Moving this blog

As I have 5 other blogs in Wordpress I decided to move my main blog over to Wordpress too, so that's where you'll find all the content from this blog and new posts too. I'll also feed my other blogs into it, so it will be a one-stop blog shop for me.

The new blog is on http://bridgetmckenzie.wordpress.com

Time & getting serious

Apologies for the lack of blogposts lately. Things have been very busy for www.flowassociates.com and my business partner has been occupied by a big new book and film project www.optimistontour.com which is taking him round the world. We've appointed a new director of digital strategy, Andy Sawyer, who is starting to get stuck in now. That's left me holding the baby at a time when we had lots of interesting work to do. So, I haven't had a break and won't get one either.

I've also been blogging on a new site about Ecology in Cultural Heritage. I've just blogged about how it is time to get serious about climate change, and about my pledges to do more about it in the cultural and heritage sectors. Have a look at the blog on http://ecoch.wordpress.com

In the meantime, I have some posts brewing for this blog too, about a campaign to revive the lost NOF Digitisation content and about the Brooklyn Museum's i-phone app and more.

I'll be back, but in the meantime follow me on twitter www.twitter.com/bridgetmck

Expressive Lives - what should museums do with it?

All the buzz last week was about participatory culture. Everyone is an artist (that is, everyone who was selected) on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, via Antony Gormley's One and Other. Herds of social media consultants have been hopping and tweeting from conference to party following the Travelling Geeks, at 2morro, at Reboot Britain, with C4's 4IP hosting a talk by Manuel Castells and at masses of other events I have lost track of in a haze of Twitter hashtags. At all these events the message can be boiled down to this: The public expects to participate. Social media is changing our expectations. Our data must be free and open. Our democracy and institutions are at crisis point. We must break down large bureaucracies and enable networks.

There may be some room to contest this, to ask 'Is it really the case that we expect to participate? Don't we just really want to be passive, to be entertained, lectured at and represented?' There isn't room in this post though. Let's accept for now that it is a big shift.

Left and right both embrace the notion of participatory culture, at least notionally. Jeremy Hunt, shadow secretary for Culture, Media and Sport and keynote speaker at Reboot Britain, coined a neologism of 'collaborative individualism' to give it an acceptable Conservative edge.

Openness and public participation in a digitally enabled world seem to be embraced even by the organisations most known for upholding their authority around canonical culture. The Guardian reported from a talk about the future of museums by our two most famous national museum directors, Nick Serota & Neil MacGregor. The report emphasised their acceptance that the future of museums is digital and that we will see curators having more conversations with audiences. A closer reading of the talk reveals more caution but it shows that they know they need to radically change policies and staff skills to deal with different expectations.

This is not really about radical openness, however. It has to be a radical shift in how museums maintain control and moderate successful public engagement. This weekend, we heard that the National Portrait Gallery had threatened to sue a Wikimedia Commons user who had taken 3,300 high res images from the NPG website and placed them on Wikimedia. The legal issue revolves around whether copyright resides in a reproduction of an out-of-copyright painting. I like the fact that those portraits are now available on Wikimedia for public to add links to and to enrich other wiki articles. However, I don't like to see combative and uncollaborative practice and think DCoetzee shouldn't have hacked the site to take high res images [Edit on 14th July - please see comment from Anonymous explaining that this wasn't an act of hacking but that the images were obtained using Zoomify then stitching the images back together]. The NPG does offer 60,000 low res images free to download. I wouldn't think of taking so many images without collaborating with the museum. A proactive approach is for museums to look at ways they can release 'safe' collections and call for the public to play with them, making clear their legal constraints and policies.

Sandy Nairne is the Director of the National Portrait Gallery and one of the contributors to a DEMOS publication called Expressive Lives. Of course, this was released last week, the week of participatory culture. The interesting notion of 'the expressive life' was introduced by BillIvey in a 2008 report and is the starting point for this publication. Sandy's essay refers to William Morris and Joseph Beuys who aimed to return culture to the people - who said that culture is something we can all do and that culture is for the good of the people. More than any other contributor, Sandy helpfully articulates the value of learning programmes in cultural organisations. He doesn't, however, engage with the issues of digital culture. Similarly, the Get It: The Power of Cultural Learning report, which he mentions, doesn't engage with digital culture.

