Question

Is there any good reason why museums shouldn't blog?

I suppose like if an institution is totally shady and is going to be lying all over their blog and be generally dishonest and/or not transparent, then no. Or even if there is shady practice (and certain well known institutions spring to mind after my course on Law and Ethics), engaging in a discussion of it would be really interesting.

I can't really think of any other good reasons though. Help me out. I mean, I acknowledge that I have a small (HUGE MASSIVE) researcher bias, and I'm trying to balance it.

List. Lists are friends:
- blogging might be passe in 1, 5, 10 years (but how many museums produced freaking laserdiscs, and blogging is way cheaper than that)
- potential to bring negative attention to the museum (if your bloggers are mean, dishonest, not open to conversation, or just oblivious)
- potential to leak information (should be some blanket policy in effect anyway about donor/NAGPRA/general information which is not public)
- potential to alienate older/non-tech savvy people (I don't really buy this one despite just making it up. Besides this is way outweighed by accessibility, younger people's involvement, and potential community building, IMHO (I'm not much for internet slang, and that one always makes me think of IHOP))
- The internet could blow up. But museum blogging would be the least of our problems then, eh?


Nothing really compelling there, nothing that can't be easily outweighed. There's gotta be something.....

PS: My abstract got accepted to Rethinking Museums. So I'll be part of a panel on Museums and Technology. I hope you're coming! I have insider info that online registration ought to be available next week, probably early in the week. Major props to the women putting this together (okay, there might be some men involved, but you are so outnumbered dudes) and doing it in such a compressed time frame. You rock!

PPS: Today, while exploring the great Northwest and taking (most of) a day away from my thesis...

I was totally INSIDE of a tree. Photographic Evidence Here.

That's a tree. I was standing inside of it. It was an awesome experience, in the awe-inspiring sense of the word. That expression on my face is one of being awed and excited. I'm telling everyone, including all you nice museum professionals. (The tree in question is located along the River Loop path at the Newhalem Visitor's Center in the North Cascades State Park, WA.)

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Goal clash

I've said time and time again that what I am doing with this thesis is all about why museums should blog, because so much has been written about how museums should blog.

Yet it just kills me when I see museums blogging who I feel could improve their interestingness factor by many times if they just changed this, or that, or did this other thing. It's so hard not to want to delve into "How I Think Your Museum Should Blog." Actually, it's less difficult in writing than it is when I'm reading my SURVEY *cough* responses. And anything I say is inherently biased. But at this point, I'm a pretty experience blog reader. (I'm tracking 132 feeds: 49 knitting blogs (yes knitting blogs! Because yarn is like crack, and so is lace and fair isle and, oh my), 44 museum blogs, 25 museum related blogs, and various other blogs from all areas. Not to mention the 50 livejournal friends blogs I keep up with and the 30 livejournal community blogs I read, plus a half dozen people who only blog at myspace) I'm no Robert Scoble, following over 550 feeds that update way more frequently than most of mine do, but I have a pretty good idea what's up and what's going down.

So it's hard to resist that siren song of best practices. Maybe as an appendix. Maybe I just need to link to that 95 Theses (Doc Searles, not Martin Luther). We'll see. It's tempting to try and work it into my proposal for Rethinking Museums (which is becoming so big! It's just amazingly exciting, what's happening there.)

While I wrestle with my pedantic demons, I need to work out my public relations section. I'm realizing increasingly that it's false to separate communication, education, and PR in the way I'm doing it, but it seems so necessary if I'm to maintain some semblance of order. I have a full committee meeting set for early April, so I should be able to get some feedback on it then.

Hmmm.... I've got an idea percolating in mah brain. (MAH BRAIN HURTS! It'll have to come out!!) Would anyone like to be on my cyber-committee? Take a look at my draft bits, give me some feedback? I'm not quite confident enough to post my raw writing to the blog, still a bit too possessive of my ideas, afraid they're going to get stoled or bashed between two heavy bricks (Have you sussed this paragraph's theme yet? Two points for you!).

Before I devolve too far into the "cry for help, this thesis thing is hard" I wanted to make sure you all saw Nina's very cool post on museum blogs. She breaks down museum blog approaches in an understandable manner. Nina, I think you've just earned a bibliographic citation in my thesis! I can see using your break down in my spreadsheet of blogs and/or in my introduction to/explanation of blogs.

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Tracing Active Learners

Constructivist theory figures largely into my rationalization of blogs for museums.

Today I realized that I don't know enough about it and am tracing it through Wikipedia. Gods bless Wikipedia for relatively accurate, extensive, and well linked information.

Jean Piaget, father of Cognitive Development

Cognitive development led, in part, to Constructivist Epistemology which tells us that there is no inherent reality, only that which is constructed by the mind and by society.

Then there's Lev Vygotsky who was instrumental in theories of social construction, in which an individual's construction of reality is influenced by their surroundings (ie society). He's also the Zone of Proximal Development guy. The Zone of Proximal Development being not a Star Trek episode, but rather the zone between what a learner knows and what they have the potential to know. It suggests that the ability to learn is affected by social interaction and collaboration.

Jurgen Habermas is also a name to know. His theory of the public sphere as "a network for communicating information and points of view" dovetails nicely to a discussion of blogging in museums, I think. "Democratic public life only thrives where institutions enable citizens to debate matters of public importance." Public realm accessible to all? Sounds like the internet to me. Well, accessible to many people in developed countries at least. If we were to get into less developed countries and issues of class we'd have a very different paper. An extremely important one, but different.

