Open Source Education

Recently we started work on creating an online community for the TEC-CH programme, one that involves professionals and students to interact outside of the classroom, to share information and resources, and to have constructive discussions that help professionals on their work and students on their understanding of the field.

Current tools we plan to use: Twitter, facebook, ning, a wiki that serves as an online bibliography, a new TEC-CH blog, and a channel on YouTube EDU. Are we using too many? too little? What are some other tools that would be useful?

Currently we’re thinking of involving a broad range of professionals, academics, artists, historians and students (last but not least) in the museum and cultural technology field, and we would love to hear your thoughts.

Would this be something that you would like to have a voice? If YOU receive an invitation to participate in the TEC-CH online community, what would be some properties of the community that would motivate you to participate? And what can we do or provide in order to make it interesting for you?

Museums & the Web '09 updates

I had some particular directions in mind in selecting my path in the sessions to attend at Museums & The Web, this year, namely web 2.0 solutions (was especially interested in co-creation of cultural contents), mobile interpretation & mobile technologies, and tangibles in museums. Some other great insights came from unexpected sources (some of these are mentioned in My best below). Here are some glimpses from the sessions I attended and further readings from the papers available online on the M&W09 website.


Photo: educational area at the IMA

Web 2.0
As it applies also for mobile interpretation, the presentation of achievements and best practices in the use of social technologies is by now outrun by visionary insights as to “where do we go from here”. In the presentation of practical achievements, the name that continues to set the standard is the Brooklyn Museum, winner of the Best of the Web Awards, category On-line Community or Service: Brooklyn Museum Collection, Posse, and Tag! You are It! The Brooklyn Museum collection has also won the distinction for the Best of the web overall, and I would also mention that the distinction for the best exhibition, went to Brooklyn Museum's Click! A Crowd-curated exhibition.
A session at M&W was dedicated to the use of wikis for expanding museum communities. I found inspiring the presentation of the Minnesota Historical Society team, Collaborative History - Creating (and Fostering) a Wiki Community. The presenters shared strategies for creating and maintaining a community of contributors around a wiki, based on their experience of creating the wikis MN150 (for the exhibition MN150) and Placeography (meant to allow sharing of memories around places and buildings in Minnesota).
The Steve.museum social tagging project team reported the results of a survey administered on tagging contributors of the past two years, meant to assess the motivation for tagging, the perception of the tagging experience and how the type of artwork might influence the tagging activity. Read paper

Plenty of place dedicated this year to the use of GIS technology and geocoding/geotagging by museums or popular photo sharing sites such as Flickr; an inspiring paper is The Interpretation of Bias (and the Bias of Interpretation) , by A S Cope, on the lessons learnt by Flickr from offering their photo geotagging service; see also the ppt presentation on slideshare.

Going mobile
This was one of the best represented subjects at M&W this year. From devices for mobile tours in the demo sessions, to best practices, survey results from museums having offered mobile tours, to identification of trends and insights into future strategic actions whether in terms of contents or devices.
Last year in August I had visited the exhibition Frida Kahlo, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I took an audio-video mobile tour that I personally considered of excellent quality and a great, unobtrusive complement to the visiting experience. It was interesting hence to hear about the results of an evaluation carried at SFMOMA around visitors’ preference for various interpretive materials, including traditional and digital, in the presentation held by Peter Samis and Stephanie Pau. Their presentation includes other two case-studies apart from the Frida Kahlo exhibition, 246 and Counting; and the Art of Participation; the overall results suggest that traditional materials are still preferred by visitors rather than multimedia interpretive materials; however, who actually took the multimedia tour gave a highly positive feedback and for the Frida Kahlo exhibition, it appears that taking the audio tour considerably improved the overall satisfaction with the visit. In answer to the debate over the best device to use – offered by the museum or owned by the visitor, and again between one’s owned iPod/mp3 player over mobile phone - participants in the study respond in an overwhelming majority that using the device offered by the museum is preferred rather than using their own mobile phone; and between a mobile phone and their personal iPod/mp3 player the majority express preference for the latter. See presentation Or read paper
Another inspiring paper is Koven Smith’s The future of mobile interpretation, which accompanied the mini-workshop The Handheld Handbook: Capturing best practices in mobile interpretation for museums . For the emerging ideas during the workshop as well as a great deal of other resources on mobile interpretation, you may check http://tatehandheldconference.pbwiki.com/ (a wiki that continues to be updated through the input of experts in mobile experiences in museums, after it has been initially set up to document Tate's 2008 Handheld Conference: From Audiotours to iPhones)

