by Terry Makewell, National Museums Online Learning Project (Victoria & Albert Museum)

From beaches across the world to cultural learning organisations.

The Victoria & Albert Museum is currently undertaking the World Beach Project (www.vam.ac.uk/worldbeach) in collaboration with artist Sue Lawty. This is a global art project open to anybody in the world and the idea is for people to build on the experiences from holiday of making patterns on beaches and shorelines with numerous different objects. This site is a good example of how cultural organisations can use the elements of web 2.0 to bring in and engage their users through participation in both activities and via mash-ups. 

The idea has been borne from Sue Lawty’s blog on the V&A website. A particularly good post on this blog concerns a family from the UK who relocated to New Zealand for a few years and undertook a family version of some of her beach artwork. This is detailed in the blog post New Zealand Stones.

Bruce Bay - Stones on driftwood

Ensuring that this type of website is integrated into your working practices is important when thinking about sustainability. Ways in which this can be made possible have been investigated by Eva Moraga. She has undertaken the discussion of how cultural organisations need to define new organisational models in order to respond to the constant transformation entailed by new media and Web 2.0.

I saw her paper delivered at Digital Archive Fever - the 23rd annual conference for CHArt (computers and the history of art) held at Birkbeck College at the University of London.  In this paper she described what she sees as Web 2.0 within the context of the cultural organisation. This does not really differ from what we have commonly come to expect, which is:

1. The user has their own space
2. The user can post blog entries, comments and upload files
3. The user can communicate with other users
4. The user can describe, tag and classify
5. The user can link to other users (i.e. a friending system)

It is no longer enough for museums to just provide images with descriptions. Cultural objects need to be presented in new and exciting ways along with more contextual information. 

Cultural organisations have the potential to undertake such changes. The problem arises when cultural organisations rush to implement Web 2.0 functionality within their websites but don’t change their work practices in order to support or sustain them. They undertake projects in which they promote online user participation but are not willing to allow users the freedom they desire. They have the ideals of web 2.0 in mind but have not put the right concepts in place for either the users or the organisation as a whole to build upon the experiences and to further develop them. To enable this a new model for the workings of a cultural sector organisation needs to be defined.

Eva Moraga has tried to develop a new cultural learning model developed from Peter Senge’s model of the learning organisation. According to Peter Senge learning organisations are:

“… organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to see the whole together.”

This new model would apply in the characteristics of work, audiences and other agents intervening in the artisitc process. This is what defines the new ‘Cultural Learning Organisation’. The participative and co-operative process in a learning organisation is similar to the values of web 2.0. This involves the reflection, communication and building upon ideas to further develop the processes. By adapting the principles of Senge’s Learning Organisations to be relevant to cultural organisation Eva Moraga has produced a new model that will allow cultural organisations to be able to respond to the constant transformation entailed by new media and Web 2.0.

It is logical from this that a new form of cultural leadership is also needed where the best leadership practices are observed from commercial organisations and implemented within the cultural section. Not all of these practices will work since the cultural sector is a unique beast. Certainly it won’t be easy to implement, but it is something which has got to be given a chance if the cultural sector is going to fully understand this technology and give the users what they want.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 at 10:43 am and is filed under Culture online, Social media, Technology, Cultural tourism, Guest blogger - Terry Makewell. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.