How Hello Museum Builds Intimate Community in one of the Biggest Cities in the World

When I tell stories about how the MAH builds community, I emphasize the importance of deep partnerships and relationship-building. We connect with people both professionally and personally, at the museum and on the street. Colleagues from bigger cities often ask: is this approach relevant to us? Can this kind of intimacy and informality work in a sprawling metropolis? This weekend, I got my answer in Seoul--the 18th biggest city in the world--at Hello Museum.

Nestled in a forest of high-rise apartment buildings, this small museum connects children and families with contemporary art. Like the New Children's Museum in San Diego, Hello Museum creates building-wide interactive exhibitions with artists, on themes like nature and #NoWar. But while Hello Museum originally opened as a "children's contemporary art museum," that's not the tagline they use today. Now, they call themselves a "small neighborhood museum"--in the middle of a city of 9.8 million people.

Hello Museum embeds neighborliness in every aspect of its work, starting with its name. I assumed the name was an invitation for children to say hello to contemporary art. But director and founder Ysaac Kim explained that it's not about people connecting to the museum. It's about them connecting with each other. As she said, "I noticed that children these days are taught not to talk to strangers, not to say hello to them. So we made this museum as a place where you can say hello."

Walk into Hello Museum, and you'll encounter a million touches that create a sense of intimacy and community. Everyone takes off their shoes on entry, which creates a homey feel. As we padded in, the front desk was manned by a visiting artist. In a warren of small rooms without doors, parents sat chatting on the floor as their children swirled through art installations made from everyday objects. There were plants and books everywhere.

We wandered up the stairs, slipped on slippers and sunhats (provided on a friendly shelf), and enjoyed a small rooftop garden with waterplay and painting areas. Up on that roof, our world of paints and plants felt tiny in contrast to the skyscrapers looming all around. It felt like a place to be human in a concrete and steel world.

While Seoul is very different from Santa Cruz, Hello Museum felt like a sister to the MAH. The warm, sociable spirit felt the same. Visitors easily and happily collided and said hello to one another. Staff members and teenage volunteers brokered conversations and play. At one point, Ysaac effusively greeted a woman visiting with her child. As they hugged and laughed, they explained to me that the mother was a friend - and part of a company that had sponsored this exhibition opening. It reminded me of every time I've given a tour of the MAH and run into a friend or partner along the way.

Like the MAH, Hello Museum brokers new "hellos" through local partnerships and visitor participation. They try to be of, by, and for their community (which is why I was visiting). For example, on our way into the museum, Ysaac pointed out tiny textile factories dotting the neighborhood run by "grandmothers." In Hello Museum's maker space, children worked with scraps donated by these seamstresses. On the floor, children sat and slid on denim cushions, sewed by the grandmothers out of cast-off jeans donated by museum visitors. After the exhibition closes, these community-made denim cushions will keep doing good in the community. Hello Museum is donating them to a local animal shelter that needs warm cushions to insulate dogs and cats from cold concrete floors.

Ysaac and her team at Hello Museum have created something small, beautiful, and powerful. Seeing this hive of creativity and human kindness made me realize that this kind of museum may even be more valuable in a big city than a small one. In a city that is rapidly growing and changing, they've created a place to come together and play and create things and make friends. A place to slow down and say hello.

Hello Museum taught me that intimacy and community-building is a choice. It's a choice to keep things simple. To work with neighbors. To design spaces that feel human and warm. A choice that any small museum, no matter how big the city, can make.

Psychology, Pricing, and Pay As You Will at the Children's Museum of Tacoma

In 2010, the Children's Museum of Tacoma was getting ready to move to a new, bigger facility. Over the years, they had noticed that 50% of their visitors were coming for free or at reduced cost--whether on free days or with special passes. When they moved to the new facility, they decided they wanted to radically expand access to the museum, AND increase revenue.

What did they do? They went to a "pay as you will" model. Now, they encourage visitors to become mini-philanthropists, enabling inclusion for all. Charging admission is a means test, and they want everyone to be able to pass.

The Children's Museum of Tacoma is two years into their "pay as you will" model, and it looks like a success. Attendance jumped from 40,000 at their old facility to about 120,000 at the new facility. Membership has doubled (now including new perks that extend beyond free admission). Attendance by low-income families is up. And while the average amount paid by each non-member visitor is down (dropping from $6 to about $3), the attendance increase means a net revenue gain. The museum launched this new strategy with a major grant from a funder (Key Bank) that provided five years of admissions offset--enough risk capital to give the museum time to grow into the new approach. The transformation of admission fees and its impact is documented beautifully in this blog post by Jeanne Vergeront. Check it out for a lot more details and numbers.

