The Museum-Ed Blog

I’ll start this entry with a confession:
I am addicted to blogs. Most of you will either be puzzled, laugh, or wonder how on earth anyone can have time for them. Truth is my family life brought me to them. For months on end my husband spent his life in time zones that made my evenings his days, so for us to connect I would be online during hours wherein I couldn’t really think too seriously. During those late nights while surfing the internet I found the blogs (first food, then political) within which news travels fast and communities can grow in exponential ways (now in the thousands of readers for the political blogs). Now with an RSS feeder, with responsibilities for teaching a museums and technology class, and with a seriously emerging blog community for museums (albeit in fits and starts) I remain a fan. When our museum community catches on to the benefits of blogs I believe they will grow.

Before going further I want to recommend that the best way to keep up with blogs not only saves time but also keeps you informed is to use an RSS feeder wherein the feeder site keeps track of updates to the blogs for you. Right now I am using bloglines (one of several options) and by logging onto one site I can easily keep track of all of the blogs related to museums. Bloglines lets me know what I have read already, and lets me choose which sites to track. This tool alone has made my blog life much more manageable.

Here just some of the things I believe blogs offer:

Immediacy: On the blogs current topics get attention immediately which gives the reading and writing community the chance to talk together about emerging ideas and what they mean for our lives. There is no publication delay.

Quality Archived Discussion: First the archive of discussions is useful and for high quality discussions, invaluable. All summer I have sent professionals who work in a variety of institutions to this site to view Kris Wetterland’s entry and the comment discussion on whether or not teachers actually use the lesson plans museum educators work so hard to create (see Museums Teachers and Lesson Plans). This level of commentary sometimes shows up through the museum-ed list serve, and I can go through the list-serve archive to later retrieve it, but I find it is easier to follow ideas through scrolling a blog. Besides, I can bookmark a blog entry and with one click return to it later with all of its comments gathered. Through the site bookmark I easily pass on the blog resource/discussion to a colleague.

Linked Resources: One of the best characteristics of blog writing is that thoughts can be supported with cited links, that with yet another simple mouse click the reader can also peruse. I have found many wonderful items that enrich my life and just outright expand my scope of understanding through the writing of bloggers. Links to background materials reveal the context of an author’s writing. The immediacy of reading these links cannot be underestimated. Think about it….when was the last time you actually bothered to go to a library to find that bibliographic citing at the end of a professional article? The web linking tools make our web based writing that much better, and frankly the web is trending as a better source for current information.

A Public Face: While I keep reading and am glad to see the issues trends through the list serve, on more than one occasion this community has asked for the findings to be posted to the list, and the information has never quite made it back into the public realm. Lots of discussions happen through private email exchange which when the content is private makes sense. On many occasions though, all of us want to get smarter about the topic but can’t due to the busy lives of the persons in the email exchanges. The posts and discussions on blogs are publicly held. The material offered can be just read, or if a reader is so inclined, commented upon, allowing for immediate challenges to and agreement with the content. The ease of adding thoughts and getting feedback makes writing take on a new dimension allowing it to become a conversation.

A Useful Tool: All of the above comments relate to how I enjoy blogs as a reader. Even more interesting to me is the potential for museum educators to use them for our own audiences. The most obvious use to me is for those of you who run volunteer programs. What a convenient way to post materials, to talk over challenges and successes in touring, to post requests for needs such as scheduling. It is easy to start a blog and essentially free if you go the blogger route. The hardest part is coming up with a name for one. Obviously, there are issues like spam and teaching your community polite commenting behavior; but, in general the advantages of providing a specific place for discussion about your program’s concerns far outweigh the relatively small hurdles.

A Community Builder: The best of the blogs I visit frequently have created communities of readers and writers. There already exists a good community here at museum-ed, I just believe that our blogs, with more entries, can strengthen our ties. So think about commenting, please. And, in the spirit of building this site, if any of you want to have a topic be a blog entry on this site please let me know through the following email address sspero AT jfku.edu or post your suggestion here. My area on this site is What Works, but I am willing to start a conversation through the blog about anything that will help us do our work better. I also plan on offering some future open threads.

And some examples:
Lastly, because I have spent time this past month looking at all sorts of blogs, here are just some of the sites I find fascinating and helpful as a museum educator. Start by going to MuseumBlogs, which is an aggregator site that now compiles new blog entries of over 70 sites that are related to museums up from a little over 60 just last month (just another indicator that is a dynamically changing environment.) Museum related blogs are catching on.

Glancing through the list on MuseumBlogs you will see a full range of material: Some blogs serve as an aggregator of automated information, other sites are fully designed and integrated with specific museum content; still others are professional reflections by consultants connected to the field; and finally, some are in-house museum efforts to use the medium for their own purposes. These sites are world-wide, are written in multiple languages, and are produced from multiple continents (I think I might try to use a translator to read the Russian site!).

There are several museum sites related to museums and technology such as Musematic, Museumblogging.com and a new favorite of mine out of Australia: Fresh + New. The Muse awards sponsored by AAM brought all of our attention to the work out of the Science Museum of Minnesota’s Science Buzz Blog, and of course the Walker Blogs is this museum’s multi-threaded site. A fun and simply brilliant use of the medium is the lovely Botany Photo of the Day that has become a favorite of the plant loving community (brilliant because it there is a daily post for those who care deeply about this subject, they have steadily built a community of readers). But there are others providing provocative comments as the anonymous writings on Mouseion. As you browse through MuseumBlogs you will see sites that are promising but apparently abandoned starts, such as the Dallas History Forum which offers 29 comments on its intitial topic of What is a Texas Hero, then essentially only offers one more blog entry.

Yet to be completely resolved is how blogs will sustain success within the museum community. My bottom-line sense is that this format will eventually be as ubiquitous as museum web pages since it is a convenient way to hold and keep public conversations.

I will leave you here to explore some more on your own. Please add to the comments section other examples of good blog sites, and or talk about what you think of blogs, and please report anything interesting about blogs happening in your own institution.