Edtech Insiders
Edtech Insiders
The Future of Museum Learning with Deborah Howes
Deborah Howes is the President of Howes Studio and a pioneer in digital museum education. With over three decades leading EdTech programs at top cultural institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, the Art Institute of Chicago, and MOCA Los Angeles. She now helps museums and nonprofits transform analog learning into dynamic digital experiences.
đĄ 5 Things Youâll Learn:
- How AI is transforming museum archives and accessibility.
- Why authenticity and trust matter in EdTech collaborations.
- The power of open-access museum data for global learning.
- How museum teaching methods can inspire better AI tutors.
- What museums must do now to remain relevant in a digital world.
⨠Episode Highlights:
[00:01:00] The hidden power of museum and EdTech collaborations
[00:05:10] AI in museums: from ancient scrolls to image tagging
[00:11:40] Why AI isnât learning from museum data, yet
[00:22:40] âThrow open the gatesâ: the case for open access
[00:31:50] How a MoMA partnership brought art into classrooms
[00:38:40] Howesâ advice for EdTech founders partnering with museums
[00:47:00] âStart with the experience, not the techâ
[00:57:30] The urgency: keeping museums relevant in the AI era
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This season of Edtech Insiders is once again brought to you by Tuck Advisors, the M&A firm for EdTech companies. Run by serial entrepreneurs with over 30 years of experience founding, investing in, and selling companies, Tuck believes you deserve M&A advisors who work as hard as you do.
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[00:00:00] Deborah Howes: That authenticity associated with museums can extend to EdTech products. Imagine collaborations where museums share their source materials, essays, images, videos together with their teaching strategies known to be effective for both learning subjects like ancient Egyptian history and for developing critical thinking skills.
In return EdTech products earn good housekeeping seals of museum authority that students, teachers, and parents recognize and trust. EdTech developers collaborating with museums is a triple win and has the important potential to catalyze learning in the humanities.
[00:00:47] Alex Sarlin: Welcome to EdTech Insiders, the top podcast covering the education technology industry from funding rounds to impact to AI developments across early childhood K 12 higher ed and work. You'll find it all here at EdTech Insiders. Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter, and also our event calendar, and to go deeper, check out EdTech Insiders Plus where you can get premium content access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events and back channel insights from Alex and Ben.
Hope you enjoyed today's pod.
We have an awesome episode of EdTech Insiders. Today we're talking about something we. Really don't talk about nearly enough on this show, which is education technology within cultural institutions, including museums, and we have an incredibly special guest to do it with us today. We're talking to Deborah Howes.
She's the President of Howes Studio and Deborah Howes brings three decades leading educational technology programs at the most recognizable art museums in the country, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Art Institute in Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the moca.
She founded Howes Studio in 2017 to transform analog teaching practices and learning programs into dynamic. Digital experiences with her deep background in EdTech history and informal education, Deb Howes works with nonprofits to innovate award-winning products like the Muslims in Brooklyn website, a multimedia exploration of oral histories developed with the Brooklyn Historical Society for the New York Department of Education, or she worked with the National Gallery of Art in Washington to produce two MOOCs for teachers seeking to foster critical thinking skills through conversations about art.
That's how Deb Howes, and I met it through my time at Coursera. She was always doing incredible courses with the MoMA. These media rich asynchronous programs were based on the Harvard Project Zero Artful Thinking Pedagogy, and are currently available for free on the edX platform. Deb Howes, welcome to EdTech Insiders.
[00:02:59] Deborah Howes: Thank you, Alex, for that lovely introduction. I really appreciate it. I'm really excited to be here and I'm so glad that we remain friends after all these years. That's a really big plus. You might be surprised as your audience may also be that AI is actually in museums now. It's mostly behind the scenes.
There are a few examples of it being used with public facilities, but in fact, the American Alliance of Museums. Is our advocacy organization and a lot of professional development comes outta there. Their summer issue was dedicated to, okay, museums, let's get into ai. And they showcased all these examples.
Wow. Even I was excited. I was like, wow, I didn't know that. So it's there. It's happening. The problem here and why I am taking this show on the road, so to speak about museums and AI is that this is a really difficult time for museums. You may have already picked up from the news that funding is down 30% across the board since COVID actually.
