University of Edinburgh reports for the National Museums Online Learning Project available online

I wanted to share links to the PDFs of the National Museums Online Learning Project ( http://www.vam.ac.uk/about_va/online_learning/index.html ) research reports, produced by the research team at the University of Edinburgh.

The final report coincided with the end of the project in Spring 2009. The NMOLP resources - WebQuests and Creative Spaces - continue to be developed, however, and the final report takes this into account.

Bayne, S., Ross, J., Williamson, Z. (2009) National Museums Online Learning Project final report. University of Edinburgh. http://www.malts.ed.ac.uk/staff/sian/nmolp/finalreport.pdf

Here are the earlier reports:

Bayne, S., Ross, J., Williamson, Z. (2007) National Museums Online Learning Project Stage one report. University of Edinburgh. Viewed 25 April 2009. http://www.malts.ed.ac.uk/staff/sian/nmolp/stage1.pdf

Bayne, S., Ross, J., Williamson, Z. (2008) National Museums Online Learning Project Stage two report: part 1, Creative journeying: portraits of our users. University of Edinburgh. Viewed 25 April 2009. http://www.malts.ed.ac.uk/staff/sian/nmolp/stage2creativespaces.pdf

Bayne, S., Ross, J., Williamson, Z. (2008) National Museums Online Learning Project Stage two report: part 2, Watching, gaming, learning: webquest contexts of use. University of Edinburgh. Viewed 25 April 2009. http://www.malts.ed.ac.uk/staff/sian/nmolp/stage2webquests.pdf

We would welcome any comments!

[Update 20 July] - Should have put links to the resources in the first time! There is an entry point for each resource from each of the nine partner sites, but these will get you started:

Creative Spaces: http://www.vam.ac.uk/activ_events/adult_resources/creative_spaces/index.html

Webquests: http://www.vam.ac.uk/school_stdnts/schools/pupils/webquests/index.html

at the Inclusive Museum conference in Leiden, part 3

I had to miss Wednesday, the last day of the conference, but had an action-packed final day myself on Tuesday.

The first presentation I saw was on museum learning and virtual worlds. I felt the presenter (Lea Kuznik, from the University of Ljubljana) could have taken time to link her theoretical framework (Gogola's experiential pedagogy and 'peak experiences') to her overview of virtual worlds. I think it could have been a fascinating paper about what a 'peak experience' might be in such a digital environment. I hope she carries on with this research - I'd like to hear about it again when it's a bit further down the road.

I was tremendously impressed by Edith Doron's paper (she is doing her doctoral research at the University of Aberdeen) on "building a Sukkah for the museum". It was about how a children's museum can engage in a responsibility to the other - a responsibility she described by quoting Edmond Jabès:

"On this side of responsibility there is solidarity. On the other, hospitality."

Her talk was largely about hospitality, and what it might mean for the museum to be a stranger among strangers, rather than a facilitator of discussion "between us about them". A Sukkah (I learned) is a booth or hut (purposefully rickety) which Jewish families build after Yom Kippur - a temporary ritualised dwelling space. The Sukkah celebrates harvest and commemorates the exodus of Hebrew slaves, and it architecturally stages the act of hospitality. It has to be an exposed space where there is an inevitability of encounter with strangers. Families have to leave the solidity of home and dwell in uncertain space. The other is not invited in by the 'potis' (master), but is invited in by an exile: the "turn toward outside is from the outside". She argued that such a metaphorical (or real, in the case of the Brooklyn Children's Museum, where Edith worked, or the Jewish Museum in Berlin) space can help museums to rethink belonging and otherness, and their place in the communities they serve.

For me the link here to the online museum is strong: the online museum itself could be a Sukkah. Rather than attempting to regulate or dominate digital space, museums could allow themselves to be in exile along with their online communities. Perhaps to treat the web as a distinctively strange and different space, rather than a bolted on, lesser version of the material museum, would be to engage with old (new) notions of hospitality in something of the way that Edith described.

I also had a number of good conversations with various interesting people on Tuesday, which is why I don't have many papers to report on! That and the repeated cancellations of things I was going to. I haven't written about everything, though, and I may find time to write more over the next few days.

Emerging into the sunshine I discovered something new had sprung up during the day.

I bought a copy of Jane Eyre, had a lovely meal and a walk with a new friend, and left Leiden with a head full of new thoughts, a pocket full of business cards, and a major appreciation for the creativity, diversity and thoughtfulness of the material inspired by the theme of the inclusive museum.

at the Inclusive Museum conference in Leiden, part 2

I think today was about the personal for me. It started with a really nice chat over breakfast about people's personal attachment to museums and museum spaces - I shared a story from one of our recent NMOLP research reports with the president of ICOM - eep! - which probably got me thinking along these lines to begin with.

