Inside the Museum of London

I’ve been pretty quiet over the last few months on the blog front, but behind the scenes I’ve been working away at lots of different things.  The project I’m most excited about is our Pocket histories and Picturebank project and I can exclusively reveal for the first time (in public anyway) that the products of this are due to launch in March!

I blogged in August (can’t believe it was that long ago!) about the consultation that we did at the beginning of this project and a little bit about what we have planned, but now I’m back to tell you a bit more about how the project has taken shape.

I’m really proud of this project because it’s the biggest one that I’ve managed, and it’s involved a lot of people, a lot of hard work and a lot of planning and I’m really excited about launching the resources next month because, who cares about modesty, I think they’re great!!

A little bit about the pocket histories and picturebank

Our official description says this:

‘The pocket histories explore London’s history through objects from the Museum of London’s collections. Picturebank supports the pocket histories with images for educational use.’

Essentially, each pocket history topic takes 5 images (almost all of objects in the Museum’s collection) and uses them to tell the stories of London’s past.

In the Picturebank, users can search or browse by period or topic

These images (or most of them anyway) are then used in the picturebank where users (probably mainly in schools) can browse them by topic or by period, or just do a keyword search.  Once users have found an image, they can enlarge it, read a simple caption about it, use some prompt questions to start a discussion about it and find out whether or not it’s on display at the Museum.

The pocket histories cover loads of fascinating topics like

• What was life like in Tudor London?
• Why were London’s docks built?
• London Plagues 1348-1665
• What was life like for children in Victorian London?
• The ‘London Look’: London fashion trends 1950–2002
• Political Protest in London, 1750–1900

And we hope to add more in the coming years.

You’ll be able to read the pocket histories online, or download and print a PDF that’s all nice and designed and pretty if you’d prefer.

This is a sneak preview of what one of the nice, designed PDF versions look like

So who are they for?

The pocket histories are ideal for anyone who’s interested in London’s history and we’re hoping that they’ll gradually work become pages that people stumble on on Google even if they don’t necessarily know about the Museum of London.

As well as this general audience, we think they’ll be particularly useful for secondary school students doing research, primary school teachers preparing lessons or a visit to the Museum, or parents helping their children with homework or just helping them learn more about London’s history.

We designed the picturebank for a more specific schools and colleges audience because we think that it’ll work best on an interactive whiteboard or in an ICT suite.  The captions were written with children in mind and we’ve chosen the images that we’ve included very carefully to make sure that we can give teachers free rein to view, copy and print the images for use in their classroom or for private research (any other use, including sharing the resources would need to be negotiated with the Museum first).

About the project

One of the reasons I’ve most enjoyed this project is because I’ve worked with some really great people on it and I think this has been absolutely integral to why I’m so proud of the resources.  We have a core project team of two curators (Meriel Jeater and Beverley Cook), 4 audience-y type people (representing the schools team – Kirsty Sullivan, the inclusion team – Kirsty Marsh, the families team – Sandra Hedblad, and the adults team – Julie Carr), and a representative of the Information Resources Section (IRS) – Matthew Rose.  Having curators on board since the beginning of the project has really ensured that the topics we cover are grounded in our collection, our expertise, and the themes in our galleries.  Having representatives of all our target audiences on the team has been completely invalauble from the point of view of making sure that we create resources that are suitable for and interesting to all audiences.  And having the IRS perspective from Matthew who knows our collections management database inside out has been essential, particularly for the picturebank. We’ve also had a team of curators and writers outside the project team who we couldn’t have done without, and a host of other people across the museum who’ve been so helpful and so supportive.

We’ve had some brilliant discussions in our monthly project meetings where we took the time at the start to really think about why and how we would create the resources, and what we were trying to achieve. It’s meant that we thought  carefully about each one and it’s made them, I think, really strong, grounded, accessible and interesting resources (but that’s just me, you’ll have to let me know what you think when they go live!)

Nerdy goodness…

I alluded just now to our collections management database, and this leads me on to another really exciting (if maybe a little nerdy) part of the project.  I won’t go into the technical ins and outs, but a big advantage of our new picturebank is that it links to our collections management database. This means that if a curator takes an object off display, or maybe adds a bit more information to a record, or takes a photo of another aspect of it, once they update our collections management database, that information will be passed through to the picturebank – cool huh?

