Lunch and Learn, May 14 2020

Overview

In order to inform the museum community about the CLIO toolkit and garner feedback on interest in and barriers to deploying technology like CLIO, two online informational and discussion sessions were held with 25 museum professionals attending each. These are the transcripts from the second webinar session held on May 14, 2020. Participant names have been anonymized.

Transcript

Dillon Connelly: Well, if nobody has any questions, I’ll open the floor to some discussion then. This is actually my thesis project for my master's degree, and I would love to poll you guys on how Clio might be used in your institution, and what might keep you from using Clio.

If you don't mind, I'll start off with:

Could any of you see integrating technology like Clio into your museum practice, and what ways would you be interested in using technology like Clio? Everyone, just feel free to just jump in, unmute yourself and talk away. There are just a few of us.

Speaker #1: I’ll start. I'm really excited and this is like the most exciting news we've had in the museum in the last long, long time, with everything going on. I mean, I've been cobbling stuff together myself with my seventh grade coding skills, which are minimal at best.

So it's nice to be able to have something that might make things look a little bit better than just my little tiny web page and whatever I can pull in, and put things together. So thank you.

Dillon Connelly: That's excellent! That's exactly what we were going for with it. While I may have the illusion of being a tech person, I am just the ‘talk good’ side of this partnership. He's the coding genius. So I'm able to understand and use the software, so if that's any indication of how we've decided this. We really did take it from a place of “I'm very interested in using open source technology, but I didn't grow up with computers.”

You know, Josh was building his own computers at age five, but I, other than pointing and clicking don't understand a lot of the fundamentals of coding. We were using my skillset as a baseline and an interest in using this kind of stuff, but doesn't really know where to get started in terms of entering a command line.

So I'm glad to know that you're interested in using it, and also interested in repurposing some stuff you may have already made, which I think is really, really cool.

Does anybody else have any ideas? We have come up with ideas of how you might be able to use this, outside of an exhibit, but is there any other way anybody could see integrating within their practice?

We ask because we're trying to explore. What kind of instructional material we should create and what kind of tutorials? Even if the question is ‘could we use this for this?’, we will make video on it.

Speaker #2: I have a question. Does it require a power source? How does that part work?

Dillon Connelly: It does require a power source, but it doesn't require Internet access. Even though it is built with web technologies, it doesn’t require the internet.

Joshua Frechette: While it does require some for power source, the kiosk can be plugged directly into the wall, or Raspberry Pi's are actually so low powered, you can actually get battery pack -- like a USB powered battery that is used to charge a cell phone -- and it would probably run it for two to three hours.

Speaker #2: Okay, that's interesting because my background is in informal science education, in outdoor capacities, for museums. I'm thinking if you’re looking at a landscape and you're trying to show how much it's changed over 50 years, and you can have this in your backpack, bring it out and have kids, be able to slide back and forth, and see themselves, and compare and contrast. I think that would be really cool.

Dillon Connelly: Exactly. And the other thing we're going to be exploring, because this is web based technology, you don't actually need to run this on any kiosk itself. You could also host a version of Clio on your organization's website. If it would be easier for you, you could just give them the web address to go to yourmuseum.org/thisprogram and pull up everything on their own smartphone, as long as they have internet access.

So, that's another end. You can also create that content, deploy it with a cell phone application for one program, and have it on a kiosk as a part of in-house programming, as well. It allows you to create great content once and use it in multiple contexts.

Joshua Frechette: One of the other things we were also curious about looking into was the ability to embed these into blog posts to create an informal type of education experience, where you're explaining some sort of scientific concept, and you can embed activities within the blog posts to illustrate your points.

Dillon Connelly: And great for digital exhibits classroom programming, if you want to build a website with these interactives to send off to a classroom, with some worksheets and objects. This can be great classroom outreach programming, as well.

Speaker #3: I have a question. I'm really glad you brought up the ability to use it without the kiosk platform. As you mentioned, I can't imagine many people are going to want to hand around touchable things for quite some time. So yeah, the ability to host just the software side on a website that is usable via phone, is that something that is going to be built in? Is that something that we, as an institution, we need to develop an app that would be able to use the software? How would that work?

