11 Questions to a Museum Blogger on Museum Blog/gers Day

For #MuseumBloggersDay the @futureofmuseums tagged me to respond to 11 Questions to a Museum Blogger on Museum Blog/gers Day, and then pass it on. Let’s see if I can answer 11 questions in 11 minutes (I won’t even re-read it for editing).

1. Who are you and what do you like about blogging?

I am the associate director of digital learning at the American Museum of Natural History. I love blogging because writing helps me to organize and develop my ideas, create opportunities to interview amazing people I want to meet, brag about the amazing work I get to be involved with here at the museum, and meet new colleagues across the digital learning and museum space.

2. And which post on your blog is your personal favourite?

Ooh, so hard to say. I loved this one: A Critique of the Zoo App Shutterbugs, or “On Second Thought, Maybe This App Doesn’t Suck”. I loved it because I got to talk about how I learned from my kids and how I learned from my mistakes, but largely because it documented a way of learning that I try to aspire to bring more into my life.

3. If you had a whole week just to blog: which subject would you like to thoroughly research and write about?

I would maybe want to follow a youth deeply involved in museum programs through their days and document their sites of digital learning and how they make sense of it all into one coherent body of knowledge and personal identity. Or follow a great museum digital learning experience and trace back how the developers navigated their institutions system of constraints to bring it to life.=

4. If you could ask anyone at all to write a guest post for your blog (you can be as utopian as you like), who would you chose and what would you ask them to write about?

I’d lock James Paul Gee in the Museum for a night and force him to live tweet his experiences wandering the halls with a flashlight.

5. What has been your most memorable museum experience?

Watching youth learn something new, become aware of that, and then get so excited they want to burst.

6. What was the last museum you visited and how was it?

The Museum of the City of New York has a current exhibit about Hurricane Sandy. It is a crowd-sourced yet curated exhibited and found a beautiful balance of lending the expertise of the museum (and the sacred sweep of its halls) to clarify and project the voice of a community struggling with a natural disaster.

7. Share your favourite photo with us that you took at a museum.

8. If time and money were not an issue, which museum in the world would you most like to visit?

The Tate Modern. Dia Beacon. And Disney World.

9. There are many big and famous museums, but which is your personal favourite ‘hidden gem’?

MassMoCA.

10. Do you have any insider tips on any of the museums you have visited or blogged about?

Try all the doors that look locked. Then walk in and look like you belong there…

Now, because I am incredibly lazy, I will repost the next step right from the previous blogger:

Next please!

So, now that I’ve answered the questions, I need to pick some other blogs to pass the BEST BLOG Blogstöckchen on to (I pick YOU, the reader). Here are my questions for you (I actually loved the questions passed on to me, so have kept some of them as is):

1. Who are you and what do you like about blogging?
2. What is the most popular post on your blog?
3. And which post on your blog is your personal favourite?
4. If you had a whole week just to blog: which subject would you like to thoroughly research and write about?
5. If you could ask anyone at all to write a guest post for your blog (you can be as utopian as you like), who would you chose and what would you ask them to write about?
6. What has been your most memorable museum experience?
7. What was the last museum you visited and how was it?
8. Share your favourite photo with us that you took at a museum.
9. If time and money were not an issue, which museum in the world would you most like to visit?
10. There are many big and famous museums, but which is your personal favourite ‘hidden gem’?
11. Do you have any insider tips on any of the museums you have visited or blogged about?

And here’s what you have to do:

1. Answer the eleven questions – you can adapt them a little to fit your blog, if you like.

2. Include the BEST BLOG image in your post, and link back to the person who nominated you (that would be me, by the way, or more specifically, this blog post).

3. Devise eleven new questions – or feel free to keep any of these ones here if you like them – and pass them on to how ever many bloggers you would like to.