Tangibles
The demonstrations featured two multitouch tables, one developed by Ideum, represented at M&W this year by Jim Spadaccini and Paul Lacey; while the second demo was the Library of Congress’s interactive multi-touch application, History at Your Fingertips: U.S. Presidential Nominating Conventions. The Ideum team have also held a one-day workshop, Make it multitouch, which dealed with technical aspects in developing multitouch technology as well as design considerations. More about the workshop in this Ideum blog post

TEC-CH students and graduates at M&Web
Shelley Mannion’s demonstration showcased the use of the steve art tagger for the project Seeing Tibetan Art, an initiative which involved young Tibetans from New York and Switzerland into the tagging of visually and narratively complex Tibetan thangka paintings from the collection of the Rubin Museum of Art.
Daniela de Angeli was present in the demonstration session with her supervisor and one of her colleagues at the New Mexico Highlands University, PICT program, where she is currently conducting an exchange semester. The demo included the showcase of projects developed by PICT students in past years, and the on-going project that PICT students, including Daniela, are developing for an exhibition in a New Mexico museum, an installation which gives the visual illusion of being dressed up in historical clothes. Daniela and her colleague showed the laser-scanning software for the acquisition of the 3D volumetry of historical clothes and explained the process through which the resulting 3D images would be then edited adding colour and texture. More about this in a blog post to come.

My best
Whether in the categories above or in others, there are some presentations or papers that I particularly enjoyed or found thoughtful and useful.
Slavko Milekic’s Action, affection and control: interface guidelines for complex visual content
A vivid presentation of a tool for editing visual content that excels through its user-friendliness and simplicity – ShowMe Tools™ – together with three simple guidelines for interface design: action, affection and control. A thoughtful paper with an extensive overview of the relevant literature which supports the validity of the three simple guidelines mentioned above, as well as their illustration through examples.
Nina Simon’s Going Analog: Translating Virtual Learnings into Real Institutional Change
First, Nina writes great, fluidly and with ease, reading her paper was a pleasure and the insights she brings invaluable. She is presenting a simple 5-step plan for developing on-site experiences starting from online or virtual experiences. Nina illustrates her points with evocative examples, showcasing the imaginative use of strategies for connecting, sharing information or personalization in unusual offline contexts such as an ice-cream vendor’s shop, or a casino.
The Indianapolis Museum of Art
http://www.imamuseum.org/
A beautiful museum, from architecture to display and the place given to art educational activities and interactivity, and a young, dynamic and full of ideas team. One of the latest IMA web-based projects is ArtBabble, a showcase of video art and contextualizing information (interview with artists, documentaries, talks etc) from IMA and other museums such as SFMOMA, NY MOMA, etc. See more on http://www.artbabble.org/

Museums and the Web 2009

Every year, somewhere in North America, Museums and the Web is a major conference for tech and museum professionals to mingle, share ideas and exchange latest progress in the museum field. This year it's taking place in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA from April 15 to 18. The Opening Plenary on Thursday summed up this year's theme - Moving from Virtual to Visceral. It is a call to bring the virtual world down to earth, so that museum applications, just like its physical venue will be usable by real people from all walks of life.

The writer personally cannot be there for this wonderful event, but a few members of the TEC-CH community are among the crowd. Please stay tuned and once they return there will be more on the conference.

For now, you can check out all of the papers and presentations online at the MW2009 conference site. Also whenever the conference is taking place, you will find a lively Twitter conversation going on in the background - participate in the conversation with #mw2009 or search it to see what people are talking about!