Dillon Connelly: Right now, the screen resolution is designed to work on the same resolution as the Pi. We're exploring ways where this is going to kind of auto load into whatever screen size you loaded onto.

The idea is, because this is basically a website that is hosted on a Apache web server, we have designed this to be an offline web server that's hosted on the kiosk or computer you're using as a kiosk, but you can also set up a web server in your institution. If you already have a website, you most likely have some form of web server that you're using and you could set this up to run on that Web server as a loadable website.

It would be a little slower with some of these activities. For example, the 3D object render. Because those files are so large, and those will be transferred over the air to somebody's cell phone. Those kinds of activities would be a little bit of a heavy lift for a mobile website. But activities like the annotated images, or rich text, are the perfect things that can load within seconds onto a website. It's the same code, it would just adjust the screen size. We will hopefully be providing instructional videos for how to do that.

Joshua Frechette: I think, more specifically, to get to your point, it will load to any size screen it's put into, so you have a lot of options. Like, behind me, it's running on an iMac. The problem is that, if the resolution is a little weird, like a portrait iPhone, it doesn't always render perfectly. So, it will run on whatever screen you put it on. I haven't had enough of an opportunity to do beta iterations to make sure that it works on more specific sizes, like an iPhone or an Android phone.

Dillon Connelly: That's to be continued as we're exploring further projects and partnerships. That's definitely something we want to explore, getting some funding to work that more naturally into the software package.

So, following up on that. If you were to explore using Clio, what kind of tools and resources would you all find the most helpful in getting you started?

Speaker #4: Videos.

Dillon Connelly: Videos. Step-by-step?

Speaker #4: Yes. Where the mouse is going, and things like that. I can stop. I can rewind. I find that really helpful.

Dillon Connelly: Would you find that more useful than text explainers or paired with text explainers?

Speaker #4: I find that paired with text explainers is best because if there's a certain piece that I want more information on, I can go down into the text and find it. But, more often than not, I'll start with a video and then like skim and kind of put that information together.

Dillon Connelly: Perfect. So providing as many resources as possible, so you can combine to your learning style best as possible.

Is there anything else anybody can think of, like resources or tools? Videos, clearly being the big one. Would you like more specific training seminars be something you would be interested in?

--General agreement--

Dillon Connelly: All right. Alright, so my last question before I'll open up the group. I know that y'all are taking some time out of your lunch break today to come and listen to this ramble.

So what barriers, if any, could you foresee making it difficult to explore integrating technology like Clio at your institution? And specifically, ones we can address. Would there be institutional inertia? Is there a basic lack of coding knowledge? Do you hear things like coding and get scared? What is it that would freak people out at your institution about trying this kind of technology?

Speaker #5: I know at my institution. We are a staff of three and, of those, two of us are 32 hours a week. So, for us, it's the time. None of us have a coding background. It's the time, it's the money. Even though it's free, our time isn't free. I feel like the better the tutorials, the quicker that someone with zero knowledge can put these together and make a case to their supervisor that, “Yes, this might take X amount of my time, but look at the end result.”

Joshua Frechette: We tried to design it a little from the ground up, so you can make complete activities without actually understanding HTML, CSS, JavaScript or anything. It reads from flat text files, where all you have to do is change the text, and the image, and it does the rest.

The knowledge of CSS, HTML and JavaScript comes in if you want to do more spectacular things, like completely change the interface to match its branding to your institution. Or if you want to come up with custom bespoke activities using JavaScript, just for your institution, you can do stuff like that. But the activity templates that I made, I tried to make as tech friendly as possible

Dillon Connelly: You make an image to this size specification. You change the numbers of the x and y coordinates and that's the only coding you're doing. You’re just changing those numbers, and putting the files in the right folder, is the basics we were going for.

The idea was, if you're already Photoshopping stuff for your organization, or doing some sort of image editing, and you know how to create an image or media, all you have to do is go into these individual template packages, save it as a new activity, change a few numbers and you're done after creating the image.

And, especially if you're going to be repurposing content you might have already created, we wanted to make it as easy for you to say, “I'm a small Historical Society, and I've got all of these archived images from the last 50 years. I just want to create an image gallery that plays near my front door. I want people to see scrolling images from the neighborhood for the last 50 years.”

