American Alliance of Museums – Centre for the Future of Museums – TrendsWatch

I have selected the section of ‘Me/We/Here/There: museums and the matrix of place-based augmented devices’ in report [Trends Watch: 2016] of American Museum Consortium. Context: People have increasingly seen museum as a key part of lifelong, informal learning. Parents would go with children; traveller would go to museums as part of their travel program. At the same time, museums have growing appetite to reach out to global audience. Type of offering: The use of VR (Virtual Reality) or AR (Augmented Reality) can be part of the museum distribution infrastructure. Museums can combine their content (displayed or not displayed, items or events) and this distribution infrastructure to provide individuals an experience without them stepping into the location. Who is the customer: There will be a difference between who is purchasing the VR/AR technology product and who is consuming it as an end customer. The purchase of technology will be museum management/curator. The real user of the technology will be individuals who want to have a visiting experience before or without getting to the museum physical location. Target global: Possible and this will be in aligned with museums that have global ambition. Market status & Competition – Since it is informal learning, it does not need to be integrated into existing formal education system. This means two things: upside as easier to enter the market, downside is competition will be crowded for anyone who has the technology, as regulatory entry barrier is lower. Overall this is a highly disruptive technology for museums, potentially. I would likely to recommend to people in this field, but I assume they would have been aware of this already.

I think I posted my review in the wrong area. Still getting used to the site! :P I thought this report did a good job of identifying trends from the last year. Five of the items were things that I had heard being discussed as they were emerging in the last year, and the sixth was a topic that has been gathering momentum. I found this report to be very interesting and I think that it would help educators to be creative and aware of new trends. The publication is intended for museums, and as such the suggestions and examples would need to be adapted for other uses, but many could be a source of inspiration. For example, the Tate Modern hosted an event where participants stayed overnight in the museum and created digital artworks. This would be an interesting idea for educators and could be linked to a local museum or even a topic being taught in class. I’m not sure how useful it would be to learning technologies specialists and ventures, other than the fact that it is an effective summary and would bring awareness of what museums are doing with these technologies on which perhaps they could capitalize. However, there are probably more useful publications available. I really liked this report for my own interest, and I would read it again next year because it is a great (and easy!) summary of the top technology trend which have emerged in the last year. I would recommend it to an educator that is looking for some creative ways to use new technology and is interested in thinking beyond the traditional classroom. However, because the ideas are for museums it would take some technological interest and understanding to apply them to a school setting. Overall, I would say this publication is moderately useful, unless you are specifically in the museum industry.

I have chosen to review the TrendsWatch because it takes the other predictions and applies them specifically to the industry I work in, museum education. Rather than attempting to sift through which trends may be most relevant to the museum context, this particular set of predictions has already taken that step for me. As an educator working across and beyond traditional educational boundaries and dichotomies of administration vs. teacher, business vs. education and students as customers vs. gatekeeper customers I find the endless round peg into square hole of making learning models and learning opportunities fit an alternative education field exhausting. The TrendsWatch report eliminates the inevitable shaving and pounding of the peg. That being said, traditional learning settings are increasingly taking pages from the alternative education fields (outdoor education, experiential education, outdoor classrooms, flipped learning, in situ learning, free learning, collaborative assessment, digital classrooms, classrooms designed in unconventional ways (ie. no chairs or to look like a community or the outdoors) makerspace classrooms etc.) Perhaps there is a chance to reverse the equation and rather than alternative education practitioners looking at the trends in the larger marketplace of K-12 or university education perhaps university and K-12 educators can look to the trends of alternative educators to help better predict the direction of the classrooms of the future. While the report is based out of the US, my experience is that neither Canada, nor the US are the trendsetters in museum methodologies or museum education and tend to be at approximate parity in terms of where they are in innovation and trends (although budgets for adopting trends may differ substantially). I would not anticipate there being significant differences to have to adjust for in creating a Canadian version of this report and so I am comfortable taking it as applicable outside of the regional context. That being said, the fact that it is based out of the US, which typically falls behind its colleagues in the UK for museum technology innovations, it is a bit suspect that this report may represent the newest trends in the museum field overall. In reviewing the report, however, it is clear that they have reviewed both national and global trends such that I am confident that the regional bias of the publication has mostly been mitigated with the exception of a few areas where specific regional considerations may have implications to the specifics but not the overall trend. For example, where the report explores privacy concerns, there are significant social differences in public attitudes towards public surveillance between the UK with its network of CCTVs and the US. Again, Canada probably falls more in line with the US perspective and possibly takes this even a step further away from the UK model than the US might so I am unconcerned by the regionalism of the report. Unlike the other predictions, the TrendsWatch focuses more on discussions of possibilities vs. strict predictions of trends so although it is a crystal ball, it is perhaps a fuzzier one than others. The report focuses on 6 existing trends and attempts to predict possibilities for dangers or opportunities of these trends for the future of Museums as learning institutions. The 2014 Report Highlights 6 Key Trends: For Profit for Good : The rise of the social entrepreneurs Synesthesia: Multisensory experiences for multisensory world A Geyser of Information: Tapping the big data oil boom Privacy in a Watchful World: What have you got to hide? What's Mine is Yours: The economy of collaborative consumption Robots! Are Rosie, Voltron, Bender and their kin finally coming into their own? The specificity of the report is both its asset and its downside. Museums can be slow moving institutions: social dinosaurs who attempt to preserve and arrest time both in their exhibitions and in their institutions. I believe this is changing, but museums, like schools and universities, have not yet fully embraced the pace of change present in social technology. My experience is that those who theorize about and within museums take their roles as keepers of the bastions and creators of culture and social capital very seriously. They are reluctant to do anything that may reduce them to theme parks or destroy their identity and what they believe to be a sacred duty to society past, present and future; a duty to the "real". As a museum educator, you have a choice between looking to trends in museums specifically which may be behind the experience of the "outside world" but is significant and in line with the pace of change of the institutions in which you work or to look to the broader social trends which are more innovative and relevant to your customers but may upend the museum creating resistance both from within your organization and from your customers who have differing expectations of what a museum "should" be. Museums have only recently begun to reconcile how they can embrace trendsetting and innovation while still remaining true to their identity as museums. Museums have done this partly by accepting shared authority with an educated public and partly by shifting focus from preservation to learning; from artifacts to visitors but the delicate balance is critical. Museums have looked to adopt technologies only where they allow this balance to be maintained and have rejected other trends making them different from other sectors. The question continues about what sorts of things can be allowed without toppling the scales. Using a museums based predictions report, rather than an overall technology prediction also means that the filtering for technologies that don't best protect artifacts or preserve the authenticity of museums have already been eliminated from consideration. This particular report confines itself to the present and very near future while speculating theoretically about overall impacts. I do find that it is behind the trends outlined in some of the other reports in terms of what may be on the horizon in the next 5-10 years in terms of global technology but because it specifically links to museums and provides specific examples and case studies of museums attempting trends it is something a practitioner can feel more confident using to drive motivation and direction for future initiatives. It provides the jumping off point to take the next step. I think using this document in companion with some of the broader documents may help museum practitioners look for where that next step may land while having confident footing in where they are. Centre for the Future of Museums (2014). TrendsWatch: 2014. American Alliance of Museums. Retrieved from: http://www.aam-us.org/docs/default-source/center-for-the-future-of-museums/2014_trendswatch_lores-with-tracking-chip.pdf?sfvrsn=0