I called the museum because I was curious to learn more about the mechanics of communicating this approach to visitors. "By donation only" can offer a wonderful sense of welcome, or it can be misleading. (Consider the ongoing lawsuits at the Metropolitan Museum on this very issue.) I wondered whether "pay as you will" might come with its own confusion and stress for families without much exposure to museums--the exact people the museum is trying to make welcome. The "pay as you will" messaging is very different, for example, from Mixed Blood Theater's "Radical Hospitality" approach, which emphasizes completely free theater experiences.

"No cost" is much more clearcut than "pay as you will." Might "pay as you will" become another museum mystery, another source of threshold fear for visitors who don't have a yardstick by which to reasonably guess what they SHOULD pay to visit?

I spoke with Chad Russell, the Administrative Coordinator at the Children's Museum of Tacoma, about their experience. He told me, "We often get asked if there is a suggested donation, what should we pay. We don’t want to put any pressure on for a suggested donation – we want you to pay what you think.”

Chad also told me:

• They have donation bins throughout the museum, so if people don't want to give much when they first walk in, they can pay somewhere else. Some people will donate more on their way out (but are not prompted to do so).
• They train their frontline staff to engage with people about WHY it is pay as you will, explaining that your donation makes it possible for other kids who couldn’t afford it, so they can come play for free. Some kids apparently come in with their piggy banks, proud that they can pay to attend the museum--because whatever they have to offer is valued as exactly enough.
• When people are stressed about how much to pay, he says, "before we went to this model, the cost was about $5 at the door." This might help more literal-minded people feel comfortable with an ambiguous system.

To me, this seems like an improvement on the norm... especially in a children's museum, which has a high number of repeat visitors (who can become familiar with the system over time). I can imagine families deciding on a value and paying it fairly consistently with little stress. I can imagine the cute rituals of kids, excited to contribute personally, proud to be part of making the museum available to all. But I can also imagine visitors being confused and stressed out--which is even worse in front of your kids. 

Does "pay as you will" fundamentally change the relationship between the institution and community members with regard to the cost and perceived value of the experiences inside? There's still a transaction--or at least a conversation--at the gate. Is that a good thing, because it invites/requires people to grapple with the cost of providing these experiences? Or is it just a different wrapper on same old means test? 

Send in the Science Clowns: A Frustrated Reaction to a Science Center Demonstration

Last week, I took in the new Galileo science show at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. The show was a standard science center demonstration; about fifteen minutes, featuring a classic science experiment (all objects fall at the same rate) and a core message (when scientists are curious about something, they do an experiment to understand it). The presenter was by many measures the best in the business. He wrapped physical comedy, silly jokes, audience participation, and water balloons into a highly entertaining fifteen minutes. I used to perform these kinds of shows at the Capital Children’s Museum, and I was impressed by the whole production.

It also drove me nuts. The show was juvenile. It barely conveyed any science. It made Galileo into a pizza-loving buffoon with a bone to pick with Aristotle. The audience participants weren’t made to feel like scientists or special participants; they were treated like props to be splashed with water balloons. The whole thing felt more like a birthday party for eight year olds than anything else.

I felt highly conflicted watching this show. I understand the value of entertainment (and its positive impact on attentiveness), but the show’s level of silliness made me cringe with embarrassment. Three things in particular frustrated me:

