What can Second Life do for your organization?

That’s the question that’s been floating around the blogosphere of late. I think, though, that the question needs to be asked in two ways.

1. What can your museum do for residents of Second Life?
2. What can participating in Second Life do for your museum?

Once you answer the first question, you can answer the second. I’ll attempt to answer these questions with some specificity after we consider more broadly the advantages and liabilities of participating in Second Life.

If you’re not familiar with Second Life, scroll down to the bottom of this post and explore some of the links in the “Second Life roundup.”

Learning curves and marketing budgets

I admit that I joined the world of Second Life (SL) only recently, and I’ve explored only about eight to ten hours “in world.” That said, I’ve spent far longer researching the possibilities within Second Life.

I haven’t spent more time in world because the learning curve is, in my opinion, rather steep for those of us who have no background in gaming. The learning curve is even steeper for organizations that want to have a “physical” presence in Second Life.

I’m highlighting this fact because whether you allocate time for someone on your staff to learn how to navigate Second Life, and then to create objects and buildings in world, or whether you hire someone to design your museum’s in-world environment for you, the cost of a Second Life presence can escalate rapidly. Before diving into Second Life, you’ll need, of course, to consider whether your marketing and PR dollars are best spent elsewhere.

Note: If you haven’t yet checked out Second Life, and you have some time on your hands, head on over and sign up for a free account. Depending on your personal comfort with virtual environments and your propensity for getting sucked into such activities, plan on spending an hour or two exploring the world. Having an idea of how people, as represented by avatars, navigate Second Life will help you better understand what follows.

What can your museum do for residents of Second Life?

To answer this question, turn to your museum’s mission statement, exhibition history, program guide, and curriculum. What does your institution do best?

Ask yourself if your institution’s capabilities and activities would translate well to this world.

Find out if someone else is already offering such activities. If so, don’t despair–there’s plenty of room for new participants, even if your offering overlaps with existing activities. However, you might consider collaborating with other institutions to create a single, multi-institution location for residents to visit.

For example, there are already galleries of art in Second Life. What will your art museum bring to the table that’s new? Will you innovate in interpretation?

As far as I know, no science centers have yet to build in Second Life. If your designer can replicate some of your real-world hands-on activities and exhibits, those would definitely be a novel addition. Remember, however, that adults are not allowed to participate on the mainland of the youth world on Second Life and vice versa. There are ways for educators to reach young people, but initially you’ll need to focus on either youth or adult patrons, not both.

If you represent a living history center or a historic house museum, your staff members’ avatars can be outfitted in period attire. Depending on the era on which your institution focuses, there may already be a logical place to build in Second Life. For example, there is a Victorian village in Second Life where avatars wear nineteenth-century garb and participate in role play.

You should also, however, take into account the kinds of things that are possible in Second Life that aren’t possible in the real world. You can animate paintings, for example, or provide bodily and mental experiences that the average person would not have in their daily lives. Take, for example, one doctor’s creation of a schizophrenia simulator.

In addition, be sure to check out the blog Second Life Library 2.0, as well as the libraries in-world, for more organizational and institutional inspiration.

Might you provide informal educational content in audio and visual formats? For example, the public radio show The Infinite Mind is broadcasting in Second Life and welcoming residents to participate in the broadcasts.

Will your institution have a physical presence in Second Life in the form of a building? If so, will you charge admission, ask for donations, or admit people for free? If you build, be sure to include a virtual store where residents can purchase fun, stylish, or elegant accessories for their avatars and their homes.

Once you have brainstormed a bit, you should ask residents of Second Life if they’d be interested in such activities or sites as you wish to provide. You can interview residents in world–an admittedly labor-intensive process–or survey participants in any number of Second Life forums on the web.

What can participating on Second Life do for your museum?

It’s hard to say. People participating in Second Life have leisure time, current computer technology, and high speed internet access, so it’s likely they have some disposable income as well.

But are they museumgoers and prospective donors? That much is unclear.

You can learn more about marketing to avatars at Brands in Games, which has published a transcript of an in-world panel on marketing to avatars in Second Life. The panel was convened by Harvard’s Berkman Center.

In addition, Clickable Culture offers some reflections on an article on marketing to avatars recently published in the (subscription-based) Harvard Business Review.

