The folks at McGraw Hill/Harvard Business Press recently sent me an advance copy of Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s Groundswell: winning in a world transformed by social technologies for review. The book builds on Li and Bernoff’s Forrester research blog and in particular their social technographics work. Aimed at managers, executives and marketing staff, the [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Young people & museums'
Behind the scenes of Launchball – an interview with Daniel Evans, Frankie Roberto, and Mike Ellis
March 20th, 2008 1 Comment
There is a lot to learn from the Science Museum’s (London) recent success with their Launchball online game. The project has been enormously successful and recently won ‘best of show’ at SxSW. I conducted an interview with Daniel Evans, Frankie Roberto, and Mike Ellis to explore some of the ideas and processes behind the project. [...]
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The problem with “digital natives”
March 7th, 2008 Comments Off
Henry Jenkins and others have been rightly critical of the notion of ‘digital natives’. Their core argument is that digital skills are very unevenly spread across age groups and digital literacy levels are not as they might necessarily seem when you read Pew Internet Reports or similar claiming that “64% of online teenagers ages 12 [...]
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The most popular online museum, user generated content and social networking
January 21st, 2008 Comments Off
In preparing for some of my upcoming papers, presentations and workshop, I came across the Saatchi Gallery’s Stuart. Stuart is like a MySpace for artists – it even looks a little like MySpace complete with visual clutter and flashing text. Create a profile, upload some ‘art’ and connect with others. Within the sector I hear [...]
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Playing with the OLPC XO Laptop and the museum possibilities
January 7th, 2008 4 Comments
I ordered an OLPC laptop under the ‘Give One Get One’ programme and via a friend in the US it arrived last week. My 3 year old has been having a great time playing with the TamTam Mini application, a very simple graphical sound triggering noise maker; the Paint application; a memory match game; and [...]
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Australian ICT use amongst marginalised youth and health service providers
December 18th, 2007 Comments Off
Australian non-profit foundation Inspire has released a report on ICT usage amongst marginalised youth and health service providers. Amongst many things it reveals that at least in the state of Victoria, a digital divide in terms of access is far less prevalent than is generally expected. Mirroring the findings of a lot of overseas research [...]
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A collection counting game for children
October 27th, 2007 Comments Off
During the recent school holidays we rolled out yet another simple game for young children over at our children’s website – Play at Powerhouse. This one is called Counting with Zoe & Cogs. Like previous games on the Play at Powerhouse site it revolves around the Museum’s two children’s mascots – Zoe, a girl representing [...]
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Social media, social networking – learning from libraries, the new OCLC report
October 24th, 2007 1 Comment
The OCLC has released an enormous (~300 page) new report titled Sharing, privacy and trust in our networked world. It is essential reading. Drawing data from 6 countries – USA, Canada, UK, Japan, France and Germany – the report gives detailed data on how people in the countries use the net, what they look at, [...]
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Why kids are moving to Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and away from email
October 19th, 2007 13 Comments
I’ve been watching a lot of people using computers over the past few months and it struck me how many of them were using web-based email services – the more tech savvy were on Gmail, and the more casual users gravitated towards Hotmail and Yahoo Mail despite their flaws. An even smaller number used webmail [...]
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A dress up game for children
October 11th, 2007 3 Comments
We’ve rolled out another simple game for young children over at our children’s website – Play at Powerhouse. This one is called Zoe’s Dress Up Game and revolves around the Museum’s two children’s mascots – Zoe, a girl representing the local community, and Cogs, a robot that represents the Museum’s knowledge and collection. The game [...]
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