1. The show’s entertainment factor appeared to be used to apologize for science and turn it into something more "palatable." I felt it insulted my intelligence and my genuine interest in learning something about science. Does making science fun really require turning scientists into clowns? I can’t imagine seeing a show like this in any other cultural context. There’s no history museum doing a send-up of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. There’s no art museum where Picasso is portrayed as a boozy goofball on the make. Entertainment and comedy can be fabulous presentation devices, but I don’t think we need them to mask the fact that science is serious, complicated, often funny business.
2. The show was geared solely towards children. I saw the show with a large group of adults at an evening event, and it was painfully clear that the content and the form were not made for us. We all knew the outcome of the experiment presented, and yet there was no way for the presenter to break from script and give us a more complex view on Galileo’s experiment. If I was watching the show with my kids or chaperoning a group of students, I would have been pleased that the kids had a good time. But the show would have also confirmed that the science center was for children, not for me. It might also have made me feel that the science center was a place for fun, not so much for learning. Adults typically make up half of science center audiences. Shouldn’t these shows satisfy their interests as well?
3. The show’s strong personality overwhelmed other more nuanced aspects of the science center. Live demos are just one part of a visit, but shows like this can have a domineering personality that imprints the whole visit. This show presented a version of the science center that was loud, overwhelming, goofy, and one-dimensional. It overwhelmed the more understated tone used in exhibit labels and by docents. Even though I thought some of the exhibits in the Space Odyssey gallery were quite nuanced and good, I left the museum with the show having the biggest impact on my visit.

I’m still grappling with this experience. I know how wonderful it feels as a presenter to captivate your audience and give them a good time. And people are more likely to internalize content messages when they are attentive and eager to follow the narrative of a presentation. Maybe attention is at such a premium that these kinds of measures are worth it to connect kids to science in an enjoyable way. Maybe I'm out of touch and my expectations are inappropriate. But the show felt like candy. People like candy—but that doesn’t mean it’s what you have to give them all the time. Sometimes, it can make them sick.

What do you think?

In Support of Idiosyncrasy

People often ask me which museums are my favorite. I don't like to give a list. I've only visited about 0.01% of the institutions out there and I suspect that the other 99.99% includes some real gems. But when I really think about it, all my favorites (so far) have one thing in common. It's not the extent to which they are participatory. It's not their size or type or subject matter. It's the extent to which they are distinctive, and more precisely, idiosyncratic.

I visit lots of perfectly nice, perfectly forgettable museums. The institutions that stick with me are the ones that have a peculiar individuality. In some cases, that's based on subject matter, as at the Museum of Jurassic Technology or the American Visionary Art Museum. Other institutions are idiosyncratic in their relationship to their environment, like the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, or to their community, like the Wing Luke Asian Museum. Some are scrappy and iconoclastic, like the City Museum in St. Louis, whereas others are august stalwarts like the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. While most of my favorites are small (idiosyncrasy is easier to maintain without too many committees), some are quite large--places like the Exploratorium where a singular ethos infuses a massive facility.

Idiosyncratic institutions aren't just quirky and weird. They are usually staffed by people who feel incredibly passionate about their particular focus. These institutions are often more connected to their specific, local communities than more generic institutions. They are akin to local news organizations and charities. They reflect the soul of the community and can be responsive to its unique interests and needs. They are places that people point to with pride and say, "that's our place."

Even the business world is getting wise to the power of idiosyncrasy. The 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea shop (shown at right) is not a small community-owned place. It's a Starbucks. Over the last year, Starbucks has been opening stores in a few cities with a very different look--one that emulates the handmade, community vibe of locally-owned coffee shops. Whether you think this is a brilliant move or a corporate swindle, it demonstrates that even a large company with a highly branded, consistent image sees the benefit of individualizing offerings to different markets. Starbucks can't be a small funky startup, but it can try to look like one.

Why are museums going in the other direction, trying to become more consistent rather than celebrating their idiosyncrasies? To some extent, it's externally-driven. Funders and potential donors tend to look for particular benchmarks of professionalism (appropriately), and few are comfortable funding the most risky or content-specific institutions. But that's only part of the story. Mostly, institutions move away from idiosyncrasy on their own accord. I see three significant internal reasons for homogenization in museums:

1. As money gets tight, museums look for exhibits, program strategies, and revenue streams that are "proven" by other institutions' successes, rather than charting their own potentially risky path.
2. Many museums no longer employ in-house exhibit developers, relying instead on a short list of contractors and consultants. Design firms' projects often have a common look across different cities and institutions.
   
3. Small museums, which are most likely to cultivate local, distinctive voice and approaches, often have an inferiority complex. Rather than asserting their uniqueness, they try to emulate large museums.
   

The institutions that seem most prey to a "cookie cutter" approach are science centers and children's museums. These institutions have three additional reasons for homogeneity:

1. The audience cycles frequently as families "age out." Institutions may feel less of a need to offer something unusual or distinctive if the audience will keep refreshing every few years.
2. The content is often seen as not being community-specific. Science is science, and grocery store exhibits are grocery store exhibits. Funders like the NSF have encouraged science centers in particular to share their techniques and evaluations, which is fabulous but also leads to rampant and sometimes unthinking imitation.
3. These museums have undergone the fastest growth in the industry in the past thirty years. There is a big business of selling exhibits, copies of exhibits, and exhibit recipe books, and many individuals who start new institutions rely almost entirely on these vehicles to fill their galleries.
   