So I promise to try and blog again when the resources are up.  There’s no point me putting the links here yet because they’re not up yet, but I hope this gives you a bit of a sneak preview of what to expect, and hope you’ll be of the same opinion as me about them – I think they’re great!

If you were in the Museum of London last weekend you might have seen a man sitting on the mezzanine above our foyer with two laptops in front of him talking to family groups.  What was he doing?

We wanted to keep a slight air of mystery around the project whilst we were still consulting audiences because we wanted the people who we were consulting not to have any preconceived ideas. Now that the consultation’s finished I can now tell you a bit more about the project that this was leading to.

Martin, ‘the man on the mezzanine’, was carrying out some audience consultation with us as part of a project we’re working on to redevelop two important aspects of our website – our factpacks and our picturebank for schools.

About factpacks and picturebank

There are various ways to find our existing factpacks, but one way is to go to : the factpacks page within the Kids section. Our factpacks are basically short introductions to an area of London’s history.  You can use them to find out, for example, about:

• Children in Victorian London
• What life was like in Medieval London
• Suffragettes

And lots of other topics too. We think our factpacks are really interesting, but some of them are quite old now, and some of them are buried quite deep within our site. We’re taking this opportunity to refresh them and to add new ones as well.

The picturebank is a resource that’s mainly for schools and you can find it at: www.museumoflondon.org.uk/picturebank. It’s a collection of images divided up by topic that we think school teachers and pupils might find interesting.  Again, it’s got some great material in it, but we think it needs a bit of a new look so we’re refreshing it.

About the audience consultation

On top of the consultation with families, Martin also conducted a focus group with teachers and we’re delighted that over 200 people completed our online survey recently about how they use online resources!  If you were one of these people, thank you very much – your information has been very useful.

I wanted to make sure as much as possible that people answered the questionnaire and attended the focus groups with an open mind, without knowing what we were working towards.  As such, this consultation was quite general, and was about finding out how you use the web, what kinds of material you look for, where you look for it, what you like/dislike about it, how you look at it (online/printed off etc).

What we found out

Rather pleasingly we didn’t really discover much we hadn’t anticipated! Even so it was very useful for us to talk to different audiences and get a real picture of how they behaved online, and then get a judgement on what they thought of our existing resources.

Here’s a quick summary of our findings:

• People mostly use Google as a starting point to find images or information about a historical period (no great surprises there)
• People like to be able to click around and explore a topic and choose their own path through it
• Some people like to print things off, in which case they like it to look nice (i.e. not just a printout of a webpage that doesn’t print very well) when they print it
• Text needs to broken up into sections and broken up with images
• Teachers particularly would ideally like to be able to edit any resources that we provide to make them relevant and suitable for their particular students. This means if they’re downloading documents, they want Word format rather than PDFs
• Teachers will generally make their own resources out of what we provide so we should provide easy-to-find images and information that they can cut and paste
• The BBC History website and BBC Bitesize are particularly popular places to look for historical information, particularly for children
• There are a few websites that come up time and time again as good sources of material for schools – particularly Woodlands Junior school
• Quite a few people hadn’t considered that a Museum website might have information about historical events or historical images
• The families we spoke to didn’t tend to think of using a museum website to prepare for a visit other than to look at opening times, how to get here etc
• The most common place to look at these resources seems to be on a home computer

So the next task is to write all of this up in detail and work out how we’re going to proceed.  We’ve got some pretty good ideas of what we’ll do.  It’s likely that we’ll rename the factpacks ‘Pocket Histories’. What do you think of the name? We’ve decided what topics we’d like to do first and we’re starting to get things moving.

What can you do to help?

• Keep an eye out in the first few months of 2011 for these new resources
• Let us know what you think of them in another online questionnaire at the end of the project
• Let us know what website you like to use to find historical information or historical images
• Leave a comment below if you’d be interested in taking part in any future website consultations like the one I’ve outlined above
• Let us know what aspects of London’s history you’d be interested in finding out more about
• Remember – Museum websites are a treasure trove of information – not just information about opening times. Next time you visit us, take a look around our website first to find out a bit more about what you can see.

By Rosie Bullimore

I have recently been working with Rhiannon Looseley on the production of the Museum of London Docklands new online game called ‘Starting Out’. The purpose of the game is to encourage young people (aged 14 to 16) to start thinking about how they manage their money. The game is set on the eve of players leaving school and is a bit like the Game of Life, as the player makes decisions about what career path they will take, where they will live, what they will wear, what leisure activities they will do and how all of this will impact their pocket!

