Western man has created chaos by denying that part of his self that integrates while enshrining the parts that fragment experience.
–Edward T. Hall in Beyond Culture
An interesting moment for me during the E-Learning Group’s Think Drink, came when Wendy Earle, Online Education Manager at the British Film Institute, shared her (perhaps slightly depressing) insight that elearning is a marginalized activity within an already marginalized field. Her statement highlights the practical obstacles to elearning, particularly the lack of recognition for educators within many museums. In some institutions, this expresses itself literally in the physical arrangement of offices which places educators in a no-man’s land where they have little opportunity to interact with colleagues from other departments. In others, it manifests when educators are denied access to technology resources, such as the museum’s website, additional workstations and desperately needed software upgrades.
This scene from Jacques Tati's classic Playtime (1967) epitomizes the compartmental (and departmental) thinking that stifles collaboration between educators and technologists in many museums.
The impenetrability of departmental boundaries creates tension between the IT, web or communications teams who manage the museum website, and educators, who do not possess the technical expertise or resources to develop elearning applications on their own. An undercurrent here is the unacknowledged hierarchy of museum audiences, which privileges wealthy adult visitors over children, teachers and ethnic/diaspora communities. If the website is seen primarily as an outward facing marketing tool for members, funders and the press, then elearning initiatives aimed at these less affluent audiences are pushed aside.
Lack of respect for educators’ primary audiences is certainly not the only issue. Museum educators themselves sometimes find it easier to stay below the radar in order to get their work done. Busy with demanding day-to-day teaching activities, many simply have no time to self-promote. Even those who have time, may be uncomfortable advertising their accomplishments because it feels like a betrayal of their authentic educational mission. In addition, some side-effects of increased visibility, e.g., increased work load, managerial scrutiny of existing programs, is a discouragement.
This naturally raises the question: What can educators do to boost their visibility of their activities, and by extension, their elearning projects? Here are five ideas drawn from my own experience. I’m sure there are lots of other great ideas out there:
- Make friends. Establishing good relationships with members of the IT or web teams that own technology in the museum, lays the foundation for potential collaboration on elearning projects. At the Museum of London, Think Drink panelist Rhiannon Looseley sees her role as a vital link between the education and web teams, informing each of the other’s activities and maintaining good communication. Connecting regularly with other departments helps thaw the ice of territoriality.
- Evangelize. Make the rounds to colleagues’ offices for a chat, publish a blog, podcast, internal newsletter, or start an email list to share information about your projects. Organize symposia, retreats or informal gatherings for colleagues where you can communicate and dialogue about your work. In January 2009, the Smithsonian Institution sponsored a conference for its employees on connecting with new audiences through digital technologies. Consider inviting industry experts to these events and collaborate with them beforehand to ensure examples from your work are included in their talks.
- Demonstrate. Use statistics from recent research to bolster your arguments for why elearning is important. As Think Drink participants noted, museum curators and administrators repeatedly raise the same kinds of objections to web-based learning and publishing. For example, if someone claims that putting museum content online discourages visitors from coming to the museum, you can refute this with two recent studies from IMLS and CHIN, both of which showed that visiting the website made people more likely (not less) to make a physical visit.
- Develop, hire or recruit technical expertise. If organizational conflicts make it difficult to establish a cooperative relationship with the IT group, consider teaching yourself some basic technical skills. It has become easy to produce instructional media using online tools that do not require in-depth knowledge of programming. Increasing your familiarity with technology will enable you to speak more intelligently with engineers when making the case for elearning. Another option is to hire a part-time programmer or recruit a volunteer who can assist with small-scale development projects and help bring non-technical educators up to speed.
- Experiment. Try out new ideas through pilot projects that you can develop without outside approval or additional funding. Shelley Bernstein has successfully used this approach to introduce social media at the Brooklyn Museum. Her articles on “scrappy” IT (2007, 2008) are a great source of inspiration. “Going rogue” doesn’t have to be scary, if done in a measured way. Make a list of projects, choose the best three, and imagine how they might be tested through small scale pilots. Volunteer testers can be invited to the museum to try the application if publishing content on the web is a sensitive issue. Once you have hard data and positive feedback, use this to advocate for more resources to fully implement the single most promising project.
