Intellectual Intimacy . . . Gone Virtual

I had a chance to chat with Terry Davis of the American Association for State and Local History at an event last week, and we were reflecting on their recent annual conference that also included a bold experiment to run an 'online conference' as well.  The online conference was designed to increase the number of museum staff members that could engage with the conference programming, even if they couldn't travel to Indianapolis.  By my rough calculations, more than a quarter of the AASLH conference 'attendance' was in the online conference rather than in person (and that's probably heavily underestimated since many of the online registrations included the participation of multiple staff members).

 

Having presented online, and in a regular conference session with Connecticut Landmarks and the Connecticut Humanities Council, I noted a few things:  The live session was a small audience, but had a very senior level of rather engaged attendees.  The online session had about five times more attendees, almost equally engaged.  It ended up as a really great way for AASLH to leverage the content prepared for the conference, extending the reach to a much broader audience.  (I'm really curious to see if the session reviews are any different for the online vs. the live presentation.)

 

Afterwards, we had a more casual online chat with the online producer and Greg Stevens, who runs AAM's online professional education, and talked about how the online experience can be far more engaging than one might expect.  For example, Greg and I realized that we had a strong rapport and working relationship even though we had only met through work on one of his online programs . . . never face-to-face until that moment.  Online isn't such a bad medium for building social glue compared to face-to-face, actually even making it easier to do that with more people.

 

But here's the big question this left me pondering:  It's clear that serious content can be delivered in an engaging manner online.  Could this be a tool that helps museums expand public access to their knowledge and expertise, while engaging a larger audience that is curious and hungry for the kind of stuff that museums are so well suited to provide?  Some universities are doing this as a means to re- engage alumni...with the end goal of supporting their development efforts.  What might this mean for museums? 

 

We'd love to hear any thoughts or questions!  Simply click on “comments” below (and if you are reading this from your e-mail subscription, go to our blog to comment).

- James

Comments

[David V Dexter]

I led a panel discussion on virtual worlds and museums at the Indianapolis AASLH conference. It was not one of the programs broadcast online -- not officially, anyway. One of my panelists was unable to travel to Indianapolis so we had her present live – both audio and video – from Second Life. An impromptu audience gathered in the Second Life area where she was presenting, and we were able to stream the audio from the Indianapolis presenters back to the Second Life audience. Unfortunately we did not have the equipment or bandwidth to stream video from Indianapolis into Second Life. But it all worked very well, especially since we had not planned on streaming into Second Life.

Incidentally, none of the three panelists had ever met each other in the physical world. We met and became colleagues in Second Life, and planned and rehearsed our AASLH presentation via meetings in Second Life. We spent nothing on video conferencing tools.

I have attended and participated in virtual world conferences as well as "mixed reality" events, and the interaction is every bit as effective as in a live "physical" presentation.

--Dave Dexter