MCN 2020 VIRTUAL

Brought to you by Axiell.

Join Nik Honeysett, Ignite MC extraordinaire, to kick off this year's conference in style with MCN's signature event Ignite MCN! Expect a night of fun, thought-provoking and inspiring #musetech talks. The talks follow the “Ignite” format, in which presenters have five minutes and 20 slides (which advance automatically every 15 seconds) to enlighten, entertain, and inspire.

Maria Wasing and Samantha Diamond of Axiell will welcome everyone.

• "Welcome to My 2D World" by Sandy Goldberg
• "Communities of Imagination & Learning" by Michael Riordan
• "Your Data Are Probably Racist" by Yvonne Lee & Meredith Steinfels
• "Audience Engagement Is Your Goal, Not Theirs" by Kyle Bowen
• “Future Wisdom Via Metadata” by Virginia Poundstone & Garrett Graddy-Lovelace
• "Craft, Work, & Kraftwerk" by Tim Boutelle
• “They Will Save Us If We Let Them” by Jeremy Munro

SOH required...
Alcohol optional...
Music by Koven Smith...
Hosted by Nik Honeysett...

Office Hours: Q&A about Online Courses is an hour-long session for conversation and questions about beginning and running a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) program at your museum. If your institution is considering or has recently started developing online courses to serve remote and international audiences, bring your questions here. This session will focus on MOOCs but with takeaways that can apply across various museum programs and platforms, including social media. Do you have questions about adapting existing content to design an accessible and inclusive online learning program? What kinds of assessments and discussion forum prompts can be generative and rewarding for a wide-range of informal learners? What happens after the course launch and initial marketing push? How can you build long-term relationships with learners who stay engaged in the course community years after enrolling? How do you define success if MOOC completion rates are often low? How can online courses be financially sustainable and support revenue generation for other areas of the museum? You are welcome to submit questions in advance or live during the session! Use this form to submit advance questions: https://forms.gle/LF5252RGuL5Suxj99 Explore MoMA's online courses here: https://www.moma.org/research-and-learning/classes

With the support from a Knight Foundation grant, MCN is partnering with NEW INC, New Museum’s art and technology incubator, to launch a new web resource for the museum tech community. Through this new resource, we will capture and share model projects and experiments from across our community, with a goal of creating a centralized repository that anyone can use to advance their own understanding of how to creatively integrate technology into museum digital practice. Over the past few years, the field has made remarkable advancements and the goal of this joint project is to create a home for documenting and discussing this work.

The format of our platform -- how information is collected, how it is categorized, how it is presented -- is being jointly developed over the next few months by MCN and NEW INC. These two 60-minute Experimental sessions are part of our discovery process, during which we'll share some early case study templates and seek participants' feedback as we develop a new framework for capturing innovative digital projects in the field.

YOU MUST PRE-REGISTER HERE TO ATTEND THIS SESSION ZOOM MEETING!

Take an online field trip to the Museum of Portable Sound (MOPS), an independent museum founded in London in 2015, now based in Portsmouth, UK! This unique museum collects, preserves, and exhibits sounds as objects of culture, offering its visitors a listening-based experience that’s been featured in publications like Atlas Obscura, Londonist.com, and Curator: The Museum Journal.

MOPS encourages its visitors to make an appointment to listen to sounds that may otherwise slip through the cracks, to give attention to sounds that exist beyond music – as objects indelibly connected to our lives and our world. Containing 30 galleries filled with 325 objects (over nine hours of material) located within four main topical categories – Natural History, Science & Technology, Architecture & Urban Design, and Art & Culture – this museum presents sounds in a whole new light.

This field trip, led live online from the UK by MOPS Director and Chief Curator John Kannenberg, will present a special 20-minute tour of MOPS collection highlights – from the first recording of a human voice (made before Edison’s phonograph!) to a malfunctioning MacBook, from pink river dolphins chuckling in the Amazon to the flush of Sigmund Freud’s toilet at his house in Vienna – you’ll experience a whirlwind of audible culture that will make you laugh, make you wonder, and hopefully make you think a little differently about what a museum can be in the 21st century.

Take an online field trip to the Museum of Portable Sound (MOPS), an independent museum founded in London in 2015, now based in Portsmouth, UK! This unique museum collects, preserves, and exhibits sounds as objects of culture, offering its visitors a listening-based experience that’s been featured in publications like Atlas Obscura, Londonist.com, and Curator: The Museum Journal.

MOPS encourages its visitors to make an appointment to listen to sounds that may otherwise slip through the cracks, to give attention to sounds that exist beyond music – as objects indelibly connected to our lives and our world. Containing 30 galleries filled with 325 objects (over nine hours of material) located within four main topical categories – Natural History, Science & Technology, Architecture & Urban Design, and Art & Culture – this museum presents sounds in a whole new light.

This field trip, led live online from the UK by MOPS Director and Chief Curator John Kannenberg, will present a special 20-minute tour of MOPS collection highlights – from the first recording of a human voice (made before Edison’s phonograph!) to a malfunctioning MacBook, from pink river dolphins chuckling in the Amazon to the flush of Sigmund Freud’s toilet at his house in Vienna – you’ll experience a whirlwind of audible culture that will make you laugh, make you wonder, and hopefully make you think a little differently about what a museum can be in the 21st century.

Take an online field trip to the Museum of Portable Sound (MOPS), an independent museum founded in London in 2015, now based in Portsmouth, UK! This unique museum collects, preserves, and exhibits sounds as objects of culture, offering its visitors a listening-based experience that’s been featured in publications like Atlas Obscura, Londonist.com, and Curator: The Museum Journal.

