Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

by Tiki East

Many may expect Webstock 2008 to be a massive geekfest of new toys, bells and whistles - catchphrases, techery and geekspeak. They wouldn’t be entirely right .

I won’t recap too much of what actually happened. There will be others who do a good rundown of events. The whole thing has also been captured for easy web access which should be available here soon.

The key messages coming out of conference were far from technical goobledegook. On the contrary, these are all pretty sound principles for anyone communicating with the public. They particularly ring true for cultural sector organisations looking at how to build or renovate their online presence.

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

One of the main linchpins for the new Web 2.0 world is user generated content. As I mentioned in a previous post this is moving away from the read only web to a read/write web environment where the user really becomes part of the experience. They are no longer just a passive viewer of the content. They are adding to it and even creating if from scratch.

Within the museum sector many different websites have been created with the aim of getting the user to participate. There are numerous degrees to the model of participation. These range from users commenting, tagging or taking part in forums through to the sole creation of content on websites through bespoke methods or blogs.

One thing that is always difficult, if not impossible, to estimate is the size of user uptake. The ‘if we build it they will come’ mentality has been consigned to the pages of web history. When building a site that calls for user participation it is important to understand what are the star features that will get your users in and using it. The trouble is that it is often very hard to know what these are. The audience is constantly changing and evolving and what they want and what they have come to expect is constantly changing and evolving. Each new website raises the bar slightly higher.

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We’ve got two tickets to give away for the massive 2008 Big Day Out Festival, which is shaping up to be one of the most exciting and diverse yet. From Bjork to Billy Bragg to Brand New – we reckon they’ve got it covered this year.

To enter the draw, all you need to do is sign up to receive our monthly newsletter by sending us an email to competitions@nzlive.com.

Last week Big Day Out made their latest announcement of acts to join the impressive line-up. The new additions to Big Day Out 2008 are:

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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.

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

You would find it hard to locate a museum in the world which doesn’t say that it is interested in engaging with its audience in new ways. A logical way of doing this is through the digital environment. This is especially apt as one of the foundations of Web 2.0 is user generated content.

There are many examples of museums inviting the audience into their digital environment, but there are also examples of museums getting the audience more involved in exhibitions themselves. This is not a new idea and has been implemented by many different museums across the world.

‘Inspired by…’ (an exhibition close to the heart of our project) is the Victoria & Albert’s annual art competition for people on part-time courses. The aim is for participants to create a work of art or craft inspired by the collections. These objects then make up the basis of the exhibition. It is solely for newly created work and doesn’t use anything from the collection itself in the displays. This video shows one of the people who exhibited this year talking about their work. There are many museums which run similar exhibitions where people have created work inspired by that particular museum’s collection.

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