I think this is a particular shame because children's museums and science centers have the greatest opportunity to introduce young visitors to the special delights of a uniquely community-focused, idiosyncratic approach. The best children's and science museums are deeply community-interrelated, often in ways that are hard to discern from the exhibits when experiencing them casually. They may feature community gardens or exhibit labels in languages tailored to locals. They may employ local artists to help create visitor experiences. They may build their exhibits to accommodate the interests and needs of particular families and school groups they have known and worked with for years. Or they may just have an unusual and distinctive spirit or ethos behind their work.

I understand why retail establishments benefit from becoming bigger, more homogeneous, and more distributed. People like to buy from chains because they know what they are going to get. But consistency should not be the number one value when it comes to providing visitors with educational, aesthetic, social, and hopefully transformative experiences. I'd argue that one of the top reasons people DON'T visit museums is that they think they already know what they are going to get. Especially when it comes to small museums with limited collections, a distinctive personality is often the best thing the institution has to offer. Trying to cover it up or smooth it out in favor of "best practices" does a disservice to the museum and the audience. It creates another forgettable museum.

Do you share my love of idiosyncratic institutions? How can you cultivate idiosyncrasy in your own work and museum?

ASTC Recap: Questions, Colors, and Reflective Research

Last week, the Association of Science and Technology Centers (ASTC) held their annual meeting in Ft. Worth, Texas. I participated in three sessions: a Pecha Kucha design blitz, a dialogue on bridging online/onsite connections, and a discussion of the IMLS 21st Century Skills report. This post recaps these sessions, provides my slides, and shares what I learned at the conference.

Designing Questions

Kathy Gustafon-Hilton coordinated a massive Pecha Kucha session, featuring 19 design professionals sharing 20 slides, 20 seconds apiece. Beyond being totally exhausting, this session offered some highly varied insights into the value of prototyping, the dangers of the color red, and what happens when good exhibits go bad.

I spoke about the importance of designing intentional frameworks for asking visitors questions, based on this blog post. Exhibit labels in science centers ask more questions than any other kinds of museums, and yet the questions are often awful--teacherly, overly rhetorical, and totally meaningless. While questions like: "Where were you last night?," asked by a cop or mother, garners the full attention of asker and askee alike, museum questions like "what is nanotechnology?," are fairly meaningless to all involved. I shared examples of question frameworks designed for specific types of visitor experiences: personal framing of exhibits (as in Facing Mars), private sharing (like the Storycorps booths), public dialogue (as in the Advice exhibit), and so on. Download my slides here.

Elsewhere in the session, I was incredibly impressed by:

• The new Dialogue in Silence exhibition, presented by the same group (Dialogue Social Enterprise) that created the incredibly successful Dialogue in the Dark exhibition. Where Dialogue in the Dark is a tactile and auditory experience led in complete darkness by blind guides, Dialogue in Silence is an exhibition of interpersonal challenges that must be completed in total silence.
• Two presentations (by Mikko Myllykoski of Heureka and Chuck Howarth of Gyroscope) that questioned whether science center exhibits should be cutesy and colorful. Both of these designers presented compelling images and evidence from exhibit work and child development experts about the idea that you can make sophisticated, muted exhibits that help children slow down, focus, and enjoy themselves with interactive content. Chuck offered a quote from an advisory psychologist who commented that "children should be the brightest thing in the space." Mikko noted that when Heureka switched to digital screen-based exhibit labels from graphics, they saw an entirely new behavior: kids reading labels, instead of their parents reading while the kids hit the hands-on elements. Mikko suggested that the kids saw the screens as being "for them" and felt drawn to read long paragraphs of text when presented digitally.
• Jane Werner, director of the fabulous Pittsburgh Children's Museum, talked about the Charm Bracelet project, a local collaboration among arts organizations that is both incredibly ambitious (with a goal to transform the troubled North Side neighborhood into a cultural and educational jewel of the city) and wonderful distributed (they make microgrants for small projects that make a difference in the neighborhood). We so frequently over-focus on our own institutions' problems, and Jane and her cohorts in Pittsburgh are thinking much more expansively about their collective power to make positive change in their community.
  

