This year the conference is in Indianapolis.  I'll be speaking tomorrow -- Tuesday, May 3, 2005 at 9:00 am CDT [see other time zones] -- on a panel here at AAM about creating and sustaining learning communties online.  We expect that many museum professionals will attend to explore ideas in how museums can cultivate and participate in online communities and play the same kind of central role they play in their offline communities.  Here's a description of the session. 

Chaired by:
Kris Wetterlund, Educator, Sandbox Studios, Minneapolis, MN

Presenters:
Jonathan Finkelstein, Executive Producer, LearningTimes, New York, NY
Carissa Amash, Smithsonian, Washington, DC
Melanie Buffington, Assistant Professor of Visual Arts Education, Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, MI

Description:
New technologies make it possible to create and extend communities of learning across distances and foster collaboration and connectedness. Join panelists who will present a comprehensive review of real-life learning communities and the exciting technologies that support them, including groups of K-12 teachers using museum materials, museum educators, and curatorial communities. Theories and practice, and cost/benefit analyses relating to building and sustaining online communities will also be examined.

I'll be broadcasting the session live in the LearningTimes.org Meeting Room if you would like to join us and listen in or participate.

My visit to AAM is shorter that in prior years, but I'll post a couple of excerpts from conversations I had here in this LT dispatch area.

-- Jonathan Finkelstein
    Executive Producer
   LearningTimes.org

"The mobile learning center, ScienceSouth on Wheels, is a fully fitted trailer that features a state of the art science laboratory, an outdoor presentation area, and a computer lab with onboard wireless access to the internet. ScienceSouth has created a unique mobile learning environment by converting a decommissioned military vehicle to a flexible science laboratory.

"The Mobile Learning Center will benefit students, teachers and families by sparking their interest in science and engineering by involving them with cutting-edge technology. It will offer a variety of science and engineering programs featuring health and medicine, environmental science and engineering. The mobile learning center will enable people to participate in real science, by conducting bioscience experiments, building robots or measuring air and water quality."

Here is an excerpt of my conversation with Perry, in which he provides a sense of the project's importance, describes who funds it, and shares the excitement of the students who get to climb aboard when the Wheels roll into their town:

Perry Gauthier with pictures of ScienceSouth Truck

These handheld devices allow educators or individual learners to visit a museum website in advance of a field trip and indicate areas of interest.  Upon arriving at the museum, the visitor picks up a handheld device that is already customized to the learner and can provide video, audio and text to enhance objects and exhibits within the physical space.  The device tracks your clicks and interests and begins to "push" you more of the kinds of content it "thinks" will be of interest to you.

The system also has WiFi for access to real time information in the museum, and also for connecting it to others.  They also have spatial positioning functionality and can pinpoint your location withing 12 feet in the museum, offering you guidance and content related to your current whereabouts.  The devices can be used with student groups, and educators or tour leaders can bring up pictures for everyone or even do a pop quiz or game on all the devices. 

Real-time messaging allows students to submit drawings (sketched out with a stylus on the mini touch screen) or send notes to their peers.  One can see a list of group members on the PDA who are online in the museum, much like an instant messaging "buddy list", and can send them real-time notes.  This online/offline real-time interaction component is intriguing.  (How might it be used in a museum in a truly meaningful way?  How do we avoid the students leaving the museum and not remembering anything they saw in the physical space around them because they were staring at their screens the whole time?  The potential is there for these tools to be used to engage a new generation of learners in some new and powerful ways.  We just need to be cautious that the tools don't overshadow or ultimately degrade an otherwise quality in-person experience.  I am optimistic that those investing the time and resources into deploying these tools are thinking about this innovatively. I am hoping they will impress us.)

I spoke to Ted Paschkis, CEO of WiVID Systems.  His handheld devices will be deployed at several Smithsonian museums in Washington, DC this month.  Here's a little of what he had to say about the handhelds and their potential:

Panelists from "online communities" session this morning: (Left to right) Melanie Buffington, Carissa Amash, Jonathan Finkelstein and Kris Wetterlund.

