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Got Game? Another Opportunity for Museum Partners

By Elizabeth Merritt

CFM’s inaugural lecturer, Dr. Jane McGonigal, lobbed “brain grenades” at the museum field last December, challenging us to apply the principles of game design to museum practice. Why wouldn’t museums want part of the “heart-share and …
Oh Brave New Virtual World!—Explorers Wanted

By Elizabeth Merritt

Museum practitioners are energized, perturbed, or both by the prospect of a future in which people spend more and more of their time immersed in virtual worlds. After all, the virtual is the enemy of the real, right? Some counter that a …
Toward Multi-Museum Multi-Media Collaboration (in the IMMEDIATE future!)

By Bruce A. Falk

Guest post by Bruce A. Falk, Contracting Officer, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Imagine a paleontology team on a dig. The lead scientist narrates a video capture summarizing the day’s finds, which is then posted to a vlog (web-based …
Please Touch the Objects: The Future of Museum Accessibility

By Elizabeth Merritt

CFM Council Member Day Al-Mohamed and I recently led a forecasting session at the Leadership and Excellence in Accessible Design Conference at the Kennedy Center. (An earlier post on the CFM blog solicited your input for this session. …
Crowdsource the Museum?

By Elizabeth Merritt

I got hooked by the title of this blog post–Get Ready to Participate: Crowdsourcing and Governance—energized by a momentary leap of hope that it was going to be about nonprofit governance. It’s not, but it’s still really interesting. …
More News from the Future–Today

By Elizabeth Merritt

Next in our series of “tomorrow’s news today”—this article from the New York Times about the National Geographic Society’s archives plan to sell its original black and white prints, and, later color photographs. While the initial sale …
Sneak Preview of a New Museum Game

By John Maccabee

CFM has from its inception has explored what museums can learn from games, and game design. In this guest post, John Maccabee, of San Francisco based CityMystery, gives readers an early glimpse into the creation of a new, multi-museum …
Questioning Assumptions: the Future of Education

By Elizabeth Merritt

The recent CFM posts about museum studies (here and here) have spun off in all sorts of interesting directions, including discussions at New Curator and MJ Writes. People propose that graduate programs should guarantee jobs for graduates, …
Future of History Museums

By Elizabeth Merritt

I encourage you to browse these interesting posts created in preparation for a workshop on the future of history museums being held now at Brown University, organized by Steve Lubar and Kym Rice. Dan Spock suggests that perhaps “in …
Where the Boys Aren’t

By Philip Katz

My colleague Elizabeth Merritt’s last blog post noted two facts in passing that deserve to be linked together more closely: the dominance of women in museum studies programs and the significant cadre of museum studies graduates who …