All you have to do is load those images in there, and change a few lines of text, and you're done. And you've got an exhibit kiosk good to go.

Speaker #6: One of the biggest challenges we've had integrating technology into our exhibit spaces is the multiple uses that happened in those spaces. We have some really old school docents that tend to get a little antsy towards having flashing things going on when they're trying to wrangle 30 kids running around.

So it sounds like you've addressed a little bit of that in the interface there, too. Is there a way I can turn it off, or can I put it into a mode that won’t distract from the other uses of the space?

Dillon Connelly: Absolutely. We've created a way for you to have different programs that can run on there. Because the Main Menu loads on the startup, you could have a program that is your default exhibit program. And, then if you just wanted to have your museum logo, you could have a program that's just a logo program, and it just displays an image.

Joshua Frechette: Would something like a “child lock” be useful in a museum context? A docent or facilitator could hit a button, enter a PIN code, and it would lock the screen until they unlocked it. Is that more along the lines of what you mean?

Speaker #6: Yeah, trying to teach an eighty year old person how to go in and change a facilitator mode is hard. Yeah, something like that would just be a touch of a button at that time.

Dillon Connelly: The nice thing about Raspberry Pi's is that they run off of SD card memory, so you're not running into an issue where a desktop computer has a spinning hard disk and you need to actually go through and software shut it down properly.

Raspberry Pi's are meant to be hard power on, hard power off for. So, if you don't want that screen running during that particular programming, the docent can literally just hit the power button, or unplug the kiosk, and it's not going to do permanent damage to the Pi because it's flash memory.

And, if there is an error code, if the data does get corrupted, all you have to do is get a new SD card. We're going to have instructions on how to create a flash image of your kiosks so that you'll just be able to write, using a very simple piece of software, the exact same thing you had on the last SD card onto a new SD card. Plug that SD card into your hardware and it will run just like the old one.

But, yeah, it is absolutely easy to just power off the kiosk, especially if it's running on the Raspberry Pi. If it is running on a refurbished piece of hardware, like this iMac behind us, you would have to do a software shutdown. But that would be as easy as using your input device to power it off, or off and on.

Do any of y'all have any more questions, or comments, or anything?

Speaker #7: I've got one last question, Dillon. I'm thinking about incorporating this, in regards to my pop-up thesis for next year. And, what does this kind of technology look like for someone just at home? I don't have an institutional-like infrastructure, or tech, or website, or anything like that. I have home Wi-Fi and stuff like that. Does that change the functionality at all?

Joshua Frechette: No. The kiosk, if you make a kiosk, is meant to host its own web server. It doesn't need connection to the internet, or anything at all, to do what it's meant to do. It's meant to be a package that you can just flash to an SD card, put it into a Raspberry Pi, and it will do its thing by itself. It's meant to not require a lot of infrastructure to begin with.

Dillon Connelly: If you're interested, we also have a preview of the content we've made for the Burke, as well as explanatory Clio content. If you go to cliomuseums.org/preview, that'll load a digital version of the kiosk into your web browser that you can explore right now.

It is still the pre-alpha release, so there might be bugs. Please feel free, if you run into a weird bug, to email us at clio@cliomuseums.org to let us know. There is a fully functioning preview of not just the kiosk interface, but also programs. If you go to the programs menu on the kiosk, you can change the program to “Getting Started”, which is the Clio instructional guides where we have all the activity templates with content about how to use Clio.

We decided to use the Clio kiosk to explain about Clio. We also provide examples of other activities, including the Roger Williams project we created there for our NASA exhibit.

There’s also previews of the Nature's Networks program we made for the BurkeMobile. All the open-license content we created for that is also there, as well, so you can see things like that food web activity.

We wanted you to be able to see not just the activity templates explaining Clio, but what those activities could look like in an actual SciComm or a museum exhibit experience.

All right. We're gonna let you go. I want to thank you again for coming. We're so thrilled that people are interested in using this kind of technology. We're really passionate about the power of open source, and really getting more people to use this kind of stuff in museums going forward. Hearing your ideas about how it can possibly be deployed at your organizations, especially the smaller organizations with small staffs, is making my heart go pitter patter. Thank you very, very much for coming today and we hope to hear some amazing projects you guys make us and our software.