New Orleans is home to this year's annual meeting of the American Association of Museums (AAM), and I'm happy to be reporting on location.  This blog will include some images and voice commentary about the AAM experience, with a special emphasis on what may be of interest to instructors.  Here's a brief audio message that I just recorded for you:

Great museums and educators share important and noble goals.  One of these is the creation of engaging experiences that transform a learner's own curiosity into an engine that powers that learner's own continued exploration and enlightenment.  This conference showcases some of the innovations and best practices from the museum world that achieve this goal.  Whether it be through hands-on exhibits or online acivities that even feel hands-on (see subsequent post), good museums are consummate story tellers and masters of engagement.  Let me show you some of the innovations and resources I found in my first few hours here that may spark some ideas in the education world.

But first,  for those who may not be familiar with the organization, a little background about AAM excerpted from their site:

The American Association of Museums (AAM) is "a national service organization representing the American museum community". AAM disseminates information on current standards and best practices and provides professional development for staff "to ensure that museums contribute to public education in its broadest sense and protect and preserve our cultural heritage". Since its founding in 1906, AAM has grown to more than 16,000 members, including more than 10,500 individual members, 2,500 corporate members, nearly 3,000 museums.

Ok, this one needs an audio blog post:



And some images:

This is me using a haptic device (in my right hand) to create a rather abhorrent looking piece of clay sculpture (on laptop screen).  The tool physically provides the user (me) with tangible feedback, so that one can sense the softness, rougness, smoothness or mushiness of the virtual material.  If you have ever played a current home video game or been to a modern arcade, you know what I am talking about.

The other aspect of this technology is a 3D scanner (the camera looking device on the tripod below) which allows one to gather enough data about about a 3D object to create a replica.  Although not present at the Expo, an additional device acts like a 3D printer, laying down topographical layers of, say, plastic to create a physical form.  In addition to creating replicas for consumer purchase at museum shops, the system can be used to record the condition of museum objects before they travel on the road or go on loan.  Imagine returning a priceless sculpture to its curator without the left arm it had when you borrowed it.  The 3-D record not only proves there was a left arm on this statue when you took possession of it, but also allows the museum to "print" a new arm which can be re-attached.

The people at the NSDL are doing a great service to educators.  But rather than hear about it from me, let's listen to Casey Jones (pictured at right in the image below),  of the "NSDL Core Integration" team:

I had a lovely conversation with Diana Folsom, Austen Barron Bailly and Rebecca Lachter, Ph.D. at the conference today. One of the topics we chatted about was how museum curators view the digital collections they make available to the public on the Web in relation to the physical collection (i.e. are the virtual versions of the object "primary source" materials, like their physical counterparts?) Let's listen in:

Diana Folsom is the outgoing Committee Chair of the AAM Media and Technology committee. She is also the Manager of Art & Education Systems at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Diana's main project at LACMA is "Collections Online".  Rebecca is the Project Manager for the Autry National Center's "Collections Online", part of the Museum of the American West. And Austen is assistant curator at LACMA.

Diana and I also talked about the submissions and winners of this year's MUSE awards, which recognize excellence in all varieties of media programs produced by or for museums. Last night was the 15th annual MUSE awards presentation. I asked Diana what the most significant differences were this year compared to past years in the nature of the submissions and projects submitted by Museums. Here's what she had to say:

Here are Diana, Rebecca and Austen:

This note from Diana Folsom, added May 12, 2004 at 6:44 EDT:

Diana Folsom writes: "[Collections Online] is the main project I work on at LACMA.  Both Rebecca and I use Mweb and collaborate between our two institutions to make the interface more robust.  Because she is working in a history museum, her focus is a little different than mine at an art museum.  We find that our interests and skills are complementary! 

Also, Austen is a curatorial assistant who is working with me on a Luce grant to place our American art catalogue online.  We have a first stage in the Collections Online site, and next year, when we finish putting the catalogue online, we hope it will be quite useful for educators.  But there is valuable material available already - check it out!"

I caught up with our friend Deborah Howes, Museum Educator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  I spoke on an AAM panel that Deb chaired two years ago when the conference was in Dallas.  That session was about what museums and universities can learn from each other in delivering effective distance-based learning.  Deb's been on a few of our webcasts in the past.  She and her team at the Met do outstanding work.  You might remember the Timeline of Art History, for example, which we featured in our hall of fame here in LearningTimes a while back.

Pictured here with Deb is David Schaller of Educational Web Adventures.  I will be joining both of them and others for lunch tomorrow here in New Orleans.

I immensely enjoyed the time I spent today with my new friends from the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (or "ATR").  ATR is a Japan-based organization that was established in 1986 with support from various sectors of industry, academia and government.  ATR works on promising research topics in telecommunications "in the search for better relationships between the information society and comfortable future human life".

One ATR initiative that one can't not find captivating is the "Augmented Composer Project".  It's designed to help people learn about and compose music.  In their words "it provides a tactile and visual representation of music that can be easily manipulated to make new musical patterns. It lets people experience their own music as patterns in musical space."

This is another one that you really have to see to comprehend (and even then, you might still be a bit bewildered).  Perhaps my experience as a magician doing card tricks prompted my additional level of interest here -- since music is composed through the use of a series of cards, dealt out on a table.  The addition of animated characters on a screen in front of you at first seems somewhat random (albeit quite cute), but then the animations start to emerge as functional elements in the composing of the music. 

Okay, you have to just see this for yourself: 

There's a QuickTime movie you can watch.  It's 32 MB, so dial-up users be warned.  It loaded quite quickly on my broadband connection here at the hotel.  Here it is:  http://www.mis.atr.co.jp/~mao/ac/movie_e.html.  It's worthwhile in widening one's perspective as to where we are headed with learning technologies -- zooming out to the big picture of innovation and reminding us the world we're moving towards holds promise beyond the power of web-connected learning.

Here are Dr. Toru Takahashi, Aya Takahashi and Aya Masuoka posing with handheld devices that are functioning as wireless museum guides -- another one of their current projects:

Snuck in a little exploring of New Orleans.  Here's a taste:

Jonathan:

Thanks too for the photos of New Orleans. They capture some of the unique ambience, history, music, and cooking that make New Orleans special.

In reading your blog I found myself drawing correlations between online museum and online learning initiatives. In the process I came up with a few more questions which I ask below. Thought I'd kind of pick your brain on this topic.

What are the top 5 online museum trends you saw/heard at AAM?

You mention that good museums are consummate story tellers and masters of engagement, are there some museum best practices that could translate into online learning best practices (and vice versa)?

Rather than converting a physical museum’s collection to online is anyone starting out deliberately creating just a online museum with no bricks and mortar facility?

Rather than collections made up of acquired works which are then made digital are any museums seeking to create collections made up of digital works that anyone can submit?

Rather than pre-packaging online experiences in advance is anyone inviting learners/the public to create their own online guided tours and collection interpretations?

The above posts were excerpted from the online community at LearningTimes.org.

In Jonathan's final posts, he discusses trends and shares perspectives in reponse to Paul's questions. He also offers a closing analysis of the conference and explores how museums and educators can learn from one another.