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By Nils Olander - October 2001
Do you have problems getting teenagers into your Museum? Nils Olander explains how Telemuseum [1], based in Stockholm, tackled this problem by allowing them to create low budget news programmes using Telemuseum’s television studios.
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It has always been difficult to get fourteen, fifteen and
sixteen year olds interested in museums. This is usually because
they are interested in other areas which they feel are more
important to them; such as experiencing life, exploring future
possibilities and discovering love. Evidently, teenagers do not
seem to find these things at museums.
Today’s teenagers demand much more out of their adolescent existence than the youth of the sixties. Thirty years ago, a teenager thought of life as a carefree existence where one enjoyed oneself by going to the movies, eating at a restaurant or simply surfing television channels. However, nowadays is it more important for them to get hands on experience that has practical value.
If this line of reasoning is applied to the study programs available at museums and to the pedagogy of these programs it follows that in museums teenagers should be their own guides and project leaders. In every instance, it should be the teenagers themselves who come to fully value and appreciate their surroundings without any insistence from us.
I am a museum teacher and can usually instinctively know if an exhibition or showing has turned out to be a success. Judging success and understanding the benefit people receive from an event is also helped by feedback from satisfied groups, thank you notes and even applause. This kind of feedback is very rewarding and keeps you interested in your work at the museum. Sometimes, you can even experience a real sense of achievement and pleasure from a successful exhibition or showing. Such feelings give you the necessary energy and drive to move on to deal with the next group waiting its turn at the museum.
It is this pleasure that those working in the museum community would like teenagers feel. It should be possible to create situations where teenagers can experience the same “kick” from an exhibition that we do. We want them to go out of the museum gates with a genuine feeling that inside the museum walls lie rich and exciting ways of experiencing life.
I think the key to attracting teenagers lies in letting them act publicly, in allowing them to be somebody, in making them a part of something, in giving them the chance to create something noticeable and in allowing them to experience something which feels real and worthwhile.
School outings to museums are usually fairly exciting, learning experiences. However the presentation phase, carried out after the visit has repeatedly been overlooked. Creative solutions for how such presentations should be carried out are often difficult to come by. Such presentations sometimes take the form of a summary with recommendations or conclusions, a reporting session for others in the group, an exhibition at the school library or even a written account of the outing. Usually these follow up presentations fail to materialise leaving the pedagogic sequence of learning activities incomplete. In short, there is often no presentation in most cases.
So what if the presentation is the most important phase of a museum visit? Emphasis should be placed on making sure that a good presentation becomes the focal point after a museum visit. To put such a situation in to practice, there should be a sphere which is widely accessible and available to both students and teachers alike. This means there must be a public sphere for teenagers to act in which is large enough to incite their interest to act. A library space, a classroom environment or a circle of schoolmates is simply not good enough.
Today’s public sphere includes airwaves, the media and networks. In order to reach teenagers, we should be bold enough to use which ever means are available to us.
Please don’t stop reading! I’m not about to lecture on the Internet as the solution to all problems. In contrast, I actually want to assert that the Internet is perhaps not entirely suitable for this particular situation. Making a presentation available on a Web site is like recording a message on an answering machine. You hope that interested teenagers will come to your Web site just as you hope that callers will listen to your recorded message in full.
The airwaves, on the other hand, offer us tremendous opportunities.
The Telecommunications Museum (Telemuseum) in Stockholm shows the depicting developments in telecommunications within the fields of telegraphy, telephony, radio and television. Since 1996, Telemuseum has been a base for activities for teenagers from Swedish schools. Using their own resourcefulness, teenagers produce their own news programs in the television studio. The news programs are then transmitted on cable television network to over 350,000 households. There is a daily transmission at 17:40. These activities have been up and running since 1996 and have resulted in approximately 800 groups of students, primarily from high school to senior high school level, broadcasting their own news programs over the airwaves.
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| The Telemuseum Studio |
The purpose of this project is not to train all teenagers who participate in the project to in becoming presenters. Rather, we would like them to become more knowledgeable viewers who fully understand the different phases involved in the production of a program. We would also like to heighten their awareness as to how dependent our society is on different networks.
There are approximately nine groups which participate in ‘T-news’ every week. Each group consists of roughly 15 students. Over a period of three hours, the group works in a fully equipped television studio. The studio offers the group access to The Swedish Newspaper Telegram Bureau (Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå -TT), The Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (Sveriges Metrologiska och Hydrologiska Institut - SMHT) and to news bureaus available on the Internet. The students in the group take on the roles of chief editor, producer, meteorologist, local and foreign sport reporters as well as domestic and foreign country correspondents. During the first two hours, they collect news releases, discuss the content, compile the news, edit it and put together a script. Sometimes, they also conduct interviews by telephone. Often they will interview students of a similar age category at the Swedish school in London. Some groups even bring with them a videotape or other material that they have prepared beforehand.
During the last remaining hour, a number of students will re-group and take on the roles of camera operators and news presenters. After only one rehearsal in front of the cameras, they tape the program. The students handle all technical work themselves and tend to do a splendid job. Learning how to conduct database searches, operate cameras, splice and edit pictures and work the microphones takes only up to about 10 minutes in 90% of cases. The students manage to learn how to do things at an amazing pace.
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| Filming T-news |
The success we have experienced with ‘T-news’ has given us the drive to spread the idea and to try and encourage the same kind of activities in other areas. If our plans work out well, we believe that we can launch Internet based video meetings among teenagers within different broadcasting and editorial areas of television. During working days, the various groups of teenagers can then discuss their selection of news items with one another.
As a further development, we are exploring the possibility of getting in touch with similar types of projects in other countries. Perhaps there are already similar activities in telemuseums around Europe. It would be useful for teenage students to get in touch with others of similar age groups. Even if their discussions take place with difficulty in using the English language, such discussions are still beneficial. Mutual exchanges over actual events and happenings can stimulate everyone to get involved. In effect, each person can become the source of foreign news and correspondence for the other. And such exchanges do not need to take place only through video meetings via the Internet. Telephone calls are also a very effective way of getting good work done. Often, telephone calls are more functional than Internet based communication.
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Nils Olander
Telemuseum
Box 27842
S-115 93 Stockholm
SWEDEN
Phone: 46 15 91 33 29
Fax: 46 86 70 81 27
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For citation purposes:
Olander, N. "T-News: Bridging the Museum Generation Gap", Cultivate Interactive, issue
5, 1 october 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/telemuseum/>
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