The game is part of a series of resources including a gallery interactive and schools session which have been developed with the support of Citi Foundation. It was quite a challenging game to create, as we had to make what could easily be seen as a rather boring and unpopular subject fun and interesting. The look of the game had a large part to play in this.

My role was to project manage the production of the game, by liaising with museum staff and the design company, and to ensure that the project was completed on time. I have never worked on an e-learning project before so it was really interesting to see the processes involved in making an online learning resource.

I joined the project at the initial meeting stage with the design company where the brief and ideas about how the game should be were put forward. After this Jenny Hastings, a museum freelancer who is familiar with the target audience, created the game content. This involved writing all the text that would appear in the game and also the basic game logic. Once this was done the game went through a series of testing, first in a paper version with some young volunteers (to check that we were generally on the right track), and then with a preliminary electronic ‘alpha’ version of the game which we tested in a school.

The alpha testing was really interesting because we were able to watch young people playing the game as well as get their valuable feedback. When the students first played the game they went really fast through the decisions without really reading things and were then a little dismayed when they found they were getting into lots of debt. The second time they played, students went much slower as they realized they needed to think about their choices more carefully. The evaluation was also really valuable for us to check we were getting the right tone and that students were able to relate to the game content. One thing we had forgotten was how much social life at school revolves around going to a friend’s house, so we made sure we added this into the leisure activity options.

The game took 3 months to complete which is generally quite a long time for this type of game. However as the Museum had specific learning aims and guidelines to follow, it ended up being quite a tight timeframe, as each stage of development had to be checked and signed off by at least 3 members of staff.

It was a really fun project to work on and will hopefully be a really useful resource for young people, especially now financial capability is part of the National Curriculum.

The game is now live on our website so do have a play! Re-live starting out and see if you can resist that lavish student lifestyle …

As promised in my previous post this blog post is to let you know that the new learning sections are now live on both the Museum of London and the Museum of London Docklands websites.

Go to the Museum of London Learning section

Go to the Museum of London Docklands Learning section

This is the end of quite a big work project for me and I’m quite pleased with the results.

There are three big reasons why the new sections are a good thing:

1. They tidy up the way that we present a large amount of information about our learning programmes online
2. They give a nice, easy, attractive and clear way for children to find a selection of our fun online games (see kids section)
3. You can now find out information through either of the two websites (Museum of London and Museum of London Docklands)

A substantial number of the resources that were previously available are still available on the sites. Let us know in the comments below if you can’t find anything and we’ll try and direct you.

There are also some new resources. Here are 6 cool new things featured in the new learning sections:

1. We took this opportunity to make some new interactive whiteboard presentations and quizzes available for KS2 Tudors, KS2 Anglo-Saxons, KS2 Romans, KS3 Romans and KS3 Medieval.  See the resources section for more information.
2. Each of our schools sessions now have their own webpage which will eventually link to the relevant teachers pack (some are already up, others are coming soon).  See the Museum of London ‘what’s on -schools’ section and the Museum of London Docklands ‘what’s on – schools’ section for more information.
3. Each of our adult courses now has their own page as well.  See the ‘adult courses’ section
4. We have a regularly updated ‘session availability‘ pages for Museum of London and Museum of London Docklands so you can check before calling the box office which dates are still available for the school session you’d like
5. There’ll be information to help you with your risk assessments going up very soon
6. It should be much easier to join our Teachers Network and stay informed!

Please look at the new sites and let me know what you think, especially if you regularly used the old site.  I hope you find the new sites useful and easy to use!

This is just a very quick blog post to say that a revised Learning section will be available on the Museum of London and Museum of London Docklands websites soon. Hopefully the changes will help you to find our learning resources more easily.

The Learning section will include:

• information for teachers about our schools programmes
• printable resources for teachers to support our schools programmes
• online resources for teachers and pupils to use either to support a visit to the Museums or independently
• fun games for children to play online
• information about our adult learning courses
• factpacks to help you learn more about the history of London

Why not take a look around the site as it looks at the moment http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/learning. It’s already got loads of interesting stuff on there. We’re not adding any new resources at this stage, we’re just trying to make it easier to find.

Take a look around now and get familiar with how it looks at the moment. I’d love to hear your feedback on how it compares once the new site is launched!