Then I went to Marcus Wood's keynote. He gave a moving and complex talk about museum narratives of the mass trauma of slavery, and their focus on the wounded slave body and instruments of torture, followed by the heroic story of emancipation and abolition. He contrasted this with the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, with its extremely explicit, intimate and creative depictions of mass trauma. He focussed in particular on an installation about lynching, and drew some interesting parallels between strategies the curators used in their exhibit and other artistic and cultural moves both past and present. He then linked this to Brazilian museums' approaches to the display of memory of slavery and their syncretic use of religious iconography and images of slavery, and the transformation of everyday objects (Barbie as Yemanja was particularly cool). I went afterwards to his "garden session" (held in a 2nd floor lobby...), where the conversation about the Martins, who created the NGBiWM, and their passion and commitment to telling this story and to their 'family of ancestors', got me thinking about how powerful the urge to collect, interpret and narrate is for some people. The web may make it easier for some to do this, but the impulse is not new. I already knew that, but sometimes it takes a concrete example before I Know it.

I got three more examples before long, in a talk by Donald Lawrence from UBC called "vernacular practice in the personal museum". His main examples were two personal museums in the Netherlands (both fascinating stories!), but he started off by talking about Sir John Soane's museum in London, which is one of the partners in the NMOLP and a place I really loved when I visited it. Of course Soane had buckets of money with which to indulge his passion for collecting, but the other personal museum creators I heard about today definitely didn't. This is real DIY stuff - uncomfortably chaotic, messy, and 'ugly' (as Lina Bo Bardi would have it, I learned today!).

Also today Elizabeth Mix talking about Fred Wilson's interventions in museum spaces - bringing pieces from collections together in new ways, and offering critiques of museum practice in the form of jarring juxtapositions, retitling, addition of artefacts and changes of staging. Her talk was full of great examples and interesting connections. However, a curator in the audience asked what lessons should be taken from Wilson, and Elizabeth's answer (that labels and barriers should be rethought, objects grouped differently) seemed to me to miss a point I took from what I saw of his work: that there is always an intervention, a reorganisation to be done, gaps and silences to fill in - not that there is a 'right' way to stage an exhibition, or that we should all follow Wilson's example... anyone else have a view about this?

I'm going to go out and find something nice to eat, now. Hopefully I'll fancy something besides pancakes...

at the Inclusive Museum conference in Leiden, part 1

At Lynda's suggestion, I thought I'd make a few notes here for those unlucky enough not to be in glorious Leiden at the first International Conference on the Inclusive Museum.

First, let me say that if it were possible to subsist entirely on Dutch pancakes, I would do it.

The introductory material in the conference programme touches on many themes and concerns of interest to me:

the diversity of visitors
particularity vs universality
the role of the reader, viewer, audience, funder
multi-modality and the 'born digital' museum
intellectual property
intangible heritage

and the first day's sessions didn't disappoint.

First we learned from Steven Englesman, Director of the National Museum of Ethnology (where the conference is being held) that a grateful William of Orange offered the citizens of Leiden a choice of two gifts in 1575: tax free beer forever, or a university. They chose the university!

Tomur Atagok, professor and founder of the museology department at Yildiz University, Turkey, gave the first keynote, stressing that inclusive museums do more than invite everyone in: they break down barriers. She focussed on children and young people, and the benefits in terms of trust and a sense of belonging that come from their active involvement and contribution in museum spaces.

There was supposed to be a 'talking circle', but something strange happened to the schedule so this only ended up being about 10 minutes long, and I don't think it even approached being what it was supposed to be (giving shape to a broad conference, interacting around key ideas, differences and points of difficulty). Too bad, because the idea seemed good. Maybe the second talking circle session will be given more time to compensate.

For the first parallel session I went to "Indiginous Cultural Heritage and the Virtual Museum" by Saskia Vermeylen and Jeremy Pilcher from Lancaster University. Saskia's research around the San people of South Africa and their relationship to the hoodia plant brought her to thinking more broadly about the repatriation of cultural property, and how talk of ownership and rights gives rise to a broader discourse of ownership.

The dominant narrative of tribal experience is of loss and cultural genocide - repatriation emphasises the return of the object to its original status, its decommodification. But the value and meaning of the object cannot be reduced to the last transaction. Simply returning the object will not erase its history of commodification. Indeed, erasing the commodity phase reduces native people to passive recipients.

The significance or 'enchantment' of an object is not in aesthetics but in social relations surrounding it. Online, she argues, content shifts away from meaning towards interaction, and therefore opens up more possibilities for multiple narratives and contexts.

Jeremy then took over to discuss the problems of databases as new media objects, with the work of Lev Manovich as a jumping off point. Manovich argues (as I understand it! - need to read up on this) that the database only appears to present the world as an unordered list, but that in fact it has narratives built into it in the form of assumptions, language, and ideas about what is or is not interconnected. The best thing to do about this, Jeremy suggested, is to acknowledge this and explictly try to weave other, alternative narratives in to the mix. They are hoping to get funding to do just this. I loved their paper, and because the subsequent speaker didn't turn up, we got a full half hour of conversation afterwards: bliss.

In the afternoon I saw Marijke van Eeckhaut, from the University of Ghent, talk about spectator-driven visual art presentations (her stuff on integration to inclusion was good, I thought), and Chloe Paver from Exeter's really interesting paper about the representation of women in historical images from Germany and Austria - how male qualities of restraint and order are juxtaposed against women's ecstasy and hysteria in being 'seduced' by Hitler, and the difficulty in unpicking the extent to which these images are chosen/preferred by curators and exhibition designers.

Then I gave my paper - which went quite well!

Then the lovely Kate Pahl spoke about her project/exhibition talking to Pakistani/Kashmiri families in Rotherham, and how stories and objects intertwine.