But even recently, federal cuts to the kinds of grant lines that we regularly depend on, especially for this kind of exploratory stuff and public facing applications is down. So museums are. Really looking for help, and it doesn't necessarily mean dollar help, but they're looking for help to really make their explorations as useful and positive and sustainable as possible.
So. It's just every museum person knows that AI is critical to address the biggest challenge to getting all of our work done, which is to be able to act with speed and scale. Museums are generally not known for that. We are backwards looking institutions, meaning that we preserve history, we make sure everything's in a safe place and it's displayed to the public in the most educational way.
But that takes time and it's kind of a bit by bit process, but there are so many opportunities for mission critical work and museums do that. AI can't. Really make a difference. It when implemented properly. And here's one example, really simple example. We all know that every image that's available on the web should have a description.
We know that. And some do. Many do. When it comes to museum object descriptions, it gets a little fussy. There are layers of scrutiny and evaluation that goes into what are you seeing and how to attribute those things. So it's a time consuming task. One of the first things that a group of museums identified is, we gotta get better at this.
And what they did was they combined the ability for AI to analyze text, like in collection records with the ability for them to interpret visuals. And combining that together made a. Almost good enough for a public version of the image descriptions. It's not ready for primetime yet, but still in development.
But I have a huge hunch that this is gonna really facilitate every museum's work in this field, and once we can distribute images with the right descriptions, it's not just good for humans, especially humans who have vision challenges, but it's also good for AI bots because now the AI bots know where to put the images in their complex knowledge graphs.
So it's a win-win, win. And the j Paul Getty Foundation is really a leader in this way. It goes with a long history of being this kind of inspiration for the museum field and big data problems, but there's some other big data challenges that AI can really help museums overcome. First of all, in curation and research, I just learned from this magazine issue that the Pompeii excavations have had in their hands for years, these fuse scrolls that have writing inside them.
And the battle has been how to unroll these scrolls in a way that doesn't destroy the text. Apparently some clever conservation people said, you know, if we let AI look through an infrared lens, I'm probably not describing this accurately, but you get the picture, they can reconstruct the ink scribbles in a way that will translate the text.
They're not even opening the scrolls physically, but AI plus technology can look inside the scroll, see what the text reads, and transcribe it, translate it, and all of a sudden something that is thousands of years old, 79 AD is available to us. Speaking from the past. I mean, that's incredible. Incredible, right?
Yeah. And maybe on a more day-to-day level, it's also about translating museum materials into the languages that visitors actually speak at. MoMA of half the visitors are from another country. Do not speak English as a first language, and so. We have to make decisions about which things we translate into maybe seven languages at most, but that leaves everybody else out, so it's a huge thing that can happen.
[00:08:26] Alex Sarlin: You are mentioning some of the really interesting applications of AI in museum education and in museums, translation, transcription, being able to curate or make sense of ancient artifacts and understand all of that as well as, I like this example of the image descriptions because you're right, museums are sort of the arbiters of knowledge and they're the ones who sort of try to curate and understand what the truth of a particular object or piece of art is.
If they are able to label everything in a way that, as you say, is both readable by humans, but also by AI bots, it makes it scrapable, it makes it data that can be synthesized and found and curated off the web. One thing that I think is incredibly interesting about museum education I wanted to ask you about is museums have so much.
Information inside of them that is really unique. It's information, it's objects, it's physical objects, but it's also knowledge that is just not found anywhere else in the world. And we're at a time where AI has sorely scraped the internet pretty thoroughly now, and open AI and philanthropic have been making deals with the New York Times or various magazines or archives, but museums have this archival knowledge that is really unique depending on what museum you're talking about.
I'm curious how you see that playing out in the future in terms of taking the information and knowledge and data, quote unquote, inside the museum world and making it accessible to ai. Is that a good idea? Is that something we should race to do? Is that something we should be really careful and thoughtful about?
Is it something museums could make money off of? Like how do you see this playing out?
[00:09:54] Deborah Howes: Well, this is what keeps me up at night. Like I really feel that everything you just said about the potential for museums to play a really big role in this evolving AI field is critical to their relevance, their maintaining relevance in the future.
And we can get into that in terms of what makes a museum relevant, whatever. But I'll tell you, I've used a lot of tools that, for example, there's a tool called Am I Trained on You? Or something where you identify an image and this website will tell you if a IBOs chain on these images. I have looked at some of the most popular images in the museums that I worked in that you mentioned, and generally speaking.