Second Life roundup

If you’re not familiar with Second Life, you can get the opinions of its fans and detractors by clicking on the links below.

Second Life resources and evangelists

College Web Editor provides a brief guide to resources on Second Life. She also considers whether Second Life might help institutions raise awareness and funds for their real-life construction projects.

A magazine on conducting business in Second Life made its debut today. While focused on entrepreneurs, it may provide museums with ideas, tips, and inspiration. Details on SL Business, “The Premiere Virtual Branding Magazine,” may be found here.

C.C. Chapman is a fan of Second Life. Browse the archive of his podcasts at Managing the Gray to learn more about the possibilities of Second Life.

Beth Kanter is exploring the usefulness of Second Life to nonprofits. Check out these posts for ideas and inspiration:
Nonprofits in Second Life: Avatar Marketing, Fundraising, and TechSoup’s Plans
Reflections on Mixed Reality Events in Second Life
A Conversation with TechSoup’s Susan Tenby on Virtual Nonprofit Communities

TechSoup has put together a directory of nonprofits in Second Life. You can read about these groups’ activities and in many cases learn where to find them in-world. TechSoup also hosts a listserv for nonprofits in Second Life.

Second Life detractors and the unimpressed

Darren of Capulet Communications warns us not to jump into Second Life just because it’s the latest trend.

Branded Newb says Second Life is

a waste of time for marketers. When the real virtual world comes (and it will), the experiences in SL will provide little value (probably as valuable as logos on Pogs). I’m sure many marketers know this but until they stop looking good posing with the facade, they don’t care. For example, did American Apparel really open up a store in SL so they can market to the 300,000 registered users of SL? I doubt it, 300,000 nerds that never get out is a waste of time for a clothing company. What it is is good PR and that’s all that really matters to everyone involved.

Michelle Murrain asks

What’s the point? I spent about five hours in SL with a new account, exploring, talking to people, trying to figure out a good reason to keep going. Being in SL keeps me plastered in my chair, in front of my screen, when I’d rather be reading a book, or out walking on the beach, or taking to a real live human being, or if I’m going to be plastered in my chair, writing something interesting.

I think that the internet has created amazing opportunities to bring people together from disparate places so that they can work together in ways that they wouldn’t be able to otherwise. I’d bet that the text based methods that we already have (IRC, IM, email) actually would be more efficient, because you wouldn’t have to spend that time flying around and futzing with your avatar.

Ethan Zuckerman elaborates on what he sees as the current failures of Second Life, as well as how organizations might better serve residents. He focuses on the virtual Darfur within Second Life:

It’s possible that simulations will be a valuable tool for communicating the reality of situations like Darfur… if and when they get the details right… which they can only do if data is coming from the places they’re trying to simulate. The creators of virtual Darfur – who I suspect are smart, well-meaning people – probably put in this firewood not because they thought it was authentic, but because it was an object easily available elsewhere in Second Life which they didn’t need to custom create. But it ends up masking one of the more powerful details about the conflict, which you’d get from any competent newspaper account or from looking at photos of refugee camps.

The problems of virtual Darfur doesn’t mean that Second Life and other metaverse spaces won’t have a social impact in the future. But asking a technology to rise to this social purpose as this stage of its development may be unfair and unwise. It’s possible that hundreds, possibly even thousands of Second Life users will encounter this space – James speculates that, for some, it will be the first time they’ve ever thought about Darfur. This worries me – if you’re so deeply disconnected from the reality I live in that a Second Life space is the first time you’ve encountered this issue, then we don’t have much common context. (Do such people exist? Do they vote?)

The reason Second Life bugs me is not the fact that it slows my computer to a crawl, that most of my fellow characters are impossibly thin girls with overinflated breasts, or that most of the activity of the world seems to rotate around real estate and sex. (It reminds me of Reagan’s America, without the cocaine.) No, it’s the cyberutopianism. What bothers me is the fact that every presentation I’ve heard from Linden Labs has focused on the social implications of the space, the ways interaction in these new spaces will change fundamental economic and social dynamics of people all around the world.

Of course, this post represents but a sampling of opinions and resources on nonprofits, marketing, and Second Life. A Google search on the keywords marketing, avatar, and Second Life or nonprofits and Second Life will provide you with further resources.