Bridging Online and Onsite Experiences

Tamara Schwarz (Chabot Space & Science Center), Seth! Leary (NRG! Exhibits), Rob Semper (Exploratorium) and I hosted a wide-ranging discussion session on design techniques for developing projects that involve both online and onsite elements. Rob shared some of the Exploratorium's forays into electronic guidebooks, Seth! talked about the Bellevue Sculptural Travel Bug project and geocaching, and Tamara and I both talked about content experiences that incorporate exhibits, social networks, and in the case of a newish project I'm working on, cellphones. Download our slides here.

I particularly appreciated Rob's thoughtful description of how people use guidebooks in real life - first, as inspiration for a hazily considered trip, then to really plan specifics, then on the ground as a guide to pre-selected and new opportunities, and finally, as a memento, peppered with comments on experiences sampled or postponed for future visits. How can a device-based guide offer the same range of experiences packaged in a small container?

This session also led to some discussion about physical infrastructure to support web-based experience integration. Many museums, especially those of the big old box variety, need guidance and help figuring out how to build data services into their facilities, and I suspect that these kinds of considerations will become a constant feature of new construction projects once a model is developed.

21st Century Skills

In the final minutes of the conference, Marsha Semmel (IMLS) hosted a session with myself, Julie Johnson (Science Museum of Minnesota) and Bronwyn Bevan (Exploratorium) to share the IMLS report on 21st Century Skills. Without getting too deeply in the weeds, 21st Century Skills is a phrase that has gained a lot of traction in US policy circles around education and workforce development. The basic idea is that there is a set of skills that need to be emphasized for kids today to be good citizens, workers, and leaders in the 21st century--skills like collaboration, global awareness, and media literacy. While most of the national discussion has focused on schools and enterprise, IMLS wanted to demonstrate to policymakers that museums and libraries already communicate many of these skills. IMLS also wanted to help museums and libraries improve their skills, both for audiences and for their own professional communities. So, IMLS convened a group of advisors (including Julie, Bronwyn, and I) to consult on the creation of a report and diagnostic tool for museum and library professionals, which you can download here.

During the session, we discussed how the 21st century skills report can serve as an actionable tool both for fundraising/advocacy activities and professional and program development at science centers. Marsha also gave a brief overview of IMLS grants available that support regional groups and institutions performing 21st century skills audits and professional development workshops.

The REFLECTS project at MOSI

In keeping with the session on 21st century skills in museums, I want to report on one other session I attended that really inspired me for its forward-thinking approach to professional development and visitor experience. A team of researchers and floor staff from the Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI) in Tampa, FL, came to the conference to talk about REFLECTS, a huge initiative in which floor educators are trained to perform self-reflective research on their own interactions with visitors and adapt their behavior to improve visitor engagement.

The REFLECTS project blends practical institutional demands with deep research. The point of the project is to train educator staff to be able to appropriately scaffold visitors' experiences at the museum. The team defines a "successful" visitor experience as one that is both active and engaged (as opposed to passive and disinterested). Floor staff are recorded via both video and audio as they interact with visitors, and then those floor staff go back later and code the recordings for cues that they define as indicating active engagement: visitors making comments about the exhibit, asking and answering each other's questions, making connections to prior experiences, and so on. The researchers don't judge the content of the cues (i.e. whether a visitor asks a silly question or a complex intellectual one), just their incidence. And then they head back out on the floor to adjust their behavior and try again.

In the session, MOSI staff showed video of themselves engaging with visitors before and after working in the REFLECTS program, and the difference was impressive. The educators weren't doing a better job communicating content in the "after" videos; in fact, many of them offered less content in these videos. Instead, they were doing a better job supporting visitors having their own content experiences, rather than trying (often unsuccessfully) to coerce visitors into engagement.

The primary researcher at MOSI, Judith Lombana, offered some hard-nosed business reasons for the REFLECTS project. She noted that in a region driven by tourism, MOSI must do whatever it can to deliver memorable experiences to visitors that will encourage repeat visits. She also noted that museums spend a lot of time giving visitors scaffolding that is not successful at improving engagement or learning, and that this is a business problem. As she put it: "waste occurs with activites or resources that some particular guest does not want."