AI is not training on these images. I can't get over it because on the other hand, when I look through the ai, you know, like if I use, I don't know, chat GBT to say what are the most obvious images from the Art of Chicago or something like that, it will link me to, to non-authoritative images, right? They will never link me to the ones that are probably in a dynamic page that are probably stored in an automatic database.
That's just, it's too hard. You know, they don't wanna spend the energy to go find that image. Even though there are APIs for museums that they distribute the images with free. I mean, anything that was made in the 19th century or before is out of copyright, more or less. And so the museums are using technology to distribute it, but it's not getting into the AI brain.
So that's what is the bee in my bonnet, honestly. Yeah,
[00:11:39] Alex Sarlin: it makes sense. I mean, you and I worked together on, on MOOCs coming from the Museum of Modern Art, and one of the things that I love about the MOOC world is it's taking information that is sort of prohibitively locked institutions and not, not in a bad way, it's locked because it's being protected.
Right. In universities' case, it's journals, it's archives, it's the papers of, you know, ov that being held in a university. In a museum's case, it can be anything. I mean, you've worked at some of the most incredible museums in the world. They have unbelievable amounts of information, of data, sort of curated, tagged, annotated, as you're mentioning, locked away, but not trying to be hidden, locked away, meaning.
Preserved. Yeah. So let's talk about that. You know, how might we break down those barriers when you say, hey, if you look for something that should be pulling up a museum level image or a museum level piece of information, but it's not 'cause it's just using the sort of internet version of it. The sort of how might we break down those barriers and actually open up the museum world.
Just as we are starting to open up, academic journals are starting to open up the patent history, you know, some of these things have been hidden away. How do we take them out and make them shine them in the light of day and make them part of our educational world?
[00:12:48] Deborah Howes: Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, I think your EdTech audience has some excellent answers and I'm really excited about, so much that I hear is going on in education reform.
I think that museums are also undergoing a reform in structure and in orientation. I mean the 200 years of museum history. Has been based on the fact that museums are located in the middle of a city, right? I mean, if they have a choice and that this is a big draw and they just open their doors and people come in, but that mentality really needs to evolve to where are the people.
And that's what was so great about the project we did with Coursera, is that it was not a popular decision. We were making money with those online courses. I mean, not a lot of money. It was 2011 and it was maybe a couple hundred people taking the online courses that we were offering for fee. But even so, leadership's like, why would we give up a fee-based program that's supporting itself and making a little money to give it away for free?
And I'm like. Let's just try like, like, you know, I can't, nothing I say is gonna make sense to you until we try, but fortunately the director was all about it. And I don't know if you remember when we got the first results back from the demographics and the director looked at the demographics and he's like, this is the most important thing we could possibly do.
This may be a slight exaggeration on what he really said, but he said, this demographic, 20 to 30-year-old college educated individuals who want to learn about art is the hardest demographic for us to attract to with our physical location. They are just not coming. Probably 'cause they're too busy building their careers, having families, blah, blah, blah.
But he is like, this is important. And I think that mentality has to shift.
[00:14:51] Alex Sarlin: Like you said, the physical location is the biggest barrier of all. There were people from Malaysia and South Africa and Brazil and all over the world going to those courses. I feel like that's a big part of it as well. Right.
[00:15:02] Deborah Howes: But you know, I empathize with the directors because 99% of their budget is about the physical location.
So if they're not drawing people to the physical location, it's existential. So we have to prove that Luke, the first barrier when we went online was, well, if we put all of our images online, no one will come see the real thing. What? Are you kidding me? Ever heard of the Mona Lisa? I mean, it's just not true.
And nobody says that really anymore. But I mean this is a similar thing.
[00:15:33] Alex Sarlin: When the, the famous, like what Walter Benya mean? The reproduction, the mechanical. I for, I'm gonna get this wrong, but go
[00:15:40] Deborah Howes: Alex. Yeah.
[00:15:41] Alex Sarlin: Right. I mean, yeah. The work of
[00:15:43] Deborah Howes: art in the age of mechanical reproduction.
[00:15:44] Alex Sarlin: That's it. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, that's the age we're living in right now.
If you
[00:15:48] Deborah Howes: Oh, way past it, baby.