Moving out of Wikipedia, there's George Hein, author of "The Constructivist Museum" in which Hein explains why constructivism is what all the cool kids on the museum block should be doing. He has no Wikipedia entry.

And that's what I know. For today at least.

Look! Tribbles! Hmmm... that reminds me of an article I read, Be Constructive: Blogs, Podcasts, and Wikis as Constructivist Learning Tools, which used terribly mixed Star Trek metaphors and saying to try and facilitate the article. Good information, bad use of Star Trek.

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Butterflies

I've had butterflies in my stomach several times this week. As the stress increases and time goes shorter I'll have a veritable flock of butterflies.

The butterflies in my stomach now are ones of excitation. Why? Because, just now, I encountered Radical Trust, both the concept and the blog. Sure I'd heard the word, but hadn't connected it to anything. And now, reading the article on the blog, I became so excited! I love it, adore it, when people say things that need saying, things which seem so painfully obvious to so many of us and yet are escaping others. I'm glad there's a term for it.

And it seems like museums might not have that kind of radical trust in their publics to really allow them behind the scenes and into the life of the museum. Who really seems to trust their publics? The Science Museum of Minnesota (Hi Liza! Thanks for stopping in). Not only do they have a pretty rockin' science blog, but (and correct me if I'm wrong here folks) users can register and submit stories for the blog. Who doesn't trust their publics? Well... I have a few ideas on that, but I want to get my surveys out and back before I go naming names. But I get the feeling that there's no a full commitment to trust in the museum blog community. Not just yet. Moving forward though.

Less recent butterfly reason: On Wednesday I got an email scheduling my first interview for a real job! Squeee!

But sometimes I get butterflies from too much caffeine. Really any caffeine lately. That's what happens when you're mostly off the stuff for about 6 months and then go hitting your body with Mt. Dew or a mocha every other day.

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Notes - Communication

Uh Oh. Disconnectedness, personal style notetaking ahead. Here's where I'm just talking to myself, trying to pin out some ideas.

Broadcast v. Network
Two systems interrelated. Blogging as a combination of the two? Particularly for institutional blogs? Or all internet as both? Certainly there is the need to put your stuff out there, but also the opportunity to create a network around said stuff. So Network is an extension of broadcast. Not nesc. the Second Media Age. It's more like Media Age 4.0 (printing, telecommunications, tv, internet). Just a continuation, an upgrade that does not supercede the previous.

Generation Gap
Younger folks get Media Age 4.0. Older folks not always. Mmmm... Tasty sweeping generalizations. Generally older folks control institutions. Thus not always getting how CMC (computer mediated communications) is a part of life for many younger folks.

Text and Interactivity
See this earlier entry and the relationship article. Text based stuff with feedback options is more useful to younger users than masses of multimedia glitz. Razzle Dazzle 'em and they'll still notice that you ain't got no content.

Are we going to reach as many people through our blogs as through our radio spots? Probably not. Unless we're doing something really great and special - which some museums have managed to do. But even if we're not reaching as many people, the quality of the interaction is higher, the consistent blog reader is more likely to feel invested in and related to the blog author/organization. (Is there anything to back this up? Just personal experience? Gotta be something. Maybe Naked Conversations has something. Look into Cluetrain.)

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Voicey voicey voice

I've been a peer writing tutor at two major US universities, so I consider myself pretty versed in the basics of writing, and some of those not-so-basics. One of the most important yet hard to capture aspects of writing is Voice. That elusive tone individual to a writer that means so much to the reader and can be so hard to control.

We were discussing voice in my Thesis Seminar Support Group last week. And I thought it would be a hoot to write portions of my thesis in my blogging voice. Because my blogging voice is SO SO SO far away from my academic writing voice and even strays pretty far from my speaking voice. That is, I am WAY more outgoing sounding and enthusiastic in my online incarnations. Which is fine.

Can you imagine reading an academic paper written in my blogging voice? That'd be a good time. But no credibility.

There's the rub. My blogging voice is genuine. It's (I think) pretty passionate and sincere. But it is completely and totally not credible. Sure, I can try and establish my street cred by reading off my accomplishments, but, dude, I say things like dude.

So museum blogs are in a sticky place with voice. Museums depend on their credibility - visitors attend for a learning experience. If a museum isn't a good learning experience, it is going to lose attendees. So when it comes to blogging, a museum can't blog like a 13 year old girl or, really, like a 24 year old master's student. A museum needs to blog like a museum.

But a museum blog is usually written by more than one person. This tosses an additional wrench into the works. Individual voices speaking for an institution. How is this balanced? Is it balanced? Is there a higher blogging power at the museum that goes over all posts before they are published and evens out the voice, avoiding the more dramatic and least credible blogspeak? How does this work?

And a blog voice can't be totally academic (ie the most credible voice), because no one can talk back to an academic paper (okay, that's hyperbole, but you get the idea). Sure, it might invite some academic response, but it's alienating to most folks. To engage in conversation, you need to be conversational, you can't be pedantic or academic. It's a hard line to walk because there's no easy solution to the problem. And you can't be taught voice. You can be shown how voice relates to reader's perceptions, but even the experienced can be hardpressed to point out specific changes to make to adjust one's writing voice.

How do you museum bloggers do it? What do you keep in mind to maintain a professional, yet inviting voice? Is it even an issue that's ever come up? Am I asking too many questions?

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