I learned a lot today about things I previously knew nothing about. My favourite kind of conferences are like that.

Amareswar Galla explained as he opened the conference how difficult it had been to get funding to make this event happen. I guess it's focussing on a topic (inclusivity) which is (perhaps?) considered both general and marginal. But I gather than in partnership with Common Ground they will be hosting another one next year, in Brisbane. Well worth checking out for those down under (or with funding to make the trip!).

Arts and Humanities Research Council collaborative doctoral award: the internet and the archive

This is a call for applications for a PhD studentship at the University of Edinburgh: co-supervised by Sian Bayne, the principal investigator on the National Museums Online Learning Project research strand.


School of Education, University of Edinburgh, UK
Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), UK

This studentship, fully funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, with additional funding from the collaborating partner, will support three years of full-time study. The student will investigate how the internet is changing the way users engage with, and learn from, the collections of cultural institutions, with supervision provided by Dr Sian Bayne (University of Edinburgh) and Ms Rebecca Bailey (RCAHMS).

Basing the study on the online education and outreach activities of RCAHMS, the broad remit of the project is to explore how new online media environments change and challenge the curatorial and outreach responsibilities of museums, galleries and archives.

The studentship covers all UK fees, and includes an allowance of £12,940 per academic year, plus an additional annual £1,500 maintenance payment provided by the AHRC and RCAHMS. Students may also be eligible for UK study visits and one overseas study visit as well as one overseas conference for the duration of the award. For eligibility criteria, see the AHRC web site at: http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/apply/postgrad/postgrad_details_d/eligibility.asp

For fuller details of the proposed project, and the application procedure, please see: http://www.education.ed.ac.uk/e-learning/ahrc.pdf.

To discuss the project informally, please contact Mrs Pam Holgate, University of Edinburgh (0131 651 6120, pam.holgate@ed.ac.uk) or Ms Rebecca Bailey, RCAHMS (0131 662 1456, rebecca.bailey@rcahms.gov.uk).

Applications should be submitted by 13 June 2008, and we anticipate that interviews will be held during the week of 7th July.

University of Edinburgh: http://www.ed.ac.uk
Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland: http://www.rcahms.gov.uk

Inclusive Museum conference, Leiden

I'm working on a paper for the Inclusive Museum conference in Leiden in June. The paper will focus on inclusive online museum learning, and the National Museums Online Learning Project in particular. It's structured around four key concepts: reach, relevance, relationship and recontextualisation, and touches on themes of the digital vs physical museum, the shift in museum learning from a focus on objects to a focus on users, what 'quality' means in online learning, tensions in schools between creativity and performativity, and social media and its relationship with institutional authority - all themes which have emerged so far in our research with the NMOLP.

Our experiences with this project have highlighted a number of creative tensions around openness and authority, insiders and outsiders, and control (who has it, who wants it...). It's interesting to think about how these issues might evolve as social media and user-generated content make their way from the margins to the centres of cultural institutions.

I really enjoyed Ross Parry's semantic web session at Museums and the Web in Montreal - the idea of the machine-readable web (web 3.0?) is pretty compelling and exciting. But even more interesting (to me! and sad, perhaps), is thinking about how institutions (museums, universities, schools) might use/co-opt/learn from/change/be changed by the digital environments they venture into. I often find that conversations about the digital/social/user-generated content in institutions - even those which start off innocently enough - end up being about the nature and purpose of those institutions. That's why I find e-learning such an exciting field to be involved in, I think.

University of Edinburgh reports for the National Museums Online Learning Project available online

I wanted to share links to the PDFs of the National Museums Online Learning Project ( http://www.vam.ac.uk/about_va/online_learning/index.html ) research reports, produced by the research team at the University of Edinburgh.

The final report coincided with the end of the project in Spring 2009. The NMOLP resources - WebQuests and Creative Spaces - continue to be developed, however, and the final report takes this into account.

Bayne, S., Ross, J., Williamson, Z. (2009) National Museums Online Learning Project final report. University of Edinburgh. http://www.malts.ed.ac.uk/staff/sian/nmolp/finalreport.pdf

Here are the earlier reports:

Bayne, S., Ross, J., Williamson, Z. (2007) National Museums Online Learning Project Stage one report. University of Edinburgh. Viewed 25 April 2009. http://www.malts.ed.ac.uk/staff/sian/nmolp/stage1.pdf

Bayne, S., Ross, J., Williamson, Z. (2008) National Museums Online Learning Project Stage two report: part 1, Creative journeying: portraits of our users. University of Edinburgh. Viewed 25 April 2009. http://www.malts.ed.ac.uk/staff/sian/nmolp/stage2creativespaces.pdf

Bayne, S., Ross, J., Williamson, Z. (2008) National Museums Online Learning Project Stage two report: part 2, Watching, gaming, learning: webquest contexts of use. University of Edinburgh. Viewed 25 April 2009. http://www.malts.ed.ac.uk/staff/sian/nmolp/stage2webquests.pdf

We would welcome any comments!

