miaridge

Jude Habib from sounddelivery interviewed me at the Museum Computer Group’s UK Museums and the Web 2011 about current issues in museums and technology (link, in case the embed doesn’t work). Oh, and I was elected Chair of the Museums Computer Group – a big responsibility, but I have a great committee of smart, talented people so I’m excited about the challenge.

Katy Beale and I ran a workshop on ‘hacking culture’ at the V&A Museum on Friday 15 July. I’ve put the photos for ‘Culture (paper) hack at V&A’s Web Weekend‘ but still haven’t written this workshop up properly.  Briefly – we explained what hack days are, the types of hacks people create, how CultureHack started – then we handed over to the participants to ‘create their perfect museum experience’ with paper, markers, scissors, glue and some printouts of objects from the V&A’s collection online. People came up with some wonderfully creative ideas, and it was interesting to see where they overlapped with the kinds of things you see at hack days, and where they were completely different.

From the V&A Web Weekend Programme:

Katy and Mia explore the idea of museums as objects, stories, experiences, people and places. If you could take objects out of the museum, where would you put them? If you could have access to any part of the museum, what would it be? You’ll hear about recent Culture Hacks and then create your own paper prototypes, bringing to life your own simple solutions or seemingly impossible ideas.

A presentation for the International Training Programme run by the British Museum for museum professionals from around the world. This is based on a presentation I prepared for OpenCulture 2011, but includes additional material on mobile phones/devices including the ‘Hidden Histories’ pilot.

I gave a talk at OpenTech 2010 on ‘Museums meet the 21st century‘ – I’ve blogged my slides and notes.

I curated a session relating to the UKMW09 themes of ‘The everyday web: situated, sensory, social’. I was particularly interested in investigating what we could learn from games and how that could be translated to interactions with museums. The conference was held at the V&A, London, on December 2, 2009.

I spoke on ‘Continued Communication: maximising your communications in a Web 2.0 world’ at the Online Information 2009 conference in London, December 1, 2009, presenting some of the research of the ‘Continued Communication’ research group with Elizabeth Lomas and Benjamin Ellis. Our paper is available in the published proceedings.

The article ‘Learning lessons from a decade of museum websites’ was published in Issue 3 of Museum Identity magazine and is also available online at Learning lessons from a decade of museum websites.

Site abstract: “Mia Ridge, Lead Web Developer at the Science Museum, on learning the lessons from a decade of museum websites and the opportunity to look at the organisational changes museums might face as both the expectations of their audiences and their own working practices have been influenced by their interactions online”.

Shelley Mannion organised the first museum pecha kucha night, held at the British Museum, London, on June 18, 2009. I blogged my writeup of the talks and these are my London museum pecha kucha slides. The evening was a good chance to take the MW2009 ‘do one thing‘ challenge a little further.

This was a ‘lightning talk’ at JISC’s dev8D ‘developer happiness’ days held in London in February 2009. The slides are downloadable and I’ve put a transcript on my blog.

This was a case study for an MLA London Workshop on ‘Web 2.0 and Social Networking for Museums, Libraries and Archives’, held in London on July 14, 2008.