Education & Interpretation

Museums & Personalized Learning: Hey Vermont, Wassup?!?!

By Elizabeth Merritt

School started last week for Vermont students, and incoming high school freshmen are going to be exploring a fragment of the future. The class of 2020 will be the first students covered by Vermont Act 77, which mandates personalized …
Supporting Learning in Museum Makerspaces: A National Framework

By Peter Wardrip

This article originally appeared in the September/October 2016 issue of Museum magazine. Identifying the elements that create and foster conditions for optimal learning. Makerspaces and maker-based learning experiences are settings and …
Exhibit A

By Elizabeth Merritt

I’m taking advantage of the late summer lull in blogging to share my personal favorite from last spring’s Future Fiction Challenge, a story submitted by Ken Eklund. It nails so many of the things that make for compelling future …
Monday Musing: Beyond Conformity & Compliance

By Elizabeth Merritt

Here’s an article I encourage you to read to start your week: Sir Ken Robinson: How to Create a Culture For Valuable Learning (Mind/Shift, KQED News). Sir Ken has been a major inspiration for my work on museums and the future of …
Free your mind! Funky futures & transformative education

By Elizabeth Merritt

“If you free your mind, you free your relationship to time”—George Clinton, funky musician and Afrofuturist Vibrant (adjective): Full of energy and enthusiasm. Pulsating. Bright and Striking… Learning (noun): The acquisition of …
Futurist Friday: Who Will You Care For? Who Will Care For You?

By Elizabeth Merritt

Many of my friends are members of the “sandwich generation”–caring both for children and for their own parents. That’s difficult enough right now, and as a new report from the Institute for the Future (IFTF) points …
A New AR Invasion: Pokemon Go!

By Elizabeth Merritt

If you haven’t heard the buzz about Pokémon Go—the new augmented reality game taking the world by storm—well, you must have been locked in collections storage, with no internet access, for the last few weeks. This new game was born from …
The Future of Museums (According to One Woman)

By Elizabeth Merritt

I was delighted to be interviewed for an issue of MISC Journal devoted to The Future According to Women. As the introduction notes, “The future we read about is made up of recycled bits of interviews curated from the minds of a few great …
Museums: An Important Partner in Talent Development Models of Gifted Education

By Elizabeth Merritt

Since I’ve begun exploring the small but expanding universe of “museum schools,” I’ve discovered they come in many different flavors. Some are schools actually run in and by a museum (like the Grand Rapids Public …
Finding Your Niche in the Future Learning Ecosystem

By Elizabeth Merritt

Here’s my thesis: “school” needs to be radically revamped to ensure that every kid has a safe, stimulating, supportive learning environment. Note I put “school” in quotes: one big challenge to inventing a new …