[Update 20 July] - Should have put links to the resources in the first time! There is an entry point for each resource from each of the nine partner sites, but these will get you started:

Creative Spaces: http://www.vam.ac.uk/activ_events/adult_resources/creative_spaces/index.html

Webquests: http://www.vam.ac.uk/school_stdnts/schools/pupils/webquests/index.html

at the Inclusive Museum conference in Leiden, part 3

I had to miss Wednesday, the last day of the conference, but had an action-packed final day myself on Tuesday.

The first presentation I saw was on museum learning and virtual worlds. I felt the presenter (Lea Kuznik, from the University of Ljubljana) could have taken time to link her theoretical framework (Gogola's experiential pedagogy and 'peak experiences') to her overview of virtual worlds. I think it could have been a fascinating paper about what a 'peak experience' might be in such a digital environment. I hope she carries on with this research - I'd like to hear about it again when it's a bit further down the road.

I was tremendously impressed by Edith Doron's paper (she is doing her doctoral research at the University of Aberdeen) on "building a Sukkah for the museum". It was about how a children's museum can engage in a responsibility to the other - a responsibility she described by quoting Edmond Jabès:

"On this side of responsibility there is solidarity. On the other, hospitality."

Her talk was largely about hospitality, and what it might mean for the museum to be a stranger among strangers, rather than a facilitator of discussion "between us about them". A Sukkah (I learned) is a booth or hut (purposefully rickety) which Jewish families build after Yom Kippur - a temporary ritualised dwelling space. The Sukkah celebrates harvest and commemorates the exodus of Hebrew slaves, and it architecturally stages the act of hospitality. It has to be an exposed space where there is an inevitability of encounter with strangers. Families have to leave the solidity of home and dwell in uncertain space. The other is not invited in by the 'potis' (master), but is invited in by an exile: the "turn toward outside is from the outside". She argued that such a metaphorical (or real, in the case of the Brooklyn Children's Museum, where Edith worked, or the Jewish Museum in Berlin) space can help museums to rethink belonging and otherness, and their place in the communities they serve.

For me the link here to the online museum is strong: the online museum itself could be a Sukkah. Rather than attempting to regulate or dominate digital space, museums could allow themselves to be in exile along with their online communities. Perhaps to treat the web as a distinctively strange and different space, rather than a bolted on, lesser version of the material museum, would be to engage with old (new) notions of hospitality in something of the way that Edith described.

I also had a number of good conversations with various interesting people on Tuesday, which is why I don't have many papers to report on! That and the repeated cancellations of things I was going to. I haven't written about everything, though, and I may find time to write more over the next few days.

Emerging into the sunshine I discovered something new had sprung up during the day.

I bought a copy of Jane Eyre, had a lovely meal and a walk with a new friend, and left Leiden with a head full of new thoughts, a pocket full of business cards, and a major appreciation for the creativity, diversity and thoughtfulness of the material inspired by the theme of the inclusive museum.

at the Inclusive Museum conference in Leiden, part 2

I think today was about the personal for me. It started with a really nice chat over breakfast about people's personal attachment to museums and museum spaces - I shared a story from one of our recent NMOLP research reports with the president of ICOM - eep! - which probably got me thinking along these lines to begin with.

Then I went to Marcus Wood's keynote. He gave a moving and complex talk about museum narratives of the mass trauma of slavery, and their focus on the wounded slave body and instruments of torture, followed by the heroic story of emancipation and abolition. He contrasted this with the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, with its extremely explicit, intimate and creative depictions of mass trauma. He focussed in particular on an installation about lynching, and drew some interesting parallels between strategies the curators used in their exhibit and other artistic and cultural moves both past and present. He then linked this to Brazilian museums' approaches to the display of memory of slavery and their syncretic use of religious iconography and images of slavery, and the transformation of everyday objects (Barbie as Yemanja was particularly cool). I went afterwards to his "garden session" (held in a 2nd floor lobby...), where the conversation about the Martins, who created the NGBiWM, and their passion and commitment to telling this story and to their 'family of ancestors', got me thinking about how powerful the urge to collect, interpret and narrate is for some people. The web may make it easier for some to do this, but the impulse is not new. I already knew that, but sometimes it takes a concrete example before I Know it.

I got three more examples before long, in a talk by Donald Lawrence from UBC called "vernacular practice in the personal museum". His main examples were two personal museums in the Netherlands (both fascinating stories!), but he started off by talking about Sir John Soane's museum in London, which is one of the partners in the NMOLP and a place I really loved when I visited it. Of course Soane had buckets of money with which to indulge his passion for collecting, but the other personal museum creators I heard about today definitely didn't. This is real DIY stuff - uncomfortably chaotic, messy, and 'ugly' (as Lina Bo Bardi would have it, I learned today!).

Also today Elizabeth Mix talking about Fred Wilson's interventions in museum spaces - bringing pieces from collections together in new ways, and offering critiques of museum practice in the form of jarring juxtapositions, retitling, addition of artefacts and changes of staging. Her talk was full of great examples and interesting connections. However, a curator in the audience asked what lessons should be taken from Wilson, and Elizabeth's answer (that labels and barriers should be rethought, objects grouped differently) seemed to me to miss a point I took from what I saw of his work: that there is always an intervention, a reorganisation to be done, gaps and silences to fill in - not that there is a 'right' way to stage an exhibition, or that we should all follow Wilson's example... anyone else have a view about this?