MOPS encourages its visitors to make an appointment to listen to sounds that may otherwise slip through the cracks, to give attention to sounds that exist beyond music – as objects indelibly connected to our lives and our world. Containing 30 galleries filled with 325 objects (over nine hours of material) located within four main topical categories – Natural History, Science & Technology, Architecture & Urban Design, and Art & Culture – this museum presents sounds in a whole new light.

This field trip, led live online from the UK by MOPS Director and Chief Curator John Kannenberg, will present a special 20-minute tour of MOPS collection highlights – from the first recording of a human voice (made before Edison’s phonograph!) to a malfunctioning MacBook, from pink river dolphins chuckling in the Amazon to the flush of Sigmund Freud’s toilet at his house in Vienna – you’ll experience a whirlwind of audible culture that will make you laugh, make you wonder, and hopefully make you think a little differently about what a museum can be in the 21st century.

This session aims to explore Sisyphean efforts—or everyday endeavors that become endless and in turn ineffective and burdensome—and pathways that professionals at different stages of their career have used to navigate such difficulties. Whether it is in the realm of system administration, grant applications, or emotional labor, workers in our sector must creatively navigate the variety of iterative work or environments that can generate feelings of helplessness and fatigue. Through group storytelling and reflection, we will explore what it means to shoulder that burden, cast off (or shatter) the boulder, and the ways in which resilience can both help and hurt. In doing so, this session seeks to collectively discover the many routes that land us in such efforts, and share experiences that lead to their resolution, disruption, or sustainability.

We would love for you to submit your story for our group reflection! 
Signup form: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScVGBPLULmWJeBRkQDc1tKJLZlAORK3JFD6rALPvC44zmK-5w/viewform
This session is Chatham house rules- stories can be shared anonymously.

In 2018, we hosted an MCN session about empathy and facilitated some empathy-building activities using our empathi[ZINE]. In such a changing, uncertain time as 2020, we want to bring some of these concepts back to the top of people’s consciousness. We invite you to engage in some person-to-person, group, and individual exercises that we’ll facilitate to find connection in a world that seems quite disconnected.

This session seeks to explore and unpack misogyny in museums, and specifically within musetech and STEAM. Internalized misogyny, microaggressions, overt harassment and assault, retaliation and abuse. The reckoning started with #MuseumMeToo… except we’re still facing it today, in even more insidious ways as white cishet feminism often overrides the voices of BIPOC folks and LGBTQIA+ folks. We want to provide attendees with the tools they need to recognize the different manifestations of misogyny, with robust discussion, and some much-needed catharsis.

Too often we only see demos of enterprise software in a highly controlled sales environment. With software show and tell participants will see many different databases in action, and hear direct testimonials from their peers who use that software daily. For those who already have DAMS and CMS, we will offer a space to share tips/hacks/troubleshooting and customization ideas among users with the same software.

Who knew robots could have such impeccable comedic timing? Sit down for this unique performance from the CHARISMA Robotics Lab and Collaborative Robots and Intelligent Systems (CoRIS) Institute at Oregon State University.  Researchers Ajay Pallekonda, Sowmya Jujjuri and the team (both human and robotic) will host a 10–15 minute performance followed by an audience Q&A about the work.

With the support from a Knight Foundation grant, MCN is partnering with NEW INC, New Museum’s art and technology incubator, to launch a new web resource for the museum tech community. Through this new resource, we will capture and share model projects and experiments from across our community, with a goal of creating a centralized repository that anyone can use to advance their own understanding of how to creatively integrate technology into museum digital practice. Over the past few years, the field has made remarkable advancements and the goal of this joint project is to create a home for documenting and discussing this work.

The format of our platform -- how information is collected, how it is categorized, how it is presented -- is being jointly developed over the next few months by MCN and NEW INC. These two 60-minute Experimental sessions are part of our discovery process, during which we'll share some early case study templates and seek participants' feedback as we develop a new framework for capturing innovative digital projects in the field.

YOU MUST PRE-REGISTER HERE TO ATTEND THIS SESSION ZOOM MEETING!

This Chatham House Rule session intentionally holds space for individuals of Asian and Pacific Islander heritage to share their experiences in the museum technology sector. The processing session will include pre-written prompts to facilitate discussion points including but not limited to shared commonalities, significant differences, the “model minority” myth, the bamboo ceiling, minor feelings, and other difficult and important issues. Attendees who do not identify as being of Asian and Pacific Islander heritage are encouraged to listen but not speak during this session.

The speakers are joined by moderators: Paige Dansiger, Emily Kotecki, Felicia Ingram, Tina Shah, Barry Joseph, Michael Haley Goldman, and Andrea Monteil du Shuman

In the last decade, more and more museums have created experiences employing Virtual, Augmented, and other realities (abbreviated here as XR). Though we have learned a lot through these projects, they have raised just as many important questions for the field. Several important areas for research have emerged including (but not limited to) questions of ethics, equity and access, educational impact, and financial sustainability.

This town-hall style conversation does not seek to answer these questions but to better define the most important issues as virtual technologies in museums become more mature. Facilitated by a team of professionals with a wide range of experience developing and researching XR in museums, the session seeks to harness the expertise of everyone present to define a shared research agenda for the next stage of our collective work.

This miniature summit on XR in museums will use a variety of techniques to include the ideas and questions from everyone present - including small break out discussions, round-robin responses, and collective documentation of the summits ideas. The results will help not only clarify the issues for practitioners developing museum XR, it will also point the way to collectively addressing these issues.