I’ve been having great discussions with MAAS educators and the communications crew about audience engagement with social media. Particularly from the education stance and illuminating the unique learning that occurs. We have been thinking about how to engage teachers, students, museum educators, and learners as a whole. How could we do this?
One hashtag that has a profile online, although US dominate, is #musuemed. What if we leveraged this profile and created a hashtag called #museumedoz? Would this engage an audience of educators – in schools and in museums to engage in conversations through the platform of Twitter? If the focus is on museum learning there would be an open dialogue created that provided opportunity to engage in real time two-way conversations that explore the various aspects of object based pedagogy, learning in museums, school visits, public programming, learning with objects, curriculum, museum educator roles, discussions on various approaches or curriculum ideas. Underpinning this would be building the capacity to engage in cultural participation from an education stance.
Would we showcase various museums?
Would we have guest hosts?
Would we have a dedicated time for an online discussion?
What do you think? What is your initial reaction?
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A dedicated hashtag – like the way #vicpln works – is a great way to anchor a community of practice. But maybe #museumedau? In my mind I kept transposing the ‘edoz’ at the end of your to read ‘doze’ 😉
Thanks for your thoughts Andrew. You have a great point there with “doze”…not what we want at all! There has been a suggestion of #GLAMed. I like this development, any thoughts?
Hi Narelle, Think carefully about the intended audience. We all know students P-12 generally aren’t on Twitter (and adults mostly avoid the social media the kids use – Snapchat & KIK! Perhaps Instagram is the happy medium of the moment?) At the school I work at I do work with all Yr 8’s each year in a Twitter session before they head out to document their CityWeek program, but many educators recoil in horror when I say that!
Of course if it’s targeting adults, particularly educators, museum educators and adult learners it could work providing its marketed correctly-with educators said to be the most active users of Twitter I would target them for starters. I think you definitely need to keep “museum” in the #, as acronyms never spring easily to mind until they are extremely well known. I’d stick to the same rules as choosing a domain name- simple, short, to the point & obvious. When I see something on the go that I think might be of interest to others I need to just know the appropriate tag for it to work. Dedicated times for online discussions are great once you have a following but the flow should be a constant flow: a sharing of resources, exhibitions, images, ideas etc. Guest hosts would be a great idea too. I certainly think this could be done and you could perhaps start with the MAAS educators and grow it from there. Good Luck!