As Edward Hall points out, it is an unfortunate feature of Western society that our institutions are dominated by fragmented thinking. In the pursuit of orderliness and efficiency, we break apart organizations and activities into isolated departments which rarely communicate or collaborate well with one another. Though learning (and therefore elearning) is a core activity of our museums, it is often seen as the exclusive domain of educators. If educators take the initiative in spreading their mission and sharing expertise liberally throughout their institutions, it will bring us closer to the goal of integration we aspire to.
On Thursday, 26th March 2009, the E-Learning Group met for a “Think Drink” in a cozy pub in Covent Garden. Three panelists from London museums discussed the role of elearning in their institutions with other learning and technology professionals. The informal atmosphere and relatively small group, led to a lively and wide-ranging discussion of topics including the definition of learning, 3D virtual tours, and “going rouge” to promote Web 2.0 technologies. Thanks to Martin Bazley for organizing the event, and to the panelists: Rhiannon Looseley, Web Elearning Officer at the Museum of London; Carolyn Howitt, Elearning Editor at The British Museum; and Wendy Earle, Online Education Manager at the British Film Institute.
From my work in the web and IT teams at various museums, I think the first step should be to meet your web/IT teams over a coffee/tea/beer!
They’re probably just as under-resourced, but would be willing to help as long as they have some idea what’s going on. If you go elsewhere for help, the results may not fit into your infrastructure, and everyone feels undermined and discouraged.
Ironically, given their public communication role, museums are very good at not communicating internally.
Thanks Shelley for posting this, and glad that you enjoyed the Think Drink. I think it was certainly really useful to meet with you all and discuss our ideas.
I agree with Mia that a first step should certainly be to build good relations with your web team before thinking about getting external help. As I said at the Think Drink, my role sits well within the Learning team but I quickly came to the conclusion when I started at the Museum of London that I need to also maintain close links with the web team here as much as with the team in which I work since they often raise issues as important as those raised by my team.
I also agree, however, that it’s worth those of us who work in the more content (rather than technical) side of eLearning to teach ourselves some basic technical skills, if only to understand the vocabulary of the medium that we’re working with.
Understanding some basic code is useful. I also remember Frankie Roberto suggesting at last year’s Wine, Web 2.0 and What’s New that you should use blogs/social networking/Flickr etc yourself before using it professionally and I think that’s great advice as well. I think a basic knowledge of Flash could also help.
Many thanks to Mia and Rhiannon for sharing your thoughts. I completely agree with Mia that informal get-togethers are often the best way of establishing a good working rapport between educators and ITers. Ideally, the communications and marketing folks should be invited along as well. Even in the TEC-CH program at the University of Lugano which is all about interdisciplinarity, both students and instructors tended to fall into one of three worldviews: Education, Technology and Communication/Marketing. And though they usually agreed about what the goals of a project should be, they expressed themselves with different vocabularies. Each referred to different theories and experiences specific to their own discipline, which were not always accepted or understood by the others. This goes back to my main point in this post: the importance of thinking outside our cubicles and finding ways to communicate across departments so everyone can be more effective.
Rhiannon: Great suggestions for how non-technical educators should focus their self-study activities. Related to Frankie’s comment that people should use Web 2.0 tools personally before using them professionally, the incredible Larry Friedlander tells students that anyone working in a museum must have a go at actually making art. He argues that it is impossible to interpret or really explain art to others without having tried it yourself.
This is great, Shelley. I completely agree with all of your points. In my institution, the Web site team is housed in a building FAR way from everyone else. We have to catch a shuttle bus to meet vs. the easy, unfriendly method of sending tons of email. Your post is a reminder that it’s important to make the effort–I’m inspired to suggest a regular pizza lunch
You may be interested in the blog post I’ve just written inspired by the things I’ve been to at MW2009. I’d be interested to hear what you think about it.
It’s here: http://rhiannonlooseley.blogspot.com/2009/04/top-tips-for-museums-creating-e.html#links.