NDF - Day 2

Good to hear about an education project, Digistore, between the Ministry of Education and National Archives. Watch out for the new website due to be delivered next year based on the TLF Scootle model. Very similar to projects we have been working on with The Learning Federation recently. They identified four curriculum themes to be mined from the Archives:

1. perceptions of youth
2. perception of dissent
3. perceptions of environment
4. perceptions of enterprise.

They have a specific Maori reference group, which again raises the issue of an Indigenous reference group for Australian content as our national curriculum is developed.

I think there is still a lot of work to be done by the cultural sector to make our content more relevant, accessible and discoverable by the schools sector. We need to build better educational metadata into our collection systems. Apparently DigitalNZ is looking at being able to retro-tag objects against key education fields, such as year level or curriculum theme. I'll be interested to see how this turns out.

It was good to see an example of an organisation, Capital E, using Voicethread and Wikispaces ( http://refugeestories.wikispaces.com) as part of the development of their kids' opera Kia Ora Khalid: How long does it take to call a place home? . I've been wondering myself how to go about doing something similar. Looks like a successful model and the opera looks great. They are interested in doing something similar with schools in Australia - I hope they make it here. Presenter Stephen Aitken mentioned a cool game for kids to play to experience a bit about what it's like to be a refugee: www.playagainstallodds.com.

The final keynote speaker for the conference was Museums 2.0 guru Nina Simon talking about 'Making risky projects possible'. You can check out her presentation here - http://bit.ly/ndfnina so no need for me to cover it in detail. Full marks to Nina for making an engaging presentation, and packing out the auditorium, during the conference graveyard shift. She even suggested a weird & wacky place for me to go and visit during my stay: Carlucciland. She ended with a networking exercise where we had to write on the back of two business cards one thing that we need and one thing that we can offer to others at the conference. The idea was to seek out your 'mate' and then ring the gong when your networking was successful. I wish I had written something cool like a Magnum icecream, but ended up seeking a killer schools app/website (apparently these things don't exist), and offering enthusiasm and support (apparently the equivalent of a weak handshake).

Off to do some in-depth research/professional development at Te Papa tomorrow, then a participatory museums workshop with Nina Simon on Thursday and meetings with our cultural sector equivalents on Thurs/Fri.