The full program for the Museums and the Web 2008 conference is now available on their Website. For the first time in a couple of years, Ideum will be in the exhibit hall. Our exhibitor information can be found here.

Along with exhibiting, I’ll be offering two half-day workshops at the conference. Rather than repeat last year’s workshops (Museum Mashups and Real Science 2.0), I decided to explore some new topics this year. We’ll be exploring the future of Web video in a workshop entitled, Online Video Editing. The other workshop, Everything RSS, looks at how Web feeds are increasingly manipulated by a variety of online tools. The conference runs April 9-12 in beautiful Montréal, Canada.

In January I will be teaching a one week intensive course for the Cultural Resource Management program at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. The course is entitled The New Web: Interactive and Collaborative Technologies in the Museum World, and as the title suggests, it explores the ever-shifting subject of social technologies and the ways they can be used in the museum world. The course looks at everything from blogging to YouTube and how this is slowly changing how museums approach Web development.

This is the second time I’ve taught this particular course, although in some ways it is a continuation of a similar one (the Web 1.0 version) that I first taught back in 2001. We usually have an interesting and international mix of participants. The course is geared for museum professionals and registration is open until December 22nd. The New Web runs from January 21 through 26, 2008. You can read more about the course on the UVIC website.

I just posted a case study about Jukebox Memories on the ExhibitFiles site. This computer-based exhibit is part of the Memory exhibition developed by the Exploratorium back in 1998. Jukebox Memories plays 120 #1 songs from 40 years of popular music spanning the dawn of rock and roll right through to the mid-1990s. The exhibit employs a simple question and answer format, asking the visitor which artist performed a particular song. While this activity engages most visitors, the exhibit is not about pop music trivia, it is about the memories that visitors associate with particular songs and eras.

I helped design and develop Jukebox Memories while working at the Exploratorium in the 90s. For that same exhibition, I helped develop another exhibit, A Memory Artist. The exhibition website is still up and is now, like the exhibit itself, nearly a decade old. You can check out the case study on the ExhibitFiles.