I'm going to go out and find something nice to eat, now. Hopefully I'll fancy something besides pancakes...

at the Inclusive Museum conference in Leiden, part 1

At Lynda's suggestion, I thought I'd make a few notes here for those unlucky enough not to be in glorious Leiden at the first International Conference on the Inclusive Museum.

First, let me say that if it were possible to subsist entirely on Dutch pancakes, I would do it.

The introductory material in the conference programme touches on many themes and concerns of interest to me:

the diversity of visitors
particularity vs universality
the role of the reader, viewer, audience, funder
multi-modality and the 'born digital' museum
intellectual property
intangible heritage

and the first day's sessions didn't disappoint.

First we learned from Steven Englesman, Director of the National Museum of Ethnology (where the conference is being held) that a grateful William of Orange offered the citizens of Leiden a choice of two gifts in 1575: tax free beer forever, or a university. They chose the university!

Tomur Atagok, professor and founder of the museology department at Yildiz University, Turkey, gave the first keynote, stressing that inclusive museums do more than invite everyone in: they break down barriers. She focussed on children and young people, and the benefits in terms of trust and a sense of belonging that come from their active involvement and contribution in museum spaces.

There was supposed to be a 'talking circle', but something strange happened to the schedule so this only ended up being about 10 minutes long, and I don't think it even approached being what it was supposed to be (giving shape to a broad conference, interacting around key ideas, differences and points of difficulty). Too bad, because the idea seemed good. Maybe the second talking circle session will be given more time to compensate.

For the first parallel session I went to "Indiginous Cultural Heritage and the Virtual Museum" by Saskia Vermeylen and Jeremy Pilcher from Lancaster University. Saskia's research around the San people of South Africa and their relationship to the hoodia plant brought her to thinking more broadly about the repatriation of cultural property, and how talk of ownership and rights gives rise to a broader discourse of ownership.

The dominant narrative of tribal experience is of loss and cultural genocide - repatriation emphasises the return of the object to its original status, its decommodification. But the value and meaning of the object cannot be reduced to the last transaction. Simply returning the object will not erase its history of commodification. Indeed, erasing the commodity phase reduces native people to passive recipients.

The significance or 'enchantment' of an object is not in aesthetics but in social relations surrounding it. Online, she argues, content shifts away from meaning towards interaction, and therefore opens up more possibilities for multiple narratives and contexts.

Jeremy then took over to discuss the problems of databases as new media objects, with the work of Lev Manovich as a jumping off point. Manovich argues (as I understand it! - need to read up on this) that the database only appears to present the world as an unordered list, but that in fact it has narratives built into it in the form of assumptions, language, and ideas about what is or is not interconnected. The best thing to do about this, Jeremy suggested, is to acknowledge this and explictly try to weave other, alternative narratives in to the mix. They are hoping to get funding to do just this. I loved their paper, and because the subsequent speaker didn't turn up, we got a full half hour of conversation afterwards: bliss.

In the afternoon I saw Marijke van Eeckhaut, from the University of Ghent, talk about spectator-driven visual art presentations (her stuff on integration to inclusion was good, I thought), and Chloe Paver from Exeter's really interesting paper about the representation of women in historical images from Germany and Austria - how male qualities of restraint and order are juxtaposed against women's ecstasy and hysteria in being 'seduced' by Hitler, and the difficulty in unpicking the extent to which these images are chosen/preferred by curators and exhibition designers.

Then I gave my paper - which went quite well!

Then the lovely Kate Pahl spoke about her project/exhibition talking to Pakistani/Kashmiri families in Rotherham, and how stories and objects intertwine.

I learned a lot today about things I previously knew nothing about. My favourite kind of conferences are like that.

Amareswar Galla explained as he opened the conference how difficult it had been to get funding to make this event happen. I guess it's focussing on a topic (inclusivity) which is (perhaps?) considered both general and marginal. But I gather than in partnership with Common Ground they will be hosting another one next year, in Brisbane. Well worth checking out for those down under (or with funding to make the trip!).

Arts and Humanities Research Council collaborative doctoral award: the internet and the archive

This is a call for applications for a PhD studentship at the University of Edinburgh: co-supervised by Sian Bayne, the principal investigator on the National Museums Online Learning Project research strand.


School of Education, University of Edinburgh, UK
Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), UK

This studentship, fully funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, with additional funding from the collaborating partner, will support three years of full-time study. The student will investigate how the internet is changing the way users engage with, and learn from, the collections of cultural institutions, with supervision provided by Dr Sian Bayne (University of Edinburgh) and Ms Rebecca Bailey (RCAHMS).

Basing the study on the online education and outreach activities of RCAHMS, the broad remit of the project is to explore how new online media environments change and challenge the curatorial and outreach responsibilities of museums, galleries and archives.

The studentship covers all UK fees, and includes an allowance of £12,940 per academic year, plus an additional annual £1,500 maintenance payment provided by the AHRC and RCAHMS. Students may also be eligible for UK study visits and one overseas study visit as well as one overseas conference for the duration of the award. For eligibility criteria, see the AHRC web site at: http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/apply/postgrad/postgrad_details_d/eligibility.asp

For fuller details of the proposed project, and the application procedure, please see: http://www.education.ed.ac.uk/e-learning/ahrc.pdf.

