Alpine Institute’s 2018 #TheStateofRace Symposium
The Aspen Institute had their annual State of Race Symposium last week. Journalist Juan Williams moderated two panels: one about politics and a second about hate speech. As Senior Executive Vice President and Chief Diversity Officer Comcast Corporation, David Cohen suggested in his opening remarks, the symposium aimed to ignite discussion about race in America …
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Visitor-Centered means Object-Centered
Over the last few years, there have been some heated debates behind the scenes of museum education offices about the ways that visitors should be engaged. Many directors have changed the department moniker from education to learning or interpretation. This change could be seen as a transformation from older methodologies to more sophisticated forms of …
Guiding Questions to Think about Bias in Museums (by functional area)
At AAM 2018, there was a wonderful panel led by Cinnamon Catlin-Legutko about Decolonization. While all the speakers were wonderful, I was particularly struck by Jaclyn Roessel’s remarks about indigenizing museums as an act of transforming the current power structure. Overall, the conversation underscored the importance of systematic and cataclysmic change in transforming the colonialism inherent …
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Recognizing Bias in Interpretation and Content
Being culturally situated is a state nothing can avoid, collection objects included. Collection objects, even natural history specimens, are mediated by creators, curators, educators, amongst others. A dinosaur bone is excavated by a person, identified by a person, and reclassified by a person. The human existence, in other words, flavors the essence of every …
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#AAM2018 Recap: Language, Collaboration, and Action
The Annual American Alliance Conference 2018 was hosted in toasty Phoenix. Many participants mentioned that this conference felt like a year to consider the basics. Rather than big bang projects, many presentations seemed to focus on maintenance, improvement, and thoughtfulness. As part of this introspection, many presentations put a fine focus on understanding the …
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6 Tips for Making the Most of a Conference #AAM2018
Conferences are a huge expenditure of time and money. They are held in huge, impersonal buildings, peopled by hundreds and hundreds of unfamiliar people. The pressure to do conference right can feel overwhelming. But, first and foremost, there is no one “right” way do attending conferences. You need to find a good balance between engaging …
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Emotions and Customer Experience
Customer/ Visitor Experience basically encompasses connection your visitor has with your organization from the signs on the street to the moments in the galleries. CX overarches both onsite and offsite; physical and digital. Experience is, therefore, a huge concept. As with all large concepts, considering constituent aspects. Touchpoints: The concrete elements that express the experience …
Museum Customer Experience
Customer? Museums create exhibitions and installations for people. We most often describe those people as visitors. The word visitor has some strengths. A visitor is invited and wanted. But, a visit is transitory and not-participatory. There are so many other words that we could use. There might not be an ideal word, but for the …
We made a book! Change at Work
There’s crazy amounts of change around us—personal, professional, societal—so two of us self-styled change agents wrote a book about how to deal, and then how to deal yourself in. This is a joint post by Robert J. Weisberg and Seema Rao Change is so pervasive in human existence that people should be able to meet …
Museums and the Web 18 Review OR Reality can be hard even when its not Virtual
Museums and the Web 18 Museums and the Web 2018 was hosted in lovely Vancouver. As always, friends from around the world descended upon the town for ideas and enjoyment. While the MuseWeb organization does a great job of publishing articles that expand on the presentations, here are the highlights and themes from this year’s …
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