Immersive theatre, part two

As follow-up to my post on theatre, I finally rescheduled a Google+ Hangout to try to unpack Sleep No More and look forward to exploring it with other attendees.

I also got an exciting email from my old friend and former colleague Catherine Hughes. Catherine started the Museum of Science’s Science Theater department back in the day, and is now the Project Director of Meet the Past at the Atlanta History Center in Georgia. Her book, Museum Theatre: Communicating with Visitors Through Drama, is a good place to learn about museum theatre in general. Here’s the scoop from Atlanta, which she kindly allowed me to post,

 I read your piece on immersive theatre and thought I’d share the most recent project I’ve directed, a fully participatory play called Four Days of Fury, which opens tonight. We’ve gotten lots of good feedback (see this and this) so far from the press opening. Fingers crossed, regular audience will feel the same. It feels like we’ve managed to do something new for a museum.

We’ve sold out each performance and are attracting a far more diverse group and having these incredible dialogues following each show. People are talking about difficult issues, race and fear, in an open forum with strangers! We’ve had the head of the Georgia Council for Humanities and the director of the Office of Cultural Affairs for Atlanta attend. We have three shows today and then next weekend. Whew. We are emailing a post-show survey to all who give us their email (we’re asking everyone) for the evaluation. Fingers crossed we get more than the usual 5% response.

So, stay tuned for details!

Tools of the trade, my 2011 edition

One of the most interesting parts of going through everyone’s responses to my question about managing their cognitive load was seeing the similarities and differences in strategies.  In fact, a couple of you wondered what those commonalities might say about us and our work. That may be a post for another day.

I thought it would be fitting end to that series to go over what tools came up as useful, and list some of the changes I’ve made to my information consumption strategies based on your input.

Twitter
The #1 tool, and the only one that everyone used was Twitter. This may be a sampling artifact, since I use Twitter a great deal, but in my decidedly unscientific pondering of the last three conferences I was at, I can pretty definitely claim that most of the museum people I run into use it as well.  Respondents to my email, like me, use Twitter clients rather than Twitter’s web page.  Filtering is vital if you’re not going to drown in the tweetstream. I have a love/hate relationship with Tweetdeck. I love it’s flexibility, and it’s lists that allow me to sort my incoming tweets. I’ve got my general museum list, hashtags I’m following like #mtogo and conferences, as well as a friends’ list, and even a celebrities list (Stephen Fry is just too interesting!) Being able to sort them means I only have to see the one two lists I feel like listening to on any given day. Things that seem interesting or worth following up on get favorited and go into their own favorites list.

After I’d started this series, I found ifttt.com. It stands for “If This, Then That” and it allows you to set up logical equations using web services. My favorite task has become “If I favorite a tweet, copy the text to a file in my Evernote account called ‘twitter favs’.” Very convenient!

Google+
We came, we saw, we looked around… and left.

RSS feeds
Coming in second was relying on RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds to aggregate the websites you want to follow.  I’d given up on RSS some time ago in favor of doing it old school style, slogging from site to site with the Firefox Morning Coffee plugin that lets you add a button to Firefox that will open tabs of any number of sites at once.  RSS readers like NetNewsWire let you corral thousands of sites and group them so you can manage your browsing before you start.  I have my twelve or so museum sites I’m most interested in keeping abreast with, maybe another twenty more tangentially connected to my work, and then a slew of general science and tech sites that spew forth potentially interesting content daily. With a reader, I can decide if I really (need to/want to/can stomach) wading through 317 Slashdot articles today or not, and I’m pretty ruthless now about hitting the “Mark All as Read” button when I don’t want to be bothered. I find it satisfying in fact to see all those little numbers of unread posts disappear. Poof! Like Jasper said in the first post, letting go is important to your sanity.

Email
I’m on the verge of getting moved from Mail to Outlook, so changing my email habits now is bit counter-productive. That said, I did clean out my inbox and outbox and went through my mail filters and updated a bunch. My inbox is a lot more manageable! More to come, post migration.

LinkedIn

What was interesting to me about LinkedIn was how many people used it, but not much, and not often.  Off all the responses I got, only one person really invested in LinkedIn, and that was for the discussion groups. For most of the others, myself included, we filled out our profiles, connected with people we knew, and … not much else.  Tweetdeck lets me post to LinkedIn, so sometimes I will send tweets that way, so it looks like I’m on more than I am.  Again, this may be a sampling artifact. Most of the people I asked have jobs and aren’t doing the kind of networking that freelancers and job seekers have to do. I have to admit that the reason I check LinkedIn is usually because I’ve gotten an alert that a contact has changed their profile, usually because they’ve gotten a new job.

Make Learning a Formal Activity, and Do It with Friends
Organizing these local meetups has been very rewarding.  And making them regular, and reliable has been important to them. Getting to the point where people expect them to happen is gratifying, and the pressure keeps me going.  I’ve enjoyed watching people make connections, and actually learn useful things from each other at the events.  Even these ostensibly social occasions can be learning experiences.

