From the Editor-in-Chief

There is an inherent tension between museums’ tradition of offering visitors face-to-face encounters with collections and their relatively new ability to connect audiences to collections through virtual access. Physical experiences in real places can provide powerful information that gives meaning to collections. Consider how a sense of place—the smells, sounds, physical sensations, and ambience—contributes to our understanding of a historic site. Or how, when comparing two pieces of art hung across a gallery from each other, we realize something new. Or how the observation of scores of baboons spread out over a vast outdoor enclosure of a zoo inspires us to ask questions about family and social relationships. The value and authenticity of being in these environments is not easily replicated through virtual access for we are able to acquire information that would fall outside of the frame of a camera.

Yet consider the ways that virtual access, especially if live and with two-way communication, can reach well beyond what can be achieved through a museum visit. One article in the guest-edited portion of this issue of the Journal of Museum Education (JME), “Don’t Lose the Connection: Virtual Visits for Older Adults,” by Dale Hilton, Arielle Levine and Janet Zanetis, argues that virtual visits are the only way that some seniors living in group settings can access museum resources.

Although virtual access does not provide some of the authenticity of a physical encounter, it is no less meaningful than reading a history book to learn about and imagine the past, or viewing a filmed documentary of a place we would otherwise not visit. Interactive virtual learning (IVL), as guest editor Allyson Mitchell calls it, is an increasingly flexible and inexpensive tool for museum activities that can occur within or outside of museum walls. For instance, Kristen Erickson describes how IVL can be used inside museums to connect in-museum visitors to people who may be far away in her article, “Using Portals to Foster Global Connectivity in the 21st-Century Museum.”

The tension then, is not simply a binary choice between in-museum or out-of-museum programming, but rather the tensions that arise over resource allocation of staffing, equipment, and space. When museum administrators add IVL programs to museum operations without accompanying resource allocations to support the new activities, staff members, their relationships, and museum systems are stressed. Stress results in fractures, and fractures can become fissures.

We hope you are inspired and excited by the IVL possibilities described in these pages. But take heed of Randi Korn’s advice in her new book, Intentional Practice for Museums: A Guide for Maximizing Impact (reviewed by Claire Orologas at the end of this issue of JME). Randi has long argued that museum professionals must routinely engage in cycles of planning that articulate museum-wide goals and desired impacts and assess how well museum activities meet them. “Intentional practice,” she says in her book, “comprises four actions—planning, evaluating, reflecting and aligning … .”¹ She asserts that the ends, not the means, should drive programming decisions. If IVL interests you and your colleagues, think about what you want to achieve with it, and how to reuse existing programs rather than creating new one, as Allyson Mitchell, Sarah Linn and Hitomi Yoshida describe in their article, “A Take of Technology and Collaboration: Preparing for 21st-Century Museum Visitors,” in this JME issue. If IVL is new to you and your museum, use it as a reason to engage in museum-wide planning that aligns all activities, from programs and exhibitions to research and development. IVL is a tool, and not an end in itself. It is a tool with enormous potential to open museums in new ways.

About the editor-in-chief

Cynthia Robinson is the director of museum studies and senior lecturer at Tufts University, where she specializes in museum education. She spent 25 years working in and with museums and has extensive experience in developing programs, curricula and exhibitions, as well as in museum management and administration. Cynthia received the 2017 John Cotton Dana Award for Leadership, presented by the Education Committee of the American Alliance of Museums. The award recognizes individuals outside the field of museum education who exhibit outstanding leadership and promote the educational responsibility and capacity of museums. It has only been awarded 9 times in the past 32 years.

Notes

1 Korn, Intentional Practice for Museums, 46.