[00:15:50] Alex Sarlin: Exactly. I mean if you're talking about the MoMA, Andy Warhol right, has become one of the most famous people in the 20th century. You have, getting his images out there doesn't make it people less likely to come visit.
[00:16:01] Deborah Howes: Yeah. It's an interesting time, and I mean, I'm not a curator, but I can only imagine the fits and starts that's happening right now in the modern art departments.
How to collect AI art. Rfi, an adult did this incredible AI generated mural that hundreds of people would kind, it was in the main lobby. You didn't have to pay entrance to see it. It was astounding. And hundreds of people would just sit there and mesmerize like, you know, it's the biggest lava lamp they've ever seen in their life.
And I love it. I'm a big fan. I didn't mean that to be derogatory, but it was. I mean, there's an artist's name attached to it, but it's AI generating, it's an impression of databases of museum data.
[00:16:44] Alex Sarlin: Oh, that's so interesting. Yeah. I think we're skirting around some of these, I think, really important issues that are like, so you mentioned museums have to change the way they think about.
Information and ai, the physical location is incredibly important, but at the same time, there's this whole world of digital amplification that they have access to. You mentioned the sort of image tagging, but let's talk about some of the risks that museums take into account as they're starting to think about this.
If you are a museum right now, similar to that, that MOOC era moment or the internet era moment, are, should we put our stuff online or will that keep people from visiting? Should we put our courses online and make them free, or will that limit our revenue? I feel like there's a similar moment of should we embrace ai?
Should we take this museum and this archive and this collection that we've spent our whole museum history building and curating, being really thoughtful about, and should we expose it to the AI world? And tell us about some of the factors that museums think about as they're deciding whether or not to do this.
[00:17:42] Deborah Howes: Well, a lot of it has to do with posing the argument in a way that. Takes into consideration the drawbacks that are in the back of the director or the curator or the mind of the museum person. I don't know that there are any real barriers that need to be addressed other than, I mean, there's financial barriers, but I just think that the barriers are a lot about inexperience.
Mm-hmm. And anxiety and maybe, you know, not all of the hype around AI is good. So definitely museums do not wanna be on the front page of anyone's rag sheet that says that the AI said all these weird things when I was in the gallery taking a tour guide. Like that's absolutely not. But I think that museums actually have a lot to offer ai, and that's where my arguments really lie.
In other words, what is one of the number one problems that we think AI and education would cause? It's that we don't know where this information is coming from, right? And so if museums partner with AI products or LLMs or whatever in the right way, I would say keep the branding guys. Because if you knew that the Art Institute of Chicago said this about the Grantwood painting, you're probably not gonna doubt it.
And you'll probably be like, oh, tell me more. Click on link, or whatever.
And here's my point, that authenticity associated with museums can extend to EdTech products. Imagine collaborations where museums share their source materials, essays, images, videos together with their teaching strategies known to be effective for both learning subjects like ancient Egyptian history and for developing critical thinking skills.
In return ed tech products earn good housekeeping seals of museum authority that students, teachers, and parents recognize and trust. Ed tech developers collaborating with museums is a triple win and has the important potential to catalyze learning in the humanities, and people forget that the most important outcome of a museum visit from an educator or point of view is to raise your critical thinking skills about what you're seeing.
You know, I don't care if you memorize all the names of the artists in the gallery, there's flashcards for that. I care. But if I'm in an aquarium, like my goal is for you to. Yes, love the fish. Ooh and awe. But you need to understand that fish are a part of an ecological ecosystem and you play an important role to keeping it now the equivalent of art.
We want you to build the empathy with this creative process and maybe that it inspires you to be creative too. That is the ideal outcome from a museum experience.
[00:20:54] Alex Sarlin: Fantastic. So just to synthesize some of the things I'm hearing you say, museums are a source of incredible authority and credibility, so they can use that to verify the authenticity of particular images or provide, or even partner, like you're saying, it could partner with AI companies to basically be the source of truth for anything.
All the photographs in the MoMA collection, all the Egypt collection at the Met. If you ask anything about Egypt, maybe Claude says, okay, well we're talking to the curator of the Egypt collection at the Metropolitan Museum. It's the best Egypt collection in the world. Here's what we know about this piece of art.
