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On December 2, 2008 I was fortunate enough to speak to a large Cultural Connections group at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The topic of the night was visitor participation in the museum experience and included myself along with Stephanie Pau, Manager of Interpretation at SFMoMA; Kathleen McLean of Independent Exhibitions; and Catharine King, Vice President of Exhibitions and Programs from the International Museum of Women. We were all asked to speak by Mandy Smith of Cultural Connections who put together an outstanding program that was attended by about 70 people from Bay Area organizations, institutions, and companies. The group was engaged and had a lot of great questions which made for fun and lively discussion.

The topic I spoke on was a recent video that we made for our exhibition Road Trip at the San Jose Museum of Art. The video acted as both a marketing tool to promote the exhibition and a vehicle for gathering postcards for an interpretive component in it.

Thanks to all that attended and to Mandy Smith for asking me to speak! Here are the slides from the talk:

For the American Association of Museums Conference in Denver, I was invited to speak about how our museum over the years has gathered visitor comments electronically.  I gave a historical perspective and talked about analogue methods using paper and worked up to utilizing “web 2.0” technologies.  The panel consisted of myself, Dave Ashiem from Guide by Cell, Peter Samis from SFMoMA, and Marla Shoemaker from the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the session was called Using Technology to Elicit Visitor Feedback.  I was sick at the time of the presentation and was not at the top of my game.  Ironically, while I was researching some facts about this post, I came across the audio from the conference available for purchase from the AAM website.