To discuss the project informally, please contact Mrs Pam Holgate, University of Edinburgh (0131 651 6120, pam.holgate@ed.ac.uk) or Ms Rebecca Bailey, RCAHMS (0131 662 1456, rebecca.bailey@rcahms.gov.uk).

Applications should be submitted by 13 June 2008, and we anticipate that interviews will be held during the week of 7th July.

University of Edinburgh: http://www.ed.ac.uk
Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland: http://www.rcahms.gov.uk

Inclusive Museum conference, Leiden

I'm working on a paper for the Inclusive Museum conference in Leiden in June. The paper will focus on inclusive online museum learning, and the National Museums Online Learning Project in particular. It's structured around four key concepts: reach, relevance, relationship and recontextualisation, and touches on themes of the digital vs physical museum, the shift in museum learning from a focus on objects to a focus on users, what 'quality' means in online learning, tensions in schools between creativity and performativity, and social media and its relationship with institutional authority - all themes which have emerged so far in our research with the NMOLP.

Our experiences with this project have highlighted a number of creative tensions around openness and authority, insiders and outsiders, and control (who has it, who wants it...). It's interesting to think about how these issues might evolve as social media and user-generated content make their way from the margins to the centres of cultural institutions.

I really enjoyed Ross Parry's semantic web session at Museums and the Web in Montreal - the idea of the machine-readable web (web 3.0?) is pretty compelling and exciting. But even more interesting (to me! and sad, perhaps), is thinking about how institutions (museums, universities, schools) might use/co-opt/learn from/change/be changed by the digital environments they venture into. I often find that conversations about the digital/social/user-generated content in institutions - even those which start off innocently enough - end up being about the nature and purpose of those institutions. That's why I find e-learning such an exciting field to be involved in, I think.

University of Edinburgh reports for the National Museums Online Learning Project available online

I wanted to share links to the PDFs of the National Museums Online Learning Project ( http://www.vam.ac.uk/about_va/online_learning/index.html ) research reports, produced by the research team at the University of Edinburgh.

The final report coincided with the end of the project in Spring 2009. The NMOLP resources - WebQuests and Creative Spaces - continue to be developed, however, and the final report takes this into account.

Bayne, S., Ross, J., Williamson, Z. (2009) National Museums Online Learning Project final report. University of Edinburgh. http://www.malts.ed.ac.uk/staff/sian/nmolp/finalreport.pdf

Here are the earlier reports:

Bayne, S., Ross, J., Williamson, Z. (2007) National Museums Online Learning Project Stage one report. University of Edinburgh. Viewed 25 April 2009. http://www.malts.ed.ac.uk/staff/sian/nmolp/stage1.pdf

Bayne, S., Ross, J., Williamson, Z. (2008) National Museums Online Learning Project Stage two report: part 1, Creative journeying: portraits of our users. University of Edinburgh. Viewed 25 April 2009. http://www.malts.ed.ac.uk/staff/sian/nmolp/stage2creativespaces.pdf

Bayne, S., Ross, J., Williamson, Z. (2008) National Museums Online Learning Project Stage two report: part 2, Watching, gaming, learning: webquest contexts of use. University of Edinburgh. Viewed 25 April 2009. http://www.malts.ed.ac.uk/staff/sian/nmolp/stage2webquests.pdf

We would welcome any comments!

[Update 20 July] - Should have put links to the resources in the first time! There is an entry point for each resource from each of the nine partner sites, but these will get you started:

Creative Spaces: http://www.vam.ac.uk/activ_events/adult_resources/creative_spaces/index.html

Webquests: http://www.vam.ac.uk/school_stdnts/schools/pupils/webquests/index.html

at the Inclusive Museum conference in Leiden, part 3

I had to miss Wednesday, the last day of the conference, but had an action-packed final day myself on Tuesday.

The first presentation I saw was on museum learning and virtual worlds. I felt the presenter (Lea Kuznik, from the University of Ljubljana) could have taken time to link her theoretical framework (Gogola's experiential pedagogy and 'peak experiences') to her overview of virtual worlds. I think it could have been a fascinating paper about what a 'peak experience' might be in such a digital environment. I hope she carries on with this research - I'd like to hear about it again when it's a bit further down the road.

I was tremendously impressed by Edith Doron's paper (she is doing her doctoral research at the University of Aberdeen) on "building a Sukkah for the museum". It was about how a children's museum can engage in a responsibility to the other - a responsibility she described by quoting Edmond Jabès:

"On this side of responsibility there is solidarity. On the other, hospitality."

Her talk was largely about hospitality, and what it might mean for the museum to be a stranger among strangers, rather than a facilitator of discussion "between us about them". A Sukkah (I learned) is a booth or hut (purposefully rickety) which Jewish families build after Yom Kippur - a temporary ritualised dwelling space. The Sukkah celebrates harvest and commemorates the exodus of Hebrew slaves, and it architecturally stages the act of hospitality. It has to be an exposed space where there is an inevitability of encounter with strangers. Families have to leave the solidity of home and dwell in uncertain space. The other is not invited in by the 'potis' (master), but is invited in by an exile: the "turn toward outside is from the outside". She argued that such a metaphorical (or real, in the case of the Brooklyn Children's Museum, where Edith worked, or the Jewish Museum in Berlin) space can help museums to rethink belonging and otherness, and their place in the communities they serve.

