IDEA, the Institute for Dynamic Educational Advancement, just released “Finding Information: Factors that improve online experiences,” which reports the findings of a study that the California-based nonprofit organization conducted recently.

Several people asked for a copy of my presentation, so here is a pdf of it.
Thanks for the attending/participating!

Saatchi's Your Gallery is worth a bit of time; it's a fun example of community-creation –– all artist-contributed content.

Now in association with The Guardian, the virtual gallery moves into a "real" space -- albeit the Guardian Newsroom. it's an intriguing development. Press release below.

Catherine Stiles blogged some concepts from her paper given at the Australian Historical Society in Canberra –– How Web 2.0 will change history - Possible futures for websites of the National Archives of Australia PDF on-line –– about implications of web 2.0 for museums, and ponders the requirement for radical trust of users. She's contrasted museum and library attitudes (citing lending as an example), and prompted responses from Jim Spadaccini and Bryan Kennedy among others. This brought me back to questions about institutional origins (that often influence attitudes) something i've been pondering in the context of "convergence" between libraries, archives and museums.

Mike Lowndes synthesizes... museums still don't know users, who they are and what they want.... and just when we think we've got them pinned down, they change, and the way that we reach them changes. Now, users themselves will be generating content in their own sites, and own spaces. "Our users are going to be in our face." -- we won't be able to hide from the re-use of museum content. When people are empowered they are surprisingly creative and can invent new ways of looking at things. Users, like good teachers, need to be able to take the parts of the content that they need to illustrate the point that they need to make. We need to put bits of our content in their context.

Anra Kennedy (24hr museum) chairs Marshall Mateer, Bruce Phillips and Helen Wright. What schools need. Marshall Mateer http://shapesoftime.net case study: children mapping docks where Titanic was built (entering content with geopositioning). challenge= orientation. where am i in relation to the information that i am taking in? how does it relate to me, and how do i evaluate its dimension/scale? case study: Journey in Stone: Caedmon School Project from the Cleveland Iron Mines. industrial heritage of area no longer in the community; mines are gone as is their central presence in the community. children are creating content, comfortable with technology.