The Museum-Ed Blog

In Part 2 of our technology session at the National Art Education Association Museum Education Pre-Conference, Marla Shoemaker, Senior Curator of Education at the Philadelphia Museum of Art shared some experiences in Philadelphia with cell phone audio tours that exemplify changes in audio tour delivery devices that have come about in the past couple of years. The Philadelphia Museum of Art contracts with Antenna Audio for audio tours, but has been conduction experiments in alternate audio tour methods over the past year.

Their first experiment was for a special exhibition audio tour – Mexican and Modern Printmaking: A Revolution in the Graphic Art. While this traveling show was a big exhibit is smaller museums, it was a small exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and seemed well suited for the first ever cell phone tour at the museum. The audio was created in-house at no cost, and narrated by a curator. Twelve audio stops were produced, with an introduction by the museum’s director and stops about specific works of art in the exhibit. No music or effects were included, because the audio quality on a cell phone sounds like a cell phone – music or other effects add to the noise and obscure the voice. One feature of a cell phone audio tour is that the public can leave messages on the system, just like leaving a voice mail. Feedback on the tour included several positive responses, including a visitor who pointed out that you can listen to the stops anywhere at anytime, not just in the museum. This visitor was doing exactly that, listening again to the cell phone stops at home, an advantage he thought was great.

You can listen to the Mexican and Modern Printmaking audio stops by dialing 215-525-1673 and entering numbers 1 through 12, each followed by the # sign.

It’s acknowledged that museums seldom earn any income from traditional audio tours of permanent collections, spending far more money to lease, staff, update and maintain the equipment necessary to provide the audio tours than can be recouped in fees paid by visitors. Museums do sometimes make money on special exhibition audio tours, especially if they are able to build equipment costs into fees visitors pay to attend the special exhibit. Cell phone audio tours can’t currently compete with the audio quality offered by wands or MP3 players, but they can be easy to produce and there are no equipment costs for the museum. Leasing fees, staffing costs, and maintenance problems disappear.

Philadelphia did produce a two-sided brochure for the Mexican and Modern Printmaking cell phone audio tour that explained to users how to dial the tour, but quickly discovered it wasn’t necessary. People know how to use their own phones, another great advantage of cell phone tours. When people bring their own devices, Philadelphia Museum discovered, there’s no need to provide user support in the form of staff or even printed material. Just provide a phone number and the visitors will take it from there.

The museum’s second experiment involved a special installation of Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic. In a huge civic effort over 2,000 individuals contributed to the purchase of this painting – at a cost of $68 million. But the installation didn’t answer the question: what makes it a masterpiece worth saving? Knowing visitors might be loathe to read a lengthy text label on the subject, the museum chose a cell phone audio stop to allow the curator of American Art to address the question. The curator takes such a conversational tone and is so enthusiastic about the painting that it feels as if you’re calling her on the phone to ask her about the painting. Hear it for yourself by dialing 215-525-1673 and entering 100 followed by the # sign.

The Philadelphia Museum’s third experiment involved a permanent collection installation of the Constantine Tapestries, a set of tapestries that the museum knew a lot about. Putting all that information on text labels would have been like writing a book on the wall, but the audio tour takes advantage of users ability to pick and choose what they want to hear about with having to read a great deal of text. For example, using the same phone number as above, users can press 472 followed by the # sign to hear the story of Constantine and Fausta illustrated on one of the tapestries, or press 482 followed by the # sign to hear the answer to the question: what is a tapestry? Or press 483 followed by the # sign to hear about the tapestries were made. Or listen to all of it!

Cell phone audio tours have a numbers advantage over traditional audio tours. Caller i.d. on most people’s phones (very few cell phone users have this feature blocked) provides all kinds of data about how cell phone tours are used and who is using it, an impossibility with traditional audio tour delivery devices like wands or MP3 players. Using a standard Web browser Marla was able to demonstrate the statistics returned on the use of cell phone audio tours at Philadelphia. The statistics displayed the number of times each stop was phoned, as well as area codes that indicate where people came from (or where they acquired their cell phone number) and even displayed the users on a map.

