Dragonfly fossil obelisk at the Oxley roundabout junction, Brisbane, Australia. Photo courtesy Scott MacLeod.
Museums and interpretive centers often display fossils. But are we becoming fossils ourselves? If we are, it’s not by meteoritic impact or melting icecaps, but by our attitudes towards the technologies that are changing human cognition, communication, and interaction. Here are some questions to think about as technology advances and the landscape shifts…
1. Are we competing with new technologies, or integrating them?
The museum and informal learning field is rapidly embracing learning and experiential strategies that reflect the changes brought about by global digitization. But down in the trenches of everyday practice, far from the trumpet call of rousing conference presentations and journal articles, the reality is that a high percentage of our colleagues view electronic media in our institutions as the dark side of The Force, regarding as suspect any form of communication other than traditionally displayed objects and labels.
What we have to offer doesn’t compete with technology.
Instant messaging and social networking sites are often scorned as destroying the concentration powers of today’s youth. This line of thinking was old when Plato worried about newfangled “books” robbing us of our powers of memory. Those who still feel this way about new media might check out the results of the 2009 Digital Media and Learning Competition organized by the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, and supported by the MacArthur Foundation.
Beneath in this obstinate view of technology lies the fear that digital media will diminish our “inherent” abilities. But this fear is unfounded and unnecessary.
What we have to offer doesn’t compete with technology and is not undone by it. The core of our attracting power — authentic objects, immersive experiences, personal interactions — will continue to serve us, and can only benefit by being explored through today’s technologies.
2. Are we hastening our own irrelevance by thinking ourselves superior to contemporary electronic culture?
We can’t dictate how, and how much, we will communicate to our visitors. The informal learning experience is a noble bait-and-switch in which we seek the optimal point of intersection between what visitors want to get, and what we want to give them.
The informal learning experience is a noble bait-and-switch.
And that means form as well as content. The digital world has changed what we consider the appropriate length of text within a given context. We can’t expect visitors to want to explore any subject in detail in an informal learning situation. We make the text shorter because we care about the content. If we didn’t care, we’d make it longer, and fewer people would read it.
Adapting how we use technology in response to our visitors’ needs is only a compromise if we view education as an inherently top-down enterprise. But that attitude — “We know what’s good for you, and we’re going to give it to you” — is no longer tenable, if it ever was.
New technologies are fundamentally democratic. This may be the aspect of digital technologies that is most liberating to learners, and most threatening to those who have traditionally held the keys to knowledge. These technologies allow the whole world to create, share, and build on knowledge. That’s why they’ve been so earth-shaking.
3. Is technology the “demon rum” of the 21st century?
Reductionist thinking has always been with us. Prohibitionists pointed to alcohol as the root of society’s evils. Whether it’s square dancing, the horseless carriage, or Elvis’s scandalous hips, we’ve always found it easier to pin society’s ills on particular activities, substances, or technologies than to embrace the more difficult task of teasing out the systemic factors that brought about, or grew out of, those cultural particulars.
For many in informal learning, today’s demon rum could be spelled i – P – o – d.
If places of informal learning focus on the technology itself rather than on the message, our efforts will appear as quaint as a mid-twentieth-century car advertisement touting the miracle of the automatic transmission.
But they are missing the point: it’s not about the gadget.
In Grown Up Digital, Donald Tapscott notes that those of us not digitally wired from birth tend to be polarized in our relationships to technology. We’re either dazzled by new gadgets or militantly opposed to them.
Younger people aren’t like that. Today’s technologies are as transparent and neutral to them as the telephone is to someone of my generation. New technologies are just like telephones, inviting neither invective nor adoration. They’re just there—a part of our world. If places of informal learning focus on the technology itself rather than on the message, our efforts will appear as quaint as a mid-twentieth-century car advertisement touting the miracle of the automatic transmission.
The majority of museum and interpretation professionals today aren’t quite the Luddites described above. But while a well-informed and productive approach to the use of technology has gained ground rapidly in our professional literature, its actual implementation in daily practice has been slow. This is partly due to characteristics of non-profits: under-funding, lack of staffing and time, self-government by contingencies that are usually older and more conservative. But partly, it’s due to old-fashioned inertia.
In the end, places of informal learning are subject to the same dictum that rules the natural world. Environmental pressures will force us in one of two directions: evolution, or extinction.
{ 7 comments… read them below or add one }
Excellent call to arms.
Matt,
Nice breakdown of the factors governing museums’ use of new technologies for interpretation. Part of good design / communication is the ability to get a key message across, by empathizing with the audience. Keeping “empathy” in mind can help us avoid the pitfalls of “too much text” vs. “too much technology for its own sake.”
It’s also important to keep pushing out of the comfort zone!
Thanks.
Interesting and timely article. Our present administration is fearful of this type of technology in exhibits . . . but it’s OK when marketing events and store sales. Go figure.
The voice of reason at last speaks with the credentials that some in the field may listen to. I support evolution over extinction any day of the week and also like staying relevant to my times. The directors, educators and curators that are intimidated or threatened by this contemporary reality need to learn to adapt or they will perish. Besides all that it’s fun.
I think society’s evil still point to Elvis’s scandalous hips.
Very nice Matt.
Very good use of straw-men, knocked down in the service of rhetoric. Each of the three Points are dated (incipient fossilization?) and miss the core issues. I would even suggest that the suggestions are misleading. i.e., in Point #1, Competing or Integration, Social networking is “scorned as destroying concentration”. Not so- actually the findings are that “multi-tasking” leads to fragmented attention and erroneous perception, regardless of age or technology. Not the same thing. One can parse each point with similar results.
David Kennedy’s comment touched on what really counts these days in Museums: the “voice of reason” & “credentials”. Perhaps if people in museums were more cognizant of their audiences and of questions of productivity, they could use or not use technology as they evolve.
The basic points — focus on the message; use digital technology to augment the real experience, not supplant it — are excellent and well worth repeating. But some of the specifics left me confused.
“We can’t dictate how, and how much, we will communicate to our visitors.” Really? I thought that was precisely what we did. We decide what our message is; we decide how we present it. Now, it is true we cannot control how the visitor will receive / understand our message; what meaning they will make of it; or what they say about it to anybody else. But what we ourselves put out there? That is totally within our control.
“The informal learning experience is a noble bait-and-switch.” Whaaa? That I don’t get at all. Bait-and-switch, as I understand the term, means to entice the customer by with one thing, but then in reality provide something else, usually of lesser value. How does the informal learning experience do that? What are we promising that we don’t deliver (or, at least, don’t make a good-faith effort to deliver)?
“The digital world has changed what we consider the appropriate length of text within a given context.” Not the way you explain it. Beverly Serrell, Judy Rand and Susan Curran were all advocating shorter labels at the Field Museum back in the late ’80s, when exhibit text was still being pounded out on typewriters. (Yes, I have been in the business that long.) The less-is-more mantra was well entrenched long before computers made much of an inroad into our homes and private lives, let alone exhibits.
If anything, the reverse is true: digital technology allows for *longer* labels. It is fairly simple to set up a digital system with a short-and-sweet 50-word label on the home page, and a “For More Info” button at the bottom for those visitors who may want an additional 500-word essay.
Other than those points, though, good article.