But Judith also noted some other major professional development values of the project, especially that the floor educators who are engaged as researchers via REFLECTS feel empowered and validated, able to improve their performance as educators and understand the framework in which they do so. Sadly, there is little on the web so far about this project, but you can find a one-page brief at the bottom of this page. Hopefully, they will soon start publishing their findings for the broader museum audience.

New Models for Children's Museums: Wired Classrooms?

Do you talk to people sitting next to you on planes? I don't. I'm like an airborne clam, hoarding my book, my space, my ears. But last year, over Thanksgiving, I sat next to a man who was working on his laptop (not an activity that invites conversation), creating a presentation on elementary education and technology. I kept sneaking glances at his screen, watching it fill with words like “Web 2.0,” “virtual worlds,” and pictures of kids tuning out teachers and tuning in their cellphones. Curiosity got the better of me, and that’s how I met Bob Whicker, a K-12 Education Development Executive for Apple. Bob’s job is to set up and support “wired” schools and school districts. A former superintendent of such a district, he explained the basic premise to me: each student, from kindergarten on, has a personal laptop. The schools have open wireless internet, so each student has continual access to the Web. Apple calls this program “one to one” learning, meaning not one instructor but one computer per child.

I was fascinated by our discussion, and Bob came to mind last month, when I was asked to write an article for the Association of Children's Museums quarterly journal, Hand to Hand, about children's museums and Web 2.0. There’s a thriving debate about the role computers should play in children’s museums, with many professionals sounding the alarm about the negative impact of exchanging screen time for tactile environments. To many of these folks, Bob's wired classrooms seem threatening. But the more I learned, the more I wondered where the real threat is, and why children's museums have been so resistant to change.

To understand more, I turned to Elaine Gurian's article The Molting of Children's Museums? in her book, Civilizing the Museum. Elaine starts, as always, with a bang, writing:

Children's museums may be facing a dilemma. It can be argued that they have exhausted the potential bequeathed them by the experimentation of the 1970s without developing fresh approaches for the new millennium.

Elaine argues that historically children's museums have been on the leading edge of progressive educational and developmental theory. Institutions like the Boston Children's Museum (which she helped lead in the 1970s) drew heavily from and worked in partnership with the "open classroom" movement to develop informal educational models that are interactive, open-ended, and individualized. They were ahead of the museum curve, using language like "participatory learning environment" (Brooklyn Children's Museum, 1977) that is still thick in the mouths of contemporary museum directors in other fields. Since the 1970s, children's museums of this experiential, open-ended type have exploded, out-pacing other types of museums in new construction projects and venues. And while they were once ahead of the curve, the lack of change in recent years is becoming more noticeable. As other museums have entered the "participatory learning" conversation, children's museums have not moved on to a new generation of audience and principles.

Consider other family-oriented products: toys, media, schools. All of these have gone through a series of movements in the last 30 years reflecting cultural shifts and expectations. Shrek is an unimaginable construct in the world of 1970s family cinema. And yet in 2004, I listened to an exhibit manager vent about the challenge of creating an early childhood development exhibition in his science center. He wanted something new, but "everyone shows me a goddamned giant plastic tree. I don't want a plastic tree. All the designers will only give me plastic trees."

Why the uniformity? Why haven't children's museums pushed past the 1970s model? This conundrum, partnered with the recent growth of children's museums, brings to mind a Yom Kippur sermon I heard in which the rabbi argued that "Jews have gone from people who do good to people who do well." Are children's museums in the same boat--less willing to change, to lead the charge for new progressive models of education, because they don't want to leave the comfort borne by the 1970s model?

I didn't think this was an issue until I met Bob. Who cares if children's museums don't change as long as the content and the experience is good? The audience recycles every few years, and every kid loves making giant bubbles. But Bob helped me see that there are intelligent ways to go further, to advance the same goals of self-directed, experiential learning with tools that speak directly to kids' interests and aspirations.

Bob argues that giving kids laptops enables more participatory, engaged learning. New questions are raised as classes can rapidly access information relevant to lessons, and students no longer look to the teacher to have every answer. They look to their own tools, and by extension, to their own abilities to learn.

