The Center for the Future of Museums Blog shares musings on the future of museums and society.

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  • What type of future do you envision for P-12 education?

    Would you like to see your ideas about the future of education shared far beyond your local museum or school? What current P-12 issues are important to you? What works and where are the opportunities for change? Draft your story today and …
  • Future Friday Fiction!: The Wax

    This week, our Future Friday Fiction work is by Joe Tankersley, a futurist. His story is set in New Orleans and imagines a future where a VR enhanced music program is developed by  a museum. Check out the other entries here and submit your …
  • Museums and Fair Labor Practices

    Fair wages, living wages, the CEO pay ratio, unpaid internships, short term contracts, unbiased hiring, outsourced work—labor issues are front and center in our field. TrendsWatch 2016 (which will come out at the end of this month) tackles …
  • Museums & Employment: Casting a Wider Net

    Diversifying the museum workforce is going to involve all players in the labor market rethinking traditional assumptions. In her January guest post (“One Graduate’s Job Search Story”) Sophie Stein encourages recent …
  • Future Fiction Friday: It began with the bees.

    Hi, this is Sylvea. I wanted to share a story from our Future Fiction Challenge…this one, by Lisa Alleman, an educator at Lakewood Historical Society in Lakewood, OH. Check out the other entries here and submit your story! If you would …
  • Lessons in Foresight

    When I wooed the American Council of Learned Societies last year, proposing they assign CFM one of their public fellows, I promised that the Alliance would provide futurist training for the humanities post-doc that also matched our needs. …
  • The Future of Websites

    CFM is a “skunkworks” for the Alliance, as well as an idea lab for the field. Sometimes we test drive things that may (or may not) work to assess whether they are promising practices for the association as a whole. Case in point: our …
  • Future Fiction Friday

    Hi, this is Sylvea. I wanted to share a story from our Future Fiction Challenge…this one, by Sarah Jesse, is entitled “World Museum and Library Database.” Check out the other entries here and submit your story! If you would like tips from …
  • Kentucky’s Jefferson Davis Dilemma

    In a post last June I began to track how museums are invoked by protesters calling for the removal of monuments and symbols celebrating the Confederacy in particular, and America’s slave-holding past more generally. In the ensuing …
  • One Graduate’s Job Search Story…Consider Casting a Wider Net

    I’m frequently asked to give advice about job searches, which puts me in an uncomfortable position: I want to be helpful, but I’m hesitant to offer advice based on my own initial forays into the field, which took place in a …

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