In our community storytelling work, here’s a central question: how do we best tap into the stories in a community? How do we draw out stories that can live long after the event? Sometimes the stories just start flowing, especially within communities that are motivated and enthusiastic. And that describes the community of educators attending the annual Scratch Conference at MIT this summer. In the course of two days, we gathered nearly...

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It’s always a pleasure to evolve our work with museums, and especially a pleasure as museums evolve too. We’ve upgraded our longstanding Storykiosk installation at the California Museum for incorporation in the museum’s Unity Center, a large center in the museum focusing on the state’s diverse people, taking a stand against intolerance and hate. The Center, designed and developed by West Office with the Museum and...

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We’re excited to ship two new Portable Storykiosk Kits out this week — our next generation combination of hardware and software designed specifically for gathering video stories and testimonials in public places. We’ve developed these kits for a new hybrid model of museum exhibit, one that includes both a long term installation in the museum, and also a portable version that is easy to take out to community spaces beyond the...

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If you’re heading to ACM Interactivity, the national children’s museum conference this week, be sure to stop by our booth and check out the latest: our prototype  allowing visitors to create and share puppet shows between museums in different countries. The idea behind this: simple, fun moments of creative family expression go a long way toward building connections. I’ve been working on this with Vicky Cave, an exhibit...

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I’m quite excited to announce a new frontier in our community storytelling mission — the use of visitors’ own mobile devices to record stories. The Museum of Durham History incorporated our cloud-based tool to record stories of members of the Ar-Razzaq Islamic Center in Durham. Ar-Razzaq is one of the oldest Muslim communities in North Carolina, and a year long community-storytelling initiative culminated in an exhibit at the...

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How can museum exhibits foster empathy? This is a long overdue post of our session for the Association of Children’s Museums (ACM) Interactivity conference this last year. It’s a topic that is increasingly relevant in a polarized country (and world), where studies show an alarming decline in empathy the last three decades (the “empathy deficit”), and increases in stress and isolation. How can museums respond proactively...

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