The wired classroom is not a free-for-all nor an entirely screen-based experience. Teachers and administrators have remote desktop applications that allow them to view any kid’s screen at any moment. Bob told me stories about principals instant messaging students to ask them to remove objectionable content from their machines, and students instant messaging principals to ask for more variety in school lunches. He explained lessons where the teacher successively displays different students’ work with a projector for full-class discussion, and group projects where kids work together across different schools and grade levels using collaborative software. Teachers still steer the boat, but students have much more freedom and opportunity with the controls.

In short, Bob told me about a new model for progressive education, one that offers flexibility, personalization, and respect for students’ self-determination. The “wired classroom” model accepts and integrates technology instead of avoiding or denying it. As Bob explained, in wired classrooms, there is no longer a continual cat-and-mouse game between teachers and students about the use of approved devices. Teachers don’t have to pretend that Wikipedia, YouTube, and other online tools don’t exist, or aren’t used by their students. Instead, teachers and administrators work creatively to educate with these tools, thus giving their students relevant experiences with the tools that are becoming the hallmark of the adult world.

I'm not suggesting that we need to replace all the plastic trees with laptops. But children's museums should get back on the leading edge, working alongside folks like Bob to define and model informal educational experiences in today's world. The "wired museum," like the wired classroom, like the open classroom, like the open museum, is a place that privileges free-choice learning. It is a place that reflects and grows with a society increasingly organized around digital tools. It is a place where individual experiences are tracked and personalized so that visitors can establish and develop unique identities. It is a place that encourages social interaction and collaboration among past, present, and future visitors. It is a place that includes visitors in content creation and distribution. It is a place that continually changes and adapts based on the contributions of the museum community.

Who is going to create and lead this place? And if not this place, where else might children's museums go? Now that the "participatory learning environment" has begun to take hold in more staid, adult institutions, where will children's museums smear the finger paint next? What changes are you already making in your own institutions to move into the future?


Note: Portions of this post excerpted from "Beyond Hands On: Web 2.0 and New Models for Engagement," In Hand to Hand, Winter 2007, Volume 21, Number 4. Reprinted with permission from the Association of Children's Museums, Washington, DC.

How Kids See Technology: The Laptop Club

Photo Credit: Mini Laptop Club

Thanks to Sibley for sending me this fascinating article about "the laptop club"--a group of second and third graders in an afterschool program who designed their own (non-functional) laptops using construction paper, pencils, and a lot of imagination.

The article includes a gallery of images of these imagined computers, which have keys for things like "Harry Potter," "games," and "friends." It also features extracts from interviews with some of these kids, who at age 8 already have some clear opinions about how to be famous on the web, what they are better at than their parents, and which parts of the computer are most "valuable."

The debate over how young and how often kids should interact with computers has raged since the 1980s. One of the things that interests me about these images is the extent to which they demonstrate how computers have gone from tools used by adults to accomplish mostly professional tasks to tools that can be used by all kinds of people for all kinds of things. The classic mental image of a kid banging away at a keyboard, trying to be "like mom" has changed. These kids see computers as tools for gaming, music, shopping, creating, and are imagining interfaces that suit their own interests and devices. They can't type well, but who needs QWERTY if you have your button that links you directly to your friend Emma?

Jeff Han, one of the innovators of multi-touch interfaces such as that of the iPhone, has questioned the value of the $100 laptops being produced for children in third world countries, arguing that the kids who receive them will be using input interfaces--keyboards and mice--that will soon be out-of-date. Who will design the user interface for the computers of the future? Will we see greater diversity in what kinds of things are accessible from the click of a button? Will the explosion of plug-ins and widgets reach out of the screen and into our input devices?

All fun things to think about--and in this case, the thinking is inspired by designs created by children. I think it would be marvelous for museums, particularly childrens' and science museums, to offer open discussions about the future of technology incorporating kids' dreams in the debate in a legitimate and active way. I'm too used to my keyboard to imagine its future. The eight year old banging on my exhibits isn't.

Children's Museums and Web 2.0

Last week, I received an inquiry from Mary Maher, editor of Hand to Hand, a magazine put out by the Association of Children's Museums, about Museum 2.0. Why, Mary asked, were there no posts about children's museums on this site? I did a quick mental scan, and she's right; with the exception of a few mentions of the Exploratorium and the City Museum (both of which are much more than children's museums), Museum 2.0 has focused on "interactive" and "collecting" museums, with much attention paid to the ways adults engage therein. So today, we start righting the wrongs and welcome the kids to the table.

