Opening presentations

We've just had two very interesting (and well received) opening presentations, from Carol Lynn Alpert, who reflected back on her experiences at the Museum of Science, Boston, and from Bryan Kennedy, who talked about how the Science Buzz project at the Science Museum of Minnesota.



I'm going to ask Carol Lynn and Bryan to each post a brief entry about their presentations, perhaps including their slides or a short summary, so I won't try to repeat it all here. However, one of the key points (for me at least) from Carol Lynn's presentation, was the need for innovator (such as those delivering contemporary science issues in new ways) to have a level of autonomy within an organisation, in order to overcome institutional inertia.



Carol mentioned a book (or article?) on this topic, for further reading (which I'll try and get the reference for), but I wondered what the experiences are of other colleagues in this area? One observation I note is that several organisations seem to be partly tackling this problem by engaging with a wider community in order to foster innovation, either through developer communities (of enthusiastic amateurs), or by employing external agencies. Is this a useful way forward for museums, or should be be doing more to foster innovation in-house?

Workshop aims

Well, day one of the workshops starts in just under an hour. Before we get going, I've just stopped to post up some of the aims of these two days.

"We'd like to give everyone here a chance to look at, think about and discuss some of the technological opportunities and challenges that museums face over the coming years. In addition, we'd like to look at the challenges and opportunities in building large scale collaborative partnerships."

To meet these aims, we'll be covering four main areas over the course of the two days:

• Converging the real & virtual


• Mobile technologies


• Multi- site collaboration


• Future technologies

The two days will consist of talks, presentations, demonstrations and brainstorming sessions, to help us shape a bold new future in interactive development in exhibitions. We will be discussing how best to use mobile technologies within exhibitions, personal technologies, what the next generation of user generated feedback will be like, large scale collaborative projects and multi-user interactivity.