Cell phone audio tours don’t typically follow a prescribed route, conducting a tour like an audio-only docent. Cell phone tours typically are constructed for “snacking” on content. Peter Samis, Associate Curator, Interpretation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), points out that visitors typically want more information when they are standing in front of the object in question, not when they are at home preparing to leave for the museum and remembering to download the tour to their iPod, and not when they are standing at the admissions point to the museum, considering whether or not to rent the audio guide. One of the questions the Philadelphia Museum of Art has been grappling with is whether cell phone tours will co-exist with other types of audio tours in the future. Currently it seems that older visitors who want linear tours are happy to take the traditional audio tour while younger visitors with cell phones are pleased to use them to access content. Whether cell phones remain the preferred device is another question museum staff is considering. Podcasts and iPods, or PDAs seem popular considerations in the world of museum content creators, but will they last?

Marla Shoemaker, Senior Curator of Education at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and I gave a breakout session last week on technology at the Museum Education Division pre-conference of the National Art Education Association’s annual meeting. We thought we’d reproduce it here for the benefit of everyone who couldn’t attend the pre-conference, as well as follow-up for those who were there.

The pre-conference theme “Change,” was well suited for our New Orleans location. In keeping with the theme Marla and I talked about how technology has evolved in the past five to ten years, focusing on museums and educational use of the Web and museum audio tours, two areas that have undergone significant change.

We started with a definition of Web 2.0, gleaned from the man who coined the term, Tim O’Reilly. While everyone agrees that there’s no one definition of Web 2.0, O’Reilly has an article on his Web site that sheds considerable light on the topic: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

Several areas of O’Reilly’s meme map (on the Web site) were singled out for the purposes of our discussion. The right to remix is at the heart of user created and saved collections of museum content. ArtsConnectEd http://www.artsconnected.org was an early leader in this movement with its Art Collector tool, allowing users, mostly teachers, to remix the collections at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and Walker Art Center and annotate their Art Collector creations in ways that serve their students.

Trusting your users, another attribute of O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 has in many ways transformed the way we think about museum Web sites, from social tagging to teachers contributing content that not only serves other teachers but helps museums understand what teachers want and need from online museum resources. Another attribute: small pieces loosely joined, is demonstrated in the way the Museum-Ed Web site is constructed, which we’ll look at later in the presentation.

Another definition Marla and I thought would be useful is a definition of “interactive.” This word gets tossed around a lot in museum technology, but as educators we instinctively understand that interactive means much more than pushing a button. A definition we like comes from a Futurelab report by Roy Hawkey on Learning with Digital Technologies in Museums: Something that is truly interactive has “clear educational objectives which encourage individuals or groups of people working together to understand objects or phenomena through exploration which involves choice and initiative.” www.futurelab.org.uk/resources/documents/lit_reviews/Museums_Galleries_Review.pdf

To start off our discussion about change and the education components of museum Web sites, we examined the past construction of museum Web sites by anyone in the museum who knew some HTML. Since the Web was so new to everyone, and especially art museums who joined the digital revolution a little late in the game, many museum Web sites were constructed without rules and institutional policy. Since that time, a lot has changed.. Today , most museum Web sites are fully institutionalized, with formal policy and procedure that often represents a brick wall to educators. In the beginning it was easy to put educational resources online, since museums had few rules about what belonged on the Web and what didn’t. Today, educators are forced to stand in line at the door of the museum Webmaster, often behind marketing, and their additions to Web site content is scrutinized and prioritized with the same procedures that printed material like gallery guides receive.

To help address these kinds of obstacles, sites like ArtsConnectEd are being designed to put control of museum generated online educational content in the hands of the museum educator. The original ArtsConnected viewed its audience as teachers, and they continue to be its main users outside the museums. The new ArtsConnectEd recognizes that another important and powerful group of users exist inside the museum – museum educators are the main generators of educational content. The ArtsConnectEd redesign will contain tools that allow museum educators at both museums to contribute content to ArtsConnectEd as easily as teachers currently use ArtsConnectEd tools. The project can be tracked on the development Web site at http://ace2.artsconnected.org/

Another example discussed was the Walters Art Museum‘s adoption of Pachyderm to solve another problem many museums face in the changing world of Web site development. Art museums often hire outside companies to design Web sites, only later to discover that those same companies need to charge money beyond the original project budget to change things on the sites. Worse, many museums discover that the outside companies have kept the original files so that museums don’t have access to their own material if they acquire technical staff capable of making changes. Pachyderm is an open-source multimedia authoring tool designed for people who have little or no multimedia authoring experience. Developed by SFMOMA, the New Medium Consortium and funded by a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), Pachyderm allows museum educators to easily develop modular and updateable multimedia educational experiences. Since Pachyderm is open source, it’s freely available and users generating improvements contribute them back to the community.