Why aren't children's museums represented on Museum 2.0? One (positive) reason is that children's museums already do so much 2.0 stuff naturally. At children's museums, visitors ARE participants. It's hard to fool yourself into thinking you define the museum experience when your visitors are jumping on, chewing, and giggling at your content. Children don't have the same social hang-ups as adults and are likely to share their experience with strangers while in the museum. Visitors use the exhibits as owners and come back to reuse again and again. Finally, children's museums are the original home of user-generated content, from face-paintings to puppet shows to take-home projects.

But Mary is also interested (legitimately) in the media side. As she puts it:

With an audience of mostly young children and families in primarily non-collecting hands-on museums, most of them small, what are the best web strategies?

In her wanderings, some children's museum folks have objected to heavy investment in the web, citing both the power of the in-person visit (how could it possibly be extended?) and American Pediatric Association guidelines to push kids away from computer screens and out into the world. After all, we want kids to come to our museums specifically to have the multi-sensory experiences not available on the web. Why try to extend that to the web?

The answer is the same for children's museums as it is for any other museums: kids are on the web anyway, and we might as well use that fact as an opportunity to connect with them in their homes. When it comes to "extending the visitor experience," I think children's museums are ideally positioned for web activities. The tendency to visit as a family can extend the positive of the in-museum experience (quality time) to shared experiences at home. I know lots of parents who spend quality time with their kids surfing YouTube, giggling at the dancing cats. Why shouldn't a children's museum website be a place for fun, safe content that family members can explore together?

In particular, I think children's museums could benefit from some of the "record yourself" experiences that other museums, primarily interactive science centers, offer. For example, when you visit the Ontario Science Centre, you can record your own stop motion animation, which you can then access on the web at home. Similarly, here at The Tech, you can take thermocamera pictures of yourself, perform DNA experiments, and other activities--all of which populate a personal website for you to visit again from home. These personalized websites are not heavily trafficked; 10% viewership is considered pretty darn good. But in a children's museum context, I could see these websites getting much more use. Parents want cute pictures of their kids (and if you search "children's museum" on Flickr, you'll find over 20,000 images). Kids want recordings of themselves performing. Everyone wants these to be shown and shared in a safe environment. And since many children's museum visitors return again and again, the vision of these personal websites evolving into a more meaningful documentation of your experiences at the children's museum becomes viable.

Take it to the next level, and museums could network these personal sites to create an internal, safe visitor social space where kids could view each other's work. Teachers or grandparents could maintain bookmarks of their students or grandchildren's updates with each visit. It may not be safe or appropriate to broadcast all of this content out to third party sites, like YouTube or Facebook, but you could effectively imagine a museum creating their own micro-Facebook for visitors to the museum, with updates when new exhibits were used, new photos recorded, new stories written.

For the adult museum audience, creating a parallel Facebook or similar makes little sense. Why compete with a social network giant that can do everything bigger and better than you? But children's museums are another story. There is no safe, family-friendly social networking site for young children, teachers, and parents. Very few people have attempted to create web spaces that are easily navigable by children who don't read well. Children's museums could carve out a niche, and provide a real service, by creating these kinds of web platforms, which encourage use of the real museum and support discovery and exploration based on museum experiences.

Children's museums deal in experiences, not collections or text-oriented content. It's tricky and often expensive to create web-based museum-like experiences... How do you convey making giant bubbles on the web? How do you create a blog around the excitement of sitting on a giant concrete dinosaur? While there are certainly some neat web-based children's museum experiences out there (Pittsburgh's inspired chicken-based navigation comes to mind), creating web "experiences" is often more expensive and complicated than creating a record of and sharing in-museum experiences.

Beyond recording, I'd suggest that children's museums start blogs geared towards different audiences--parents, teachers, kids--and use those to share museum-endorsed links, upcoming programs, and ask questions of the audience. Every kid likes to be polled, and plenty want to share their personal experiences--check out the Club Penguin blogs for confirmation of that. Another interesting site to check out is imbee, a new social networking site for kids ages 8-14.

But children's museums serve a younger set of kids, and they are in position to likewise serve their audience on the web in unique ways. Ultimately, the web experience should complement the museum experience, not offer a screen-based carbon copy. The starting question should be: how do we want to grow? Which growth areas could be best served by web media?

Social networks of personal webpages populated from museum experiences is one option. But there are others as well. Children's museum folks out there: what do you imagine your web presence could be? What are your challenges, and where do you want to grow?