For me the link here to the online museum is strong: the online museum itself could be a Sukkah. Rather than attempting to regulate or dominate digital space, museums could allow themselves to be in exile along with their online communities. Perhaps to treat the web as a distinctively strange and different space, rather than a bolted on, lesser version of the material museum, would be to engage with old (new) notions of hospitality in something of the way that Edith described.

I also had a number of good conversations with various interesting people on Tuesday, which is why I don't have many papers to report on! That and the repeated cancellations of things I was going to. I haven't written about everything, though, and I may find time to write more over the next few days.

Emerging into the sunshine I discovered something new had sprung up during the day.

I bought a copy of Jane Eyre, had a lovely meal and a walk with a new friend, and left Leiden with a head full of new thoughts, a pocket full of business cards, and a major appreciation for the creativity, diversity and thoughtfulness of the material inspired by the theme of the inclusive museum.

at the Inclusive Museum conference in Leiden, part 2

I think today was about the personal for me. It started with a really nice chat over breakfast about people's personal attachment to museums and museum spaces - I shared a story from one of our recent NMOLP research reports with the president of ICOM - eep! - which probably got me thinking along these lines to begin with.

Then I went to Marcus Wood's keynote. He gave a moving and complex talk about museum narratives of the mass trauma of slavery, and their focus on the wounded slave body and instruments of torture, followed by the heroic story of emancipation and abolition. He contrasted this with the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum in Baltimore, Maryland, with its extremely explicit, intimate and creative depictions of mass trauma. He focussed in particular on an installation about lynching, and drew some interesting parallels between strategies the curators used in their exhibit and other artistic and cultural moves both past and present. He then linked this to Brazilian museums' approaches to the display of memory of slavery and their syncretic use of religious iconography and images of slavery, and the transformation of everyday objects (Barbie as Yemanja was particularly cool). I went afterwards to his "garden session" (held in a 2nd floor lobby...), where the conversation about the Martins, who created the NGBiWM, and their passion and commitment to telling this story and to their 'family of ancestors', got me thinking about how powerful the urge to collect, interpret and narrate is for some people. The web may make it easier for some to do this, but the impulse is not new. I already knew that, but sometimes it takes a concrete example before I Know it.

I got three more examples before long, in a talk by Donald Lawrence from UBC called "vernacular practice in the personal museum". His main examples were two personal museums in the Netherlands (both fascinating stories!), but he started off by talking about Sir John Soane's museum in London, which is one of the partners in the NMOLP and a place I really loved when I visited it. Of course Soane had buckets of money with which to indulge his passion for collecting, but the other personal museum creators I heard about today definitely didn't. This is real DIY stuff - uncomfortably chaotic, messy, and 'ugly' (as Lina Bo Bardi would have it, I learned today!).

Also today Elizabeth Mix talking about Fred Wilson's interventions in museum spaces - bringing pieces from collections together in new ways, and offering critiques of museum practice in the form of jarring juxtapositions, retitling, addition of artefacts and changes of staging. Her talk was full of great examples and interesting connections. However, a curator in the audience asked what lessons should be taken from Wilson, and Elizabeth's answer (that labels and barriers should be rethought, objects grouped differently) seemed to me to miss a point I took from what I saw of his work: that there is always an intervention, a reorganisation to be done, gaps and silences to fill in - not that there is a 'right' way to stage an exhibition, or that we should all follow Wilson's example... anyone else have a view about this?

I'm going to go out and find something nice to eat, now. Hopefully I'll fancy something besides pancakes...

at the Inclusive Museum conference in Leiden, part 1

At Lynda's suggestion, I thought I'd make a few notes here for those unlucky enough not to be in glorious Leiden at the first International Conference on the Inclusive Museum.

First, let me say that if it were possible to subsist entirely on Dutch pancakes, I would do it.

The introductory material in the conference programme touches on many themes and concerns of interest to me:

the diversity of visitors
particularity vs universality
the role of the reader, viewer, audience, funder
multi-modality and the 'born digital' museum
intellectual property
intangible heritage

and the first day's sessions didn't disappoint.

First we learned from Steven Englesman, Director of the National Museum of Ethnology (where the conference is being held) that a grateful William of Orange offered the citizens of Leiden a choice of two gifts in 1575: tax free beer forever, or a university. They chose the university!

Tomur Atagok, professor and founder of the museology department at Yildiz University, Turkey, gave the first keynote, stressing that inclusive museums do more than invite everyone in: they break down barriers. She focussed on children and young people, and the benefits in terms of trust and a sense of belonging that come from their active involvement and contribution in museum spaces.

There was supposed to be a 'talking circle', but something strange happened to the schedule so this only ended up being about 10 minutes long, and I don't think it even approached being what it was supposed to be (giving shape to a broad conference, interacting around key ideas, differences and points of difficulty). Too bad, because the idea seemed good. Maybe the second talking circle session will be given more time to compensate.

For the first parallel session I went to "Indiginous Cultural Heritage and the Virtual Museum" by Saskia Vermeylen and Jeremy Pilcher from Lancaster University. Saskia's research around the San people of South Africa and their relationship to the hoodia plant brought her to thinking more broadly about the repatriation of cultural property, and how talk of ownership and rights gives rise to a broader discourse of ownership.

