Compassion+Systems in Place+Timeliness=Community Impact In the midst of the international outpouring of support and sympathy for the victims of the two bombs that went off near the finish line of the Boston Marathon on April 15,2013, what role did museums, especially Boston museums, play in their beleaguered community? As readers of Museum Commons know, I…
See my guest post on Adrianne Russell’s blog Cabinet of Curiosities . Adrianne is doing a series of posts on campus museums, and I contributed my thoughts on university museums’ advantages and challenges in mounting controversial exhibitions.If this post is being sent to you by email and you would like to subscribe or add a comment,…
Utility, Ubiquity, Unselfishness A few months ago Neal Stimler, media visionary and digital specialist at the Met in New York, spoke on The Commons and Digital Humanities. “Utility, Ubiquity, Unselfishness,” he said, must be the qualities for the future of the digital humanities. In this post I’d like to acknowledge just these characteristics in…
In a series of posts over the past year on next steps for museum educators, I’ve expressed disappointment at the over-identification of museum learning resources and experiences with the methods of formal education – too many lesson plans, tests and reading assignments–all of which are fine in themselves but not our forte. One promising trend in …
A little background… Museum maker spaces—either permanent installations or public programs—are all the rage right now, at least in the U.S. Picking up on the popular Maker Faire phenomenon launched by MAKE Magazine in San Mateo, CA in 2006, museums are moving to create hands-on tinkering and innovation spaces that reflect the…
Dear readers, I’m working hard on an upcoming post, and it’s taking me more time than I anticipated to think this one through. In the meantime, fellow blogger Jamie Glavic has begun a series called “Meet a Museum Blogger” on her Museum Minute blog. She sent a variety of questions to answer, and uses these to create a…
…always a museum person. This will be a short post in the midst of holiday activities, but I was inspired to write after having lunch with a longtime museum friend and colleague, Caryl Marsh. Caryl’s work has had a profound impact on contemporary museums. Along with educator Judy White, Caryl was in the forefront…
This post, the fourth in a series on what’s next for museum educators, proposes the mastery of interpretive planning, a process that shapes what is still the central role of most museums – exhibition development and display. Interpretive Planning on the Institutional Level “Interpretive planning” is a fairly elastic term in the museum context. In…
I’m interrupting the series of posts I’d planned on next steps for museum educators to reflect a bit about Superstorm Sandy and museums. A few days after the storm, I saw a notice from the New York Public Library that it was working to re-establish power in all of its branches, and as each one opened,…
In my first two posts regarding what’s next for museum educators (September 17 and October 1) I promised to take a look at some of the skills educators should be cultivating so that they can contribute more effectively to the museum’s role as an informal space for learning and engagement. It happens that I’ve been talking with Allison Wickens, an energetic…