Shelfari: Speaks for Your Books

In the TEC-CH Online course of Museums and the Social Web, we are required to analyse a number of Web 2.0 sites and create a report describing the interactions, usability and potential museum applications of these websites. Shelfari was the topic of my assignment, and while thinking that it may be something useful to share, I'm re-posting my article on the blog. 

In a nutshell, Shelfari is a virtual bookshelf application that lets its user document and organise his or her reading lists and book collections. Wikipedia refers to it as a “social cataloguing website”1, where users may “rate, review, tag and discuss their books”. Its main feature is a graphic user interface (GUI) in the form of a bookcase, displaying book covers of the items that users choose to exhibit. Based in Seattle, Shelfari was first launched in 2006, and was later acquired by Amazon.com in August 2008.

The Features of Shelfari

As with many other Web 2.0 applications, it is mandatory for users to create identities for their accounts, so their contributions and participation on the website may be identified. In true bookshelf-building fashion, users may also choose the shelf material of the bookcase, in the exciting colors of mahogany, walnut, rosewood, and black cherry.

Once a bookshelf is created, users may add titles to the shelf and organise their reading lists. If a user already has certain titles in mind, one may conduct a search by title, author, ISBN or subject to find and add the book. When desired results cannot be found, users may add their titles to the catalogue. One can still construct his or her book collections even if they do not have specific titles to add to their virtual bookshelves. Users may choose to browse for books under “What’s Hot” and “Browse Subjects”. “What’s Hot” presents books that have the highest ratings, are the most reviewed or the most commented within the day, while the option of “Browse Subjects”, as the name suggests, is a more traditional approach. As the user advances to participate in the Shelfari community, for instance, reading reviews or contributing to discussions, one would realise that any book entry that one comes across may be added to his or her virtual bookshelf. For those who already own accounts or booklists on other similar websites, Shelfari presents the option to import their collections.

Book titles may be organised into three main categories, or book lists: Books that I plan to read, books that I’m reading, and books that I’ve read. By keeping book statuses current, the lists offer a great way to motivate and keep track of one’s reading progress as well as his or her interests for any future reading. The books can also be marked as a favorite, as one that the user owns, or one that is on his/her wish list. These features are useful in reflecting the user’s tastes in books, so Shelfari members with similar tastes may connect with each other, and the website may make useful recommendations for the user on potentially interesting books, authors and other Shelfari members. Further, for each book entry users may enter their read dates of a book to create a reading timeline for his or her collection, create a purchase record, and keep track of the loan status of a book. These cataloguing features under “My Copy” bring Shelfari from virtual to visceral, letting users manage their physical bookshelves at home, or elsewhere such as a library. In addition, a user can also help the Shelfari community in cataloguing its books by tagging them with relevant keywords. With the tagging mechanism, books with the same keyword are grouped together, so users may discover new titles with similar concepts by looking into a given tag.

Shelfari is not merely an organization device, with a large community of book lovers it also behaves like a giant book club. Users can reflect on their books by rating them from one to five stars, writing reviews and comments, and by contributing to an “Authors Unbound” section dedicated to information about the authors of their books, much alike a wiki. The reflection is not an individualistic one, as users can also interact amongst themselves by reading and voting on the quality of other members’ book reviews, exchange notes, recommend books or ask for recommendations, and engage in conversations that take place under discussions, comments and groups. They can also freely browse each other’s virtual bookshelves to discover other member’s preferences for books. Users can also become “friends”, regardless of whether they know each other in person or not, in order to keep track of each other’s activities on Shelfari.

Ease of Use and Areas of Improvement

The virtual bookshelf is a very user-friendly graphic user interface. Book covers are neatly lined up and clearly sorted according to their own categories, and many common functions such as rating, tagging or writing reviews can be easily accessed with one-click, directly on the virtual bookshelf. The website itself is also very usable, packing access to most Shelfari features on the user’s homepage, and any potential confusion with ambiguous icons are aptly explained with instructions upon rollover. Another interesting characteristic is its multiple points of entry for various functions on one page. For example, to add a book to the shelf, one can click on the according link located on the bookshelf, but one can also click on another link that is located directly above the bookshelf interface. While it makes the features more accessible, it may also create confusion for users, as they may wonder which link is the correct one to use or expect different destinations for the same links on the same page, but at different locations. Another side effect of such multiple points of entry is that the menu options are very much scattered across the page, directing users to search all over the page for desired functionalities.