Here's what we know about this period of history. I mean, that just adds so much credibility compared to, we found it on Reddit, we found it on the internet. That's sort of the way things are normally trained. Protecting artists' rights, you're mentioning incredibly important, and especially right now, it, it's such a nebulous time for artists to try to figure out how they can protect themselves from AI theft, transparency about disputes, you know, the elgan marbles or various kinds of historical artifacts that have all sorts of loaded histories to them, or were stolen by Nazis in World War ii.
That's really important part of this. And then underneath it all, I think you're talking about sort of digital literacy. Or critical thinking skills or even inspiration. The inspiration of wanting to be a creative person or have a creative mind yourself. These are all aspects of how a museum has to think about ed tech that I think are really, or AI and ed tech that are different frankly than many other institutions.
Some university libraries probably have to think like this and, and universities I guess sometimes have to think about ip. They're protecting the rights of their professors or their people on staff who are creating ip. But at the same time, this is such a unique and exciting set of challenges. I can imagine why it's daunting, but I can also say it's so exciting.
It makes me think, you know, one of the courses that you were involved in, correct me if I'm wrong here, was did you do the fashion design?
[00:22:44] Deborah Howes: You know what, I think I have an example that shows what you wanna say, but it's not from MoMA. Is that okay? Of course. Yeah. Because you were saying about how museums and academic institutions are somewhat different, and I can give you an example of exactly how so.
When I came to the Met, it was at the moment that everybody realized, oh gosh, we have to have a nice website. You know, here we go. And so I was in charge of making educational experiences on the web, which no one knew anything about what that was. But we had a very visionary 90-year-old couple who wanted to support a timeline of art history.
And when you're talking about a timeline of art history for the met, you're talking about 5,000 years all over the world. So talk about 3D chess, and I think we had HT, HTML and flash. That was it, right? That's what we had. And so an academic institution. I could never make that resource. They don't have the images, they don't have the breadth of staff, they don't have the practice of creating public resources.
But we did. And so I was one of five people that had an email address at the time. So I went from office to office and I said, we're making an electronic timeline. And some people, you know, recoiled in horror and some curators stepped up and said, oh, well I have Egyptian timelines for thousands of years in an Excel spreadsheet.
Would that help? And I'm like, I'll take it. So the idea that we build a little bit, our first tranche of the timeline was ancient world. It was truly world. But it was like, I think up to a zero one ad. Already you could see what that, the power of this was that just being able to hop around based on geographic interest or chronological interest and seeing beautiful objects and hearing what curators have to say about it.
I mean, we got fan mail from all over the world and that was something we were able to do early that. Piece launched in oh one and everybody connected to it, and all of a sudden the sale of art textbooks fell off because everybody decided that whatever the Met had to say about the chronology of art and linking to the website and blah, blah, blah, that was better.
And so it was a huge success. It's still a huge success. It's still the biggest draw to the website for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
[00:25:32] Alex Sarlin: That is such an incredible example of exactly as you say, something that is unique to museums. That's something that couldn't be done by any other kind of institution.
And also something that is really about bringing together a huge variety of different types of data from different sources, from different people, and pulling them together into something that makes it very meaningful and actionable and usable and accessible, of course to the world, and really changes how people learn.
That's really powerful. So I wanna ask you about this open access policy. This is really Okay.
[00:26:02] Deborah Howes: Well, I think running behind this, and another reason it's different from other sources is that museums exist for the public. So ultimately we are responsible to the public and everything we have is for public benefit.
And so in 2017 when there was a lot of conversation about open web and open educational resources, we're like, you know what? Let's just throw up at the gates. Like we have, especially at the Met, they have, you know, half a million objects that are well illustrated, well documented. They're in our collection database, which you can get individually online when you search with the right terms.
But if you wanna make something with this dataset, have at it. So we weren't the only ones. There were five other museums that joined. I think there've been many more since Cleveland Museum and Natural Gallery of Art. And others said, you know, we're gonna. Publish these Open Access with Creative Common Zero license and most of them also produced an API.
And it's just free, like, and if you know, it doesn't really matter what you do with it, we're not gonna trace these public domain objects, images, or information. Go for it. And when the Reichs Museum did this, I think like two years before, there was a huge creative burst of what people were doing with the Rembrandts and all this stuff, but I think it came at a moment of overwhelm and we haven't really seen the kind of.
Fantastic creation products, whatever with this, and you have to wonder why that is. I don't have an answer.
