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Futurist (Thursday?): No Phones at the Pop-up Dinner Table
[Due to the July 4 holiday in the US, Futurist Friday falls on a Thursday this week. Churchy LaFemme would approve.] A study by Android last year showed the average user checks their phone about once every seven seconds. When you are … -
Tangible Things Online: A MOOC about the Study of Stuff
I’m keeping my eye on MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) because they provide a platform through which museums might increase their reach by orders of magnitude. Last year Lisa Mazzola blogged for CFM about MoMA’s dive into the realm of … -
Turning the Museum into a Personal Oracle
I’m always on the hunt for examples of people “hacking” museum content in interesting ways. Museum fans come up with amazing ways to use museums—things museum staff may not have thought of in a million years. This week, artist / educator / … -
Museums in a Dangerous Time
The Alliance has announced that the theme of our 2015 Annual Meeting will be The Social Value of Museums: Inspiring Change. Believing, as I do that Museums Can Change the World (CFM’s motto), I look forward to the year leading up to the … -
Futurist Friday: Compiling a Summer Reading List
Earlier this week I tweeted about the search by UCLA law professor Ted Parsons for reading/viewing to assign for his upcoming seminar “Law in Futurist Social Visions.” The course will use speculative fiction to explore challenges that may … -
Yah, Museums Do That
I want to share this video the Alliance recently released. It shares a couple of great stories demonstrating museums’ role in the growing “vibrant learning grid” connecting educational resources in the US. These stories … -
Meet Watson, Your Personal Museum Learning Agent
A recent post by Steve Hamm wrote on the IBM Smarter Planet sparked a new thought about a role for AI (artificial intelligence) in museums. Steve writes about IBM Watson’s new gig: improving the customer experience, as demonstrated in this … -
Futurist Friday: Heads Up
When Jeff Bezos announced last year that Amazon was going to introduce “Prime Air,” a drone delivery service, he was roundly mocked and Amazon quickly backed off the claim. But, in fact, the barriers to drone delivery are … -
Museums in the World of Open Data
Yesterday IMLS gave a webinar explaining the methodology that went into compiling the 34,144 records in their recently released Museum Universe Database File (MUDF). The big news isn’t so much the count, though that is important, as … -
Futurist Friday: Robotic Emoticons
I will be writing soon about CFM’s experiments with robots (telepresence robots and drones) at the annual meeting in Seattle last month. Spoiler alert: some people found our robot guests charming, others were more than a bit creeped …
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