This intersection of public learning and digital culture is one which the sector needs to address, not just in theory but in the practice, in terms of training, evaluation, data publishing, information management, UGC mediation and copyright. The place where this is being addressed is a new strand of work by the Collections Trust called Open Culture. To end the 'week of buzz', Nick Poole, the Collections Trust's CEO gave a talk about 'citizen curators' and Open Culture. His presentation covered the way citizens created all kinds of animated real-time content of the Soho fire. And when did the Soho fire happen? Only on Friday, a few hours before Nick's talk. Cultural artefacts are being made everyday and published to audiences at great speed. These records are the cultural archives of the future. This kind of fast and expressive culture, culture that says 'I was there and I felt this', is compelling and relevant to people.

What are we going to do to respond to this change?

Visual literacy gets profile

I'm very pleased that Anthony Browne has been chosen as the new Childrens Laureate, replacing the tireless and wonderful Michael Rosen. I especially like the fact that Browne is emphasising visual literacy. The gallery education and visual arts education worlds have delivered so many campaigns and resources to promote visual literacy over the past 2 decades and more. But they are pushing against the tide of the National Literacy Strategy. Michael Rosen did run a stream of work in his laureateship called The Big Picture (for which I wrote the guidance materials for teachers). But, with Browne this will be his main focus. I hope that this will be a really effective Trojan Horse, to promote visual literacy through a programme that is all about literacy and books.

In this article, Browne describes how he visits one school where the teacher is proud that the children are two years above their reading age but they are extremely constrained when it comes to drawing, imagining and inventing. I know exactly what he is describing. He says that art in this school seems only to be tied to the rest of the curriculum, not Art for Arts Sake. Again, I know what he means. I can imagine that he is seeing imagery that is limited, decorative, formulaic and derivative. However, I don't think that this means Art & Design should be uncoupled from the rest of the curriculum. What matters is the quality of visual and creative activity. There should be more of it, more variety, more visual thinking, more looking and above all, more inventiveness and play. This should be infusing learning throughout the day, in every subject.

From arts marketing to service design

I'm scratching my head at the moment over a new methodology that will be a key tool for our work at Flow Associates. We hope this will help our clients (museums, arts and science organisations etc) understand their users in ways that are more about needs than niches. It's motivated by my belief that cultural sector programming and marketing are too narrowly based on a notion of 'audiences for arts', which doesn't really take into account the full range of extrinsic and intrinsic motivations that people have. The Flow approach is informed by the emerging practice of service design, which in turn has been informed by systems thinking. We hope to be testing this new model with user research we're doing for the West Midlands Museums Hub, in their development of an offer of Black Country Collections.

School uniforms and children's rights

Firstly to say I haven't blogged here for a while, partly because I'm busy writing a book in my spare time and partly because I've started another blog on Ecology in Cultural Heritage - see http://ecoch.wordpress.com

But, here comes something that has niggled me enough to blog today, despite a deadline looming. The last 2 days have seen the collapse of the cabinet, following the MP's expenses scandal, and an election in which nobody voted Labour. But the story that really bothered me is something much smaller but quite symbolic for me.

The story was simply that the school my daughter used to attend had sent home a note to parents asking them to vote on making school uniform compulsory. I tweeted that I felt compulsory school uniform was a violation of children's rights, and that led to a bit of attention and criticism. Someone said that introducing compulsory uniform would be the start of making a better school. That claim seemed highly contestable so I dug around to find research on whether there were proven links between uniform and performance. It's not easy to find any research done in the UK but the majority of international & US studies show that there is no proven link and that overall the effects may be negative.

The DCSF policy is strongly in favour of uniform. Their guidance says that it is acceptable to exclude students for repeated flouting of uniform rules, taking all circumstances into account. It seems to me highly ironic that a child can be punished or excluded from school if they vary from the strict visual norm by choice, poverty, cultural difference or accident, at the same time that so much Government lip-service is paid to upholding the rights of children, to the need to tolerate diversity and the importance of creativity in education. The Government has not arrived at this policy after rigorous research but simply in response to a conservative consumer market, a creeping orthodoxy, which assumes that uniform is a good thing. Most people who don't like uniform accept for one reason or another that it probably is a good thing. The DCSF have only really listened to the economic argument against uniform, that it is expensive for poor families, and so have conducted research and measures to make it cheaper.