In January this year I blogged about my role as e-Learning Officer (Web) here at the Museum of London. In that post, I mentioned that I was working on two interactive games for 3-5 year olds which was a really fun project. This post is a quick follow on from that one to say that the games are now live!

Create a costume

In Create a costume children have the opportunity to design and colour costumes based on items in the Museum’s collections by dragging on shapes and patterns and then colouring them in with a paintbrush and some paints.  The costumes that the designs are based on are:

• a pearly king’s jacket
• the Fanshawe dress
• a pair of Georgian shoes

Move and Make

In Move and Make they can make a historical vehicle or building by dragging on the different elements. At the end, they can invent their own! In both games the children have the chance to see real objects/vehicles/buildings and find out a little bit more about them.

Adult guidelines to both games give accompanying adults some helpful hints on how to get the most out of the games as a family and provide a bit more in-depth information about each object/vehicle/building to talk to their children about.  We’ve also indicated whether and where you can see the objects for real. The games will be available not only online but also in our Clore Learning Centre and can be used as well as part of our Under-5s programme.

Working on the project

I’d never really worked on a project like this before, I’d project managed other web projects but never a game. Parts of it were great fun and the whole thing was a brilliant learning experience but it wasn’t without its challenges.

Developing something for such a young audience was a particular challenge. We knew, for instance, that we could not assume that children between 3 and 5 could read. For this reason all of the instructions are read out as well as written.  Obviously all text also needed to be very simple and it’s a real discipline sometimes, particularly where you’re trying to convey information about a really interesting historical object.

Why we did it how we did!

There isn’t space here to go into the ins and outs of every decision – let’s just say our first meeting to discuss concepts lasted 5 hours! But I thought it might be interesting to give a little bit of an insight into what we aimed to achieve.

By having two games, we aimed  to provide two different experiences for children – one where they could be creative and do some colouring – Create a Costume, and one where there was more of a ‘right answer’ – Move and Make.

We were careful, however, with Move and Make not to make too much of this ‘right answer’. These are, after all, aimed at very small children and we wanted to stress that it’s just as important to use your imagination and be creative as to get things exactly right. This is also why, at the end of the game, you get to use all of the different elements from across the historical periods to make your own fantastical vehicle or building.

We wanted to use a range of historical periods from across the stories that the Museum of London and the Museum of London Docklands tell.  We also wanted to include links to the galleries that are currently available, but also to items that will be in our new Galleries of Modern London due to open next year.

Enjoy!

We hope you and your children enjoy playing the games! Let us know which bits you like best!

I joined the Learning Department as the e-Learning Officer (Web) at the very end of September 2008.

What is e-Learning?

The best definition I’ve heard of e-Learning is that it’s a learning experience that is significantly enhanced by the use of technology.  This means that you can’t just plonk a copy of a worksheet online and call it e-Learning. Instead there needs to be some element of the experience that technology makes better.

So what do I do as the e-Learning Officer (Web)?
As the ‘brackets web’ part of my job title suggests, I’m responsible for the web side of e-Learning. There’s also an e-Learning Officer (Programmes) who is responsible for integrating other kinds of technology (mp3 players, cameras, video recorders etc) into our learning sessions.

The Museum of London website has a specific section for Learning and the easiest way of summarising my job is to say that I work on that!

About our Learning online section
As I see it, the learning provision on our website does three things:

1. It promotes our learning programmes (for adults and families as well as schools)
2. It is a place for teachers to find resources to use to prepare their visit to the Museum
3. It provides web visitors with the opportunity to have a museum learning experience online i.e. by playing interactive games or reading historical fact packs

Learning Online contains a huge amounts of really valuable information and resources and really fun games.  We’ve had quite a lot of reports, however, that suggest that the way that people find that information could be improved.

My first big task, then, is to rationalise all the content to ensure that it provides the smoothest and easiest ‘user experience’.  At the moment I’m in the process of working out just how to do this!

Another really fun project is the development of two interactive games for under-5 year olds.  These will go on the Learning website and will also be available to use in drop-in sessions in our new Clore Learning Centre which will be opening next year.  This has been a really fun project to plan particularly the part where we explored the CBeebies website for ideas!  We hope to have the games up and running by the end of March 2009.

These are just a couple of examples of the kinds of projects I work on. I hope to continue to blog when other projects get off the ground and the ones I’ve already described develop.