What do you think? Is your institution considering participating in Second Life? If so, why, and in what forms?

Ana of Le carnet d’Ana blogged today about the Virtual Museum of Canada’s AGORA Learning Center. She writes,

Je trouve cette initiative importante parce que de plus en plus d’information muséale destinée aux enseignants est disponible et des heures sont nécessaires pour les trouver et les interpréter. Or, les enseignants n’ont pas ce temps. Il est de notre devoir de les aider à se simplifier la tâche de recherche et de leur donner des outils pour utiliser nos ressources à leur façon.

My (very) rough translation of the above:

I find this initiative important because more and more museum information is available to teachers, yet it takes hours for them to find and interpret it. Some teachers don’t have the time to do this. It’s our job to help them simplify the task of research and to give them the tools to use our resources in their own ways.

Agreed! When I was employed by a science center, I created teacher resource packets that, in a single page or so of text, gave teachers the background information they needed to understand what they’d see in our exhibits. In this same packet, we provided them with simple exercises to try out with their students using materials they likely already had at hand. Some lessons were designed for use before the class visited the center and some post-visit. The teachers received these packets via mail but they were also available online in PDF.

In a perfect world, of course, these packets would be interactive and tailored both to the exhibit and to individual teachers’ needs. I’d like to see a museum-hosted, online, fully searchable database that allowed teachers to enter the subject they’d like to teach, the grade level, and either their budget or the materials they had at hand. Entering these search criteria would bring up a selection of lessons tailored to the teacher’s physical resources and curricular needs. Anyone want to hire me to design one? 😉

P.S. — It looks like the VMC lets users create their own “personal museums.” This feature might work really well for teachers trying to put together a custom collection of objects on which students could produce projects. Check it out.

The Natural History Museum, London’s Antarctic Conservation Blog has been describing some interesting pieces of material culture.

Coop of Positive Ape Index is totally in love with some old tools. Really.

Mister Jalopy salivates over a Christie’s auction that includes a Laughing Drunkard Coin Operated Automaton–and he kindly provides photos. In an earlier post, he finds a childhood in a jar.

Continuing its “Cool Things” series of podcasts, the Kansas Museum of History has published a new episode, this one on a leg brace for a woman who had been afflicted with polio as a child.

In the series “Found Objects,” I’ll be sharing sites and blog posts that may be of interest to museum professionals.

The folks at Ideum have begun a central clearinghouse for museum blogs, MuseumBlogs.org. Be sure to check out the other museum blogs listed there, some of which you may have already discovered through the blogroll here on Museum Blogging. And if you haven’t yet read it, check out Ideum’s survey of museum blogs and community sites.

Glenda Sims provides a nice summary of the Museums and the Web conference. I’m grateful that the post drew my attention to Curating the City: Wilshire Blvd; what a wonderful site! Sims also blogged about her experiences at a Digital Storytelling Bootcamp for Museums.

The Canadian Heritage Information Network recently unveiled the Knowledge Exchange, “an online space for museum professionals and volunteers, promoting community engagement through the use of relevant technologies.” Be sure to check it out.

Blogging Pedagogy considers “digital curation” in the context of a post about mobile blogging.

Live from LRMA points us to a list of fictional works that feature art conservators or restorers and Encyclopedia Smithsonian’s guide and reference list on the appraisal of objects.

Paul Marty of Musematic considers the state of museum research. An excerpt:

as more museum professionals work to integrate media and technology into their museums, it will become even more important that regularized data benchmarks be established to allow for comparisons between projects and to help others avoid re-inventing the wheel each time a new project is started.

Brent Gustafson of the Walker Art Center shows us how to hack the iPod operating system to make it useful for audio tours.

Nina Puurunen of Museoblogi considers censorship in museums and how to best write the history of museums, a subject near and dear to my heart.

Found History considers the utility of Yahoo’s Taglines as an historical resource.

I’ve been following with some interest the relatively new blog craft research. According to its own description,

Craft Research is the blog for the Craft Research team at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee, UK. The team is conducting a major research project funded by the Art and Humanties Research Council entitled “Past, Present & Future Craft Practice: exploration of the inter-relation between skill, intent and culture”. This blog serves both as a networking device for team members, and as a means of exploring ideas as they evolve with a wider audience.