One of the main arguments that makes people believe that it is a good thing is that we believe uniform prevents bullying. Again, there is no real evidence to prove this is so. I have personal evidence that the opposite is true, at least for myself. I was bullied at secondary school. My family was too poor to buy a new uniform that complied with current rules, so I wore a threadbare blazer and bleached-out blouses, a non-regulation skirt and an out of date summer dress. My shoes were always scuffed. I felt like rubbish. When I was older I started making my own clothes and flouted the uniform rules quite clearly. The bullying from pupils subsided because I felt more confident and independent. A key reason I felt more confident was that instead of being bullied by the pupils I was bullied by the teachers, for not wearing uniform. I was then seen as brave and rebellious and more accepted by the crowd.

I know that my daughter is much happier at her new school where she doesn't wear uniform. The school has better results than the voluntary-uniformed school she went to before because it is more creative and has more inspirational, child-centred leadership. The children thrive because they are treated as expressive individuals, which is precisely what our Government says they want.

Get it: Got it. What next?

Get it: The Power of Cultural Learning report was launched at the RSA this week. I've blogged about this before here, as the report has been available since the New Year but this was the official launch. Everyone I spoke to (about 15 people) expressed appreciation for the basic premise but also varying degrees of criticism about the event (e.g. that none of the speakers were cultural learning experts) and about the initiative in general. Here are three views about the initiative that were expressed most frequently:

We've heard this before, and Ken Robinson's NACCCE report articulated it more fully, a decade ago. So why are we still trying to prove the case? 

To which I would respond: The Cultural Learning Alliance is not mainly seeking to articulate the value of cultural learning, although in a skim read of 'Get It' the big quotes doing just that hit your eyes first. The initiative seeks to pull bodies together to create the conditions where cultural learning can flourish, at a time when economic conditions may jeopardise it. It is mainly a plea for coherence.

This is too much the lobbying of arts organisations for support and not enough about what makes children's lives better. (This was echoed by a challenge from the audience: 'Why should we even be talking about cultural learning? Why can't we be talking about effective and enjoyable learning?') 

To which I would respond: To talk about effective and enjoyable learning may be logical from the perspective of educational delivery. Yes indeed, this is not just about the arts. All the subjects are more effective when enriched with cultural practice and imaginative approaches. That has been, and continues to be, the main driver for the continued work of the Creative Partnerships regional agencies. The problem with only looking at creative curriculum strategies is that you may fail to acknowledge the value of cultural practice and heritage. If we whittle away the capacity of the cultural sector to collect, conserve, commission, research, interpret and practice, or to exist at all, there will be no capacity to make partnerships for learning and outreach. Yes, let's turn our schools into cultural centres and make schools more open to the community but let's not close the long-established museums, studios and theatres in the process.

This is all about children in schools. There's not enough about informal learning (with references made to: early years/family, youth, community, international, adult and elderly settings as well as broad public participation). 

To which I would respond: Yes, I can see why you say that. The recommendations do consistently refer to 'schools and other learning settings' but where it gives more detail, it focuses entirely on schools. However, I see this report as a seed, planted at the right time, which should now lead to action to build a cultural sector in which learning and public participation are key to its mission. When cultural bodies limit their education work to schools programmes, and in particular when they limit this to delivering narrow curriculum outcomes, they are more likely to fail in enriching those schools and to fail in securing the status of learning within their organisations. 

This talk is all very well, but what are you going to do now and how can we be part of it? 

To which I would say: Quite! Let's get on with it, which means being positive about this report. I have some questions:

Given that the Clore Duffield Foundation (and all credit to Sally Bacon) has devoted a huge bulk of time to this, how can they be helped by the other consortium members and Government to form an effective Cultural Learning Alliance?

How can this Alliance manage to be open to contributions from the cultural and learning professions, and from enthusiasts/participants too? How could they use digital tools better to manage this, to help crowdsource ideas, to collaborate on tasks such as coherent funding systems and to help save money?

If the primary goal of this is coherence, do we now need to create an analytical map to understand where the main points of incoherence are? This might be a map that helps us grasp the scope of initiatives and bodies, where the main relationships are, what are the opportunities for brokerage and sustained delivery and so on.

How can the focus be shifted so that it still does justice to the schools sector, whilst acknowledging the wider range of cultural learning practice?