The dominant narrative of tribal experience is of loss and cultural genocide - repatriation emphasises the return of the object to its original status, its decommodification. But the value and meaning of the object cannot be reduced to the last transaction. Simply returning the object will not erase its history of commodification. Indeed, erasing the commodity phase reduces native people to passive recipients.

The significance or 'enchantment' of an object is not in aesthetics but in social relations surrounding it. Online, she argues, content shifts away from meaning towards interaction, and therefore opens up more possibilities for multiple narratives and contexts.

Jeremy then took over to discuss the problems of databases as new media objects, with the work of Lev Manovich as a jumping off point. Manovich argues (as I understand it! - need to read up on this) that the database only appears to present the world as an unordered list, but that in fact it has narratives built into it in the form of assumptions, language, and ideas about what is or is not interconnected. The best thing to do about this, Jeremy suggested, is to acknowledge this and explictly try to weave other, alternative narratives in to the mix. They are hoping to get funding to do just this. I loved their paper, and because the subsequent speaker didn't turn up, we got a full half hour of conversation afterwards: bliss.

In the afternoon I saw Marijke van Eeckhaut, from the University of Ghent, talk about spectator-driven visual art presentations (her stuff on integration to inclusion was good, I thought), and Chloe Paver from Exeter's really interesting paper about the representation of women in historical images from Germany and Austria - how male qualities of restraint and order are juxtaposed against women's ecstasy and hysteria in being 'seduced' by Hitler, and the difficulty in unpicking the extent to which these images are chosen/preferred by curators and exhibition designers.

Then I gave my paper - which went quite well!

Then the lovely Kate Pahl spoke about her project/exhibition talking to Pakistani/Kashmiri families in Rotherham, and how stories and objects intertwine.

I learned a lot today about things I previously knew nothing about. My favourite kind of conferences are like that.

Amareswar Galla explained as he opened the conference how difficult it had been to get funding to make this event happen. I guess it's focussing on a topic (inclusivity) which is (perhaps?) considered both general and marginal. But I gather than in partnership with Common Ground they will be hosting another one next year, in Brisbane. Well worth checking out for those down under (or with funding to make the trip!).

Arts and Humanities Research Council collaborative doctoral award: the internet and the archive

This is a call for applications for a PhD studentship at the University of Edinburgh: co-supervised by Sian Bayne, the principal investigator on the National Museums Online Learning Project research strand.


School of Education, University of Edinburgh, UK
Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), UK

This studentship, fully funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, with additional funding from the collaborating partner, will support three years of full-time study. The student will investigate how the internet is changing the way users engage with, and learn from, the collections of cultural institutions, with supervision provided by Dr Sian Bayne (University of Edinburgh) and Ms Rebecca Bailey (RCAHMS).

Basing the study on the online education and outreach activities of RCAHMS, the broad remit of the project is to explore how new online media environments change and challenge the curatorial and outreach responsibilities of museums, galleries and archives.

The studentship covers all UK fees, and includes an allowance of £12,940 per academic year, plus an additional annual £1,500 maintenance payment provided by the AHRC and RCAHMS. Students may also be eligible for UK study visits and one overseas study visit as well as one overseas conference for the duration of the award. For eligibility criteria, see the AHRC web site at: http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/apply/postgrad/postgrad_details_d/eligibility.asp

For fuller details of the proposed project, and the application procedure, please see: http://www.education.ed.ac.uk/e-learning/ahrc.pdf.

To discuss the project informally, please contact Mrs Pam Holgate, University of Edinburgh (0131 651 6120, pam.holgate@ed.ac.uk) or Ms Rebecca Bailey, RCAHMS (0131 662 1456, rebecca.bailey@rcahms.gov.uk).

Applications should be submitted by 13 June 2008, and we anticipate that interviews will be held during the week of 7th July.

University of Edinburgh: http://www.ed.ac.uk
Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland: http://www.rcahms.gov.uk

Inclusive Museum conference, Leiden

I'm working on a paper for the Inclusive Museum conference in Leiden in June. The paper will focus on inclusive online museum learning, and the National Museums Online Learning Project in particular. It's structured around four key concepts: reach, relevance, relationship and recontextualisation, and touches on themes of the digital vs physical museum, the shift in museum learning from a focus on objects to a focus on users, what 'quality' means in online learning, tensions in schools between creativity and performativity, and social media and its relationship with institutional authority - all themes which have emerged so far in our research with the NMOLP.

Our experiences with this project have highlighted a number of creative tensions around openness and authority, insiders and outsiders, and control (who has it, who wants it...). It's interesting to think about how these issues might evolve as social media and user-generated content make their way from the margins to the centres of cultural institutions.

I really enjoyed Ross Parry's semantic web session at Museums and the Web in Montreal - the idea of the machine-readable web (web 3.0?) is pretty compelling and exciting. But even more interesting (to me! and sad, perhaps), is thinking about how institutions (museums, universities, schools) might use/co-opt/learn from/change/be changed by the digital environments they venture into. I often find that conversations about the digital/social/user-generated content in institutions - even those which start off innocently enough - end up being about the nature and purpose of those institutions. That's why I find e-learning such an exciting field to be involved in, I think.