Kris Wetterlund, the chair of the session, kicked off the panel with an overview of a few different online communities in the museum world that utilized listservs and online threaded discussion areas to facilitate communication.

I then showcased some highlights from the LearningTimes.org community -- such as the blogs, podcasts, and Meeting Room -- and the LearningTimes ACRL (Association of College and Research Librarians) community that was the home to the ACRL's virtual conference last month.  My charge was to introduce participants to active educational communities that are utilizing media rich tools to foster interaction and collaboration online, which might serve as inspiration or case studies for museum-related initiatives. 

Carissa Amash followed with a great description of how the New York Transit Museum (where she was associate curator until recently; she's now with the Smithsonian) used a LearningTimes online community site to connect a group of geographically dispersed people in the design and completion of a large-scale exhibit and accompanying book. 

Melanie Buffington rounded out the panel with a very nice review of some major themes that emerge from current literature on the theory behind online communities.

Joining us online in the LT Meeting Room throughout the session were LearningTimes members Sus Nyrop, Michael Coghlan and Dan Balzer, who also offered perspectives on online community.  Their global presence (from Denmark, Adelaide, and Illinois, respectively) demonstrated the power of bridging face-to-face events (such as those commonly produced at museum venues -- i.e. gallery talks, workshops, etc.) with remotely located participants and experts.  From conversations I had with attendees after the panel session, it seems this tacit example of a "multiple venue presentation" (MVP) triggered some ideas for its potential at museums.  (Sus, Michael and Dan -- and John and Hope -- thanks for participating!)

Due to great interest in the topic, we are planning to reconvene the panelists and the attendees in an online session to continue this discussion. 

If you have examples of meaningful museum-related online communities or online community-building projects, would you kindly share them with all of us here?  Please click "reply" above this message and share a link and/or a brief description of the site.  We'd love to feature some of these examples in the online session we plan to do as a follow-up.

Callers can call in to the Walker's "Art on Call" number, enter an ID number of a particular work, and hear a curator, expert or the artist him or herself discussing the piece.  The system has some added benefits over standard audio wand tours, such as the use of caller ID to recognize repeat callers and customize their experience and the accessibility to the audio from anywhere in the world.  The system also is integrated with the Walker Art Center's web site, such that new content added in text about such things as museum hours, special events, or gallery talks, are instantly converted to speech and can be heard on the "Art on Call" line.  Future plans include leveraging the "mp3" audio format of the Walker's large audio collection for Internet access and download.  (Can you say "podcast"?)

I sat down this afternoon with Scott Sayre and Kris Wetterlund of Sandbox Studios and Museum-Ed.org and learned more about this interesting project.  Lets listen in: [This clip is about 8 minutes in duration.] What other possibilities do you see for the use of cell phones for accessing information and audio on demand in the education and museum worlds? What do you think of Scott's suggestion that cell phones may prove to be more powerful than PDAs?

Try "Art on Call" for yourself!  Visit the Walker site for some guidance: http://newmedia.walkerart.org/aoc/index.wac ... or call 612.374.8200.  Press 1 to hear about artists, and then choose a number, such as 1019 for Roy Lichtenstein, 1013 for Yoko Ono, or 1018 for Jasper Johns.  (More codes on the above website.)

Learn more about Museum411, the system that powers Art on Call at this site: http://www.museum411.com
 

Yes, the two bats in the foreground are real, and very much alive.  And they were no more than 12 to 18 inches away from me during my conversation at the NSDL booth.  There are so many booths at AAM featuring dinosaur bone assemblies and truly realistic mannikins that I did not believe these critters were real.  They were.  And Casey called over her neighbor Rob Mies of BatConservation.org to explain:

Rob Mies and two live fruit bats.

This is why it's nice to get out of your office and away from a computer screen when you can.  I just don't see myself bumping into live fruit bats from the comfort of my desk.  (Okay, squirrels - yes - but not fruit bats.)   :-)