Reading about departments with built in learning communities made me a little jealous at first, and I realized how much I enjoy that kind of interaction. As I’ve been writing these responses, I’ve had any number of little epiphanies. One of them was that if I wanted to work in a more learning-centered workplace, I’d better do something about it. The outcomes of this were twofold for me.  Firstly, it reminded me that I really wasn’t doing much to pass on any of the benefits I received at the start of my career. So, I’ve got a shiny new intern (actually she’s a highly skilled, veteran intern) and am trying to figure out what is useful for her to know is a very valuable lens into my own practice.  What do I do? Why do I do it this way? It’s a lot of work, keeping an intern learning and doing stuff that’s not make-work.  Hopefully, she’ll get something useful out of the experience. Stay tuned.

The other outcome has been that the exhibit developers here agreed that we’ll hold regular professional development meetings. There are only three of us, so it can be very informal — read a book or article and discuss.  It’s not hard, it just takes determination to keep doing it.  Got any exhibit topics that you think are hot?

 

 

 

Replies to “Dealing with your cognitive load” – Part two of four

This is the second of four posts summarizing replies to the question I posed about how people cope with the vast amounts of information coming at them.  In the first part, I described some strategies people use for managing information intake. This post will look at how people store information. The last two posts will cover separating inspiration from information, and the importance of making time to learn.

Storing stuff

The reason to go looking for information is so that you find information. Once you’ve found it, though, how do you keep track of it, store it, or tag it so that you can retrieve it later when you want it? As a digital Cro Magnon, I can’t help feeling that I don’t really have it, unless it’s on my drive in some form, where I can access it whenever, regardless of connectivity.  Call me old-fashioned… This leads to some strange behaviors on my part.

Storing PDFs

Reference collections from OSU Archives

I do a lot of research and often find things online that might be useful someday, but not immediately.  And the Web being a fickle medium, you can’t always rely on that article or review still being where it was six months or a year ago.  So PDFs get downloaded and sucked into my Mendeley reference manager. It’s a fabulous way to organize your documents, and generate bibliographies. And it’s got some great social features I keep meaning to use but never do… For webpages, I tend to capture local copies using Readability to strip out all the chaff and leave me the content. That then gets turned into a PDF and goes into Mendeley with the original URL so I can get back to it if needed. Kate Haley-Goldman will put research or even researchy stuff in Zotero or Endnote. If it’s more personal she keeps it in Evernote. She keeps meaning to make better use of Mendeley, but…

Storing links

"A man checks Twitter on an iPhone" by Flickr user stevegarfield

What about links? Twitter provides me with the vast majority of leads to pertinent information. I tend to favorite links that look interesting so I can circle back to them when I have time and check them out.  I also use Tweestream to archive all my tweets and give them back to me as a spreadsheet. I’ve never actually opened that archive, but knowing it’s there makes me feel better.  Tweetstream also provides you with interesting metrics on your Twitter usage which I glance at, but rarely engage deeply with. If I was in business for myself, then knowing who’s retweeting my stuff most often might seem more urgent. Kate Haley Goldman marks things she finds interesting on Twitter and on rare occasions actually goes back and looks at batches of things she’s marked, bookmarking the pieces she’ll want to see again.

Nancy Proctor loves wikis. If you’ve looked at any of her work, you’ll wind up on one her wikis. She captures the #mtogo hashtag to the MuseumMobile wiki as her way of hanging onto information of interest.  Bruce Wyman uses a third party service that listens to his Twitter feed and automatically captures any of his tweets with a URL into del.icio.us, so he has a permanent record of the things that he found interesting. And in general, his take on storing links seems to be broadly shared.

“As for general URLs and link mgmt tools (including del.icio.us), I rarely actually use them. MY general assumption is that if I need something again that it’s likely I can re-Google for it and saving links creates a cleanup headache and categorization activity that I just don’t have time for.”

Storing files

"Stored documents" by Flickr user profkaren

 

Lori Phillips, obviously more of a digital native than me, keeps a separate Google Doc for each of her main areas of research interest, where she posts her thoughts, chunks from emails, and links to blogs and articles that relate to the concept. That way she can keep everything all in one place, and also direct co-workers to it when necessary.

Kathleen Tinworth uses Dropbox for most of her personal and consulting file storage and sharing.  It’s not the most secure place, but it’s darned convenient.  My lovely and talented wife also uses Dropbox a great deal with her school teacher colleagues, both a way to share documents effectively and to get around some of the shenanigans that public school IT departments make users go through in the name of “securityiness.” I’ve used both Dropbox and Box.net for consulting jobs and am sold on their utility, especially when there are big files, like floorplans or label proofs that need to be distributed. Being me, though, I of course download everything and maintain a separate copy of everything on my hard drive. Just in case.

from the Powerhouse Museum's Flickr collection

An interesting practice that Kathleen brought up was using dication software for capturing ideas when you can’t write them down.  When I first got my iPhone I used to take voice memos while I walked to and from work.  It was great at first, but the act of going back and listening and transcribing them got to be a drag.  Kathleen uses Dragon dictation. The free iPhone app is actually pretty decent and it’s a quick way to capture things in real-time.

Storing images

by Flickr user clickykbd

Flickr. ‘Nuff said. Everyone uses it, it seems.

Next up, separating inspiration from information, and then some thoughts about making time to learn. Thanks to all of you who responded. I’m adding things to my repertoire!