The Walters Art Museum is using Pachyderm to develop their educational curriculum unit Integrating the Arts: Mummies, Myths and Madonnas http://www.thewalters.org/pachydermpubs/ The program is built in Pachyderm by outside content developers and delivered in modules to the Walters, who have Pachyderm installed on their museum server. Walters staff can change and update material on the Integrating the Arts Web site without any special technical know-how beyond a couple of hours of training in using Pachyderm. To learn more about Pachyderm, go to http://pachyderm.nmc.org/ where the New Media Consortium offers hosted accounts and trials of Pachyderm. The Pachyderm user community can be tracked on the Pachyforge site at http://www.pachyforge.org/ The Pachyderm software is available for free at http://sourceforge.net/index.php for download and installation, although it’s recommended that museums without technical staff wait for the new Pachyderm version 2.1 due out this summer.

The Museum-Ed Web site is powered by another open source software called Joomla. Joomla is essentially a system for managing content that results in a standard Web page with a lot of potential add-ons. The Museum-Ed Web site’s use of Joomla means it’s easy to update by anyone. In addition, Museum-Ed uses a separate software to power its list serv, talk@museum-ed.org, blog software to produce the content you’re reading right now, and a flickr pool to display photo portraits of museum educators (http://www.flickr.com/photos/8246209@N05/). All of these pieces are easily integrated into Joomla. If you remember the Web 2.0 attribute: “small pieces loosely joined” from the beginning of this blog, you can see how the Museum-Ed Web epitomizes that characteristic.

Open source software like Joomla has the potential to return the Web to its original, anyone-can-do-it spirit. One potential museum application is docent Web sites. Many museum educators recognize the need to create Web sites to serve their docent audience, and tools like Joomla make it possible for museum educators to do it themselves, circumventing the red tape that makes it hard to create a new Web site within the political boundaries of the museum. You can learn more about Joomla at http://www.joomla.org/

In part two of this blog we’ll cover the changing landscape of museum audio tours.

Fiction, and reading in general, is getting more and more play in museums these days, and I am so glad for it. Maybe it’s just art museums but I am seeing more and more book clubs and discussion groups organized by and meeting at museums. The Walker Art Center here in Minneapolis has been doing this for a while, and I’ve seen others too, the Joselyn Art Museum has a book club for art lovers.

Partly inspired by all this reading, and partly because of my belief that if you are writing you ought to be reading, I invited my friend Nona Caspers to be our keynote speaker at the upcoming Museum-Ed online conference on interpretive writing. Nona’s book of short stories, Heavier Than Air, was published last year and won the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction in 2007. Before her book was published, Nona asked me to read one of the stories she wanted to include in the collection. When the manuscript arrived, I opened it and what I read took my breath away:

Mr. Lawrence Hellerman’s brain is yawning against the slick coat of drugs the psych nurses give him to sleep. His mind moves like a glacier sliding south, leaving odd deposits on the landscape: a shoe burning in the fire, the eyes of a deer like a trail of turds, work boots, hunting knives, bird feeders, then entrails of ducks and geese and quail. Squirrel bones. His father, Bernard, deaf, hairless, inebriated, slides out the side of the ice in a soft chunk; as soon as he’s gone Mr. Hellerman can open his eyes. But Mrs. Hellerman and their six children are still trapped in there: the firstborn wearing a peach graduation dress, the three boys hunched over cigarettes behind the barn, the youngest girl, the baby boy. The unborn are there too, at the very bottom, scraping against his cranium.

Great writing like this speaks the unimaginable, and great art imagines the unspeakable. What a magical marriage! I hope you’ll join us on February 20 and 21 to hear Nona read from her book and talk about writing from her perspective as a writer and teacher. And if you’d like to read Nona’s book you can get it here Read the rest of this entry »