Shelfari also has a logical presumption that its users are fully literate, thus the menu options are highly text-based. Besides the virtual bookshelf interface, book covers and user profile pictures, the entire website is consisted of texts rather than images. While it may be reasonable to argue that extra icons or graphics may overwhelm the webpages which already contain many images of book covers and profile pictures, a fully text-based menu is also boring to read and visually difficult for one function to distinguish from another. In addition, ambiguous menu items such as “Books”, “Members” and “Groups” should be more specific or explained with a rollover so users may have a better idea of what to expect before the click-through.

In Nina Simon’s terms, Shelfari is a “walled garden”. Any contributions made to the application is only viewable to other users who have also registered. While there are attempts to go beyond the wall of the Shelfari site by creating widgets so that information from one’s account may be displayed elsewhere on the web, much of the communication, updates and modifications can only be accessed on the Shelfari website.

The biggest flaw may be that it is an anglocentric application that is incompatible with books that are in languages other than English. With several attempts to search for Chinese books with varying methods of input, I have discovered that all the Chinese titles are only available in English translations, if not completely inexistent in the catalogue. Further, the Shelfari search engine is unable to recognise any input that is not consisted of Roman characters. With the current rising trend of non-English sites, multilingual compatibility would be a valuable upgrade to the website.

Applications for the Museum

Museums may join Shelfari and use it as a tool to connect with visitors or patrons, discuss ideas, and recommend books in relevant areas. By participating in discussions, adding friends with interests relevant to the institution, and starting up Shelfari groups, institutions have the opportunity to reach out to established online communities as well as individuals, informing them of the existence of the museum, sharing its knowledge and having useful exchanges of information. With the expertise available at museums, staff may create valuable book reviews on readings that are relevant to their subject areas, hence attracts users with genuine interests on those topics. By studying the bookshelves of these users, museums may gain a good idea of the interests of their target audience and hence develop relevant exhibitions and programmes. On a research level, Shelfari also enables museum staff to connect with other professionals, to exchange insights and to enlist research help.

Shelfari has many individual features that may be adopted to museum websites in order to facilitate visitor participation. For example, “Authors Unbound” may be adopted as an exhibition-related wiki, where curators and visitors may create content collaboratively. Instead of tagging books, museums can invite visitors to tag individual artifacts or exhibitions, so museum staff can learn about common perceptions of their collections while visitors have the opportunity to contribute to the understanding of the items. Discussions and comment capabilities are also obvious technologies to adopt, so visitors are given a voice to express their opinions about objects, exhibitions, and related issues. Further, the idea of creating own collections in general is highly applicable to the museum world, as visitors may gain a sense of belonging to the museum and identify their favorites within an often vast collection of museum objects.

1 "Shelfari." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 5 Jan 2009, 19:25 UTC. 1 Feb 2009 .2 Simon, Nina. "Is your museum website a walled garden?" Museum 2.0. 29 Jul 2008. 27 Jan 2009 .

ITSME slideshow (repost from slideshare)

From: itsmesrl,
4 days ago

Itsme A New Workstation To Exploit The Potential Of The Cyberspace 02

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: web2.0 operating)

ITSME, a collaboration-friendly workstation

On Wednesday, December 3, 2008, the TEC-CH programme jointly hosted a seminar with the Institute for Communication Technologies (ICT), featuring Prof. Giorgio De Michelis from the University of Milano - Bicocca. He presented a new open source initiative to develop an operating system that maximises the benefits of cyberspace, and that is sensitive to the context and interrelations of various items instead of the simple categorisations of folders and file formats. In the new interface, workstation content will be referred to as "venues" for contexts and "stories" for various formats of files. 

Considering current leanings towards open-source platforms, including big companies such as IBM and Symbian Foundation, the ITSME project presents much potential and possibilities than ever before. It is currently in the beginning of its development stage: while it may possibly be the solution for the dispersion of information and the inadequacy of file systems, its actual results remains interesting and yet to be evaluated.