WALKER ART CENTER BLOGS

The Walker Art Center certainly seems to spend a lot of time blogging and it seems to be engaging at least a few people.

Blogs are given a prominent spot on the museum's homepage, where the MCA, for the sake of comparison, has only a "coming soon" placeholder that took a little doing to find.

So, it looks like the walker has at least half a dozen different blogs, focusing on specific areas like education & community programs, film & video, etc. and at least one less specific area "Off Center", which is non-Walker stuff from people at the Walker. The blogs offer a ton of material, the posts are long, cogent, and frequent. Frankly, it's a little astonishing.

As a professional museum educator who researches family programming at other museums all of the time, I feel like I have a great sense of what the Walker stands for in terms of education from looking at the education blog. Certainly, the blog doesn't break down the schedule-- that's what the schedule is for-- but it provides documentation and casual analysis of education goings on. Just the tone and what items are given emphasis show what the Walker values. I especially enjoyed the post by Nakami Tongrit-Green, teen program participant. There is a video, for crying out loud! Seriously, though, it is wonderful to read her first-person account of her experiences.

We talk a lot in museums about engaging visitor voice and about solving the problem of the museum as an authoritarian teacher. Podcasts and other media that are essentially contentless ads for museums, and I don't think anyone's being fooled. The Walker's blog, on the other hand, feels very real and straightforward, and it looks like they're really trying to engage audience in new ways. There is a very spirited string of comments connected to a post about the Coen brothers coming to the Walker, and it's nice to see that out in the open, although Richard may be getting a little carried away if you ask me.

There is a ton of content here. I wonder if they publish these as links to their facebook fans? Actually, I am a facebook fan of the Walker, now that I think of it, and I haven't seen any of this. I think maybe they should because one trouble I do have with this particular blogroll is that it just seems overwhelming. Maybe I need someone to help me learn a better way to subscribe to a blog...