museum YouTube 44