Throughout its three-month history, its contributors have been discussing definitions of craft. For example, Liz Donald writes,

I was interested to read that in Australia craft of exceptional quality of workmanship, uniquene and refined, and show a degree of problem solving, creative intellegence and innovation, is classed as ‘Art Craft’. In the USA the same criteria is used to but called ‘Fine Craft’. In the UK I have found no distinction in the crafts. Everything is lumped together. What do you think?

I’ve been thinking about definitions of craft quite a bit lately, which might seem a bit odd for an academic whose current project is on the history of science. My next project, however, will be focused on hobbies and crafts. And I do see some connections between women’s place in the sciences and women’s craft work.

A recent post written by the project’s principal investigator, Georgina, both piqued my interest and raised my hackles. An excerpt:

Time to move on. The practice of crafts, and the arena in which crafts operate has changed, not is changing. We have to see a future, so, what aspect of craft practice? Can we move into a new paradigm? I suggest that we start to look at the intellectual basis, seeing the thinking process, not the happy clappy hands that everyone keeps referring to, (i.e. make it but don’t think about it, or the home therapy session), is not what is meant by a system of thought that moves through the processes and materials, using each and every aspect of making as additive to practice. Until this is accepted as the boundary for fine crafts you are lost in icing sugar! Sweet, synthetic and too much makes you sick!

She concludes with an invitation for engagement with this “intellectual basis,” and says “I will respond with works that I can identify as fine crafts.”

I understand that within any study, the researchers need to define their area of study. Otherwise, the project’s scope can become too large to address in a single article or book. That said, an attempt to define “fine craft” seems especially risky and high-stakes.

photo by Michael and Felicity

Part of the problem with defining an object as “fine craft” or “art” is that the object may be defined as merely everyday handiwork in one decade may be praised as art or fine craft in the next. Take, for example, the the quilts of Gee’s Bend, Alabama. The quilts and the African-American women who created them were “discovered” by the U.S. art establishment earlier this decade and exhibited at the Whitney Museum and elsewhere. Since then, the quilts have been celebrated in a book and their designs licensed for use in rugs.

Another problem with Georgina’s desire to focus on the intellectual effort of craft comes from the fact that poor African-American women in the South have not usually been associated with intellectual practice. Segments on NPR and PBS reveal that these women do think about their aesthetic choices and see their quilts as individual creative achievements. But outsiders have not always recognized their quilts as such.

It’s easy, I think, to look at much of the production on Craftster, Etsy, and whip up as amateurish and, to borrow Georgina’s phrase, “happy clappy.” But it’s not always clear what separates the most original and technically accomplished (again, both value judgments) work on these sites from “professional” work featured on, for example, design*sponge.

The craft-art boundary is increasingly blurred, and I think that’s a good thing, especially for women. I worry that setting up a further hierarchy within craft–by distinguishing some craft as “fine” or “high”–could hurt the thousands upon thousands of women who hope to sell their work and become self-supporting, as then standard-issue craft becomes less valuable (culturally and monetarily) than fine craft.

A similar phenomenon has occurred again and again in the natural sciences in the U.S., where work undertaken by women becomes undervalued or made invisible. In the course of my dissertation work, I’ve learned that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, women specimen collectors who sold or donated their collections to museums were not considered to be undertaking scientific work, even though they followed scientific guidelines for preserving their specimens and recording information about them. If they weren’t undertaking original research, they weren’t scientists. Similarly, women who sold seeds or ran nurseries were not recognized as scientists even if they hybridized new species. Women scientists who worked in museums were expected to undertake both outreach to amateurs and laypeople and to conduct original research on the collections, but only their research for a professional audience was considered real scientific work.

In short, narrow definitions of science have kept women from being recognized for work that is indeed scientific and that, if presented in another light, might have brought them some prestige. Instead of being dismissed as a “seedswoman” or “nurserywoman,” for example, a woman who hybridized plants would earn more acclaim if we called her a “biotech pioneer.”

And that’s why I’m hesitant to embrace a hierarchy of craft. Such a schema makes craft less democratic; it closes off possibilities, economic and social and cultural, for women.

(cross-posted at BlogHer)

For those of you who have been trying to subscribe to this site’s Atom feed, it’s now fixed. Please resubscribe to the new feed. Many apologies for the inconvenience.