[00:27:50] Alex Sarlin: Well, you know, you say that, but I, I remember that right. As the AI boom started a couple of years ago, some of the very first things people were showcasing is these incredible animated videos that were basically like the history of art.
And it would have the scream morphing into the Mona Lisa morphing into rebrand, morphing into Leonardo da Vinci. And I think we take this stuff for granted because we think of these things as, oh, these are. Images that are in the public consciousness. But I think that kind of thinking of, oh, all of the Rembrandts are available, the Art Institute of Chicago, Smithsonian, the lacma, all of these amazing museums have joined this open access program.
The Reichs Museum, as you're saying, the The Cooper Hewitt, is an incredible New York museum. I just think there's just not knowledge of it, frankly. 'cause the idea that you have all the textiles, the historic textiles from the Cooper Hewitt are available. If artists and anybody who knows AI right now realize that those are available, they could be pulled through an API and they could be used in any kind of AI project.
I mean, blinders are off. It's just like we could reach a new level of human art. I don't even know how else to put it.
[00:28:53] Deborah Howes: Yeah.
[00:28:54] Alex Sarlin: So it's an exciting opportunity. I honestly think it's just not well known enough that that's my, I hope
[00:28:59] Deborah Howes: you're right, Alex. I feel like. We're missing something in between like the source, which is the museum and the place, which is like classrooms or whatever.
We're missing sort of a distribution system. Or here's another example. It has to do with that. Museums have collaborated with ed tech companies before. And it's been successful. And from my personal experience when I was at the Art in Studio of Chicago, which has one of the most well-known collections in the world, right?
We've got Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, and we've got Grantwood, American Gothic. And so lots of works of art that people know. The Voyager Company was an incredibly important early ed tech innovator in the late eighties and nineties. They first started being the producers of video discs, high quality collections of images from each of the museums.
But when they came to us, they said, we wanna do something for children. And I'm like, okay, you have a video disc on your video screen and your Mac with a HyperCard application. You got a two screen solution? And he's like, yeah, and we're gonna make. The hypercar driver visual and it's gonna drive the experiences, but we need you to design what they're gonna do on the HyperCard screen.
I'm like, okay, okay, well we'll just do it. Like, I dunno, like anyway, so we ended up having a great collaboration. Cause guess what? We knew the artworks, there were three 50 of them and they knew what the technology could do and they could program the control system. And surely by the time that this video disc was ready to press CD ROMs came into play.
So we reinvented it for a thank God, a one screen solution. And it was all visual. It was audio prompts. You could see a timeline of the objects. You could hear stories about the objects. You could play games, you could leapfrog around the objects. And guess what the connection was? I mean, it was highly interactive for the time and.
Voyager said, Hey Apple, you know, classrooms are buying these Macintosh computers. Don't you think this would be a good thing for them to have with them? Mm-hmm. And Apple's like, absolutely. There you go. It became the number one art CD ROM for kids for years, and it lasted for years, and it was bundled for years in classrooms.
[00:31:36] Alex Sarlin: There's your answer until,
[00:31:37] Deborah Howes: of course, you know the internet took that all away, but it was really successful.
[00:31:42] Alex Sarlin: There's your answer right there to why the stuff, you know, if you find a true distribution channel like a bundling partner like Apple, my God, then you get this incredible system into everybody's hands.
Please, you keep going. I just wanted to call that out. Yeah.
[00:31:54] Deborah Howes: And each of us couldn't have done that individually. Voyager didn't have the bandwidth to negotiate all those rights and to understand all the aspects of those objects we did. And also supply all the digital files, which they didn't have. And we could have never approached Apple in the way that Voyager did.
We didn't have the cred to do that. Even though it's the artist of Chicago, it's, it was just like, well, you wanna make a CD wrong? Like, you know, it didn't compute, but together. It was a really, really strong
[00:32:25] Alex Sarlin: project. That is such a powerful example, and I feel like we should put a call to action to everybody listening to this right now, because I think really the EdTech companies, big tech companies, we know a lot of people from big tech listen to this podcast.
I've heard that from a lot of different folks and cultural institutions, incredible culture institutions. Everybody has these different strengths and we are, this sounds like a hyperbole, like an exaggeration, but I really mean it. Like we are entering a new era in human intelligence. I mean, when I go to like the Met Store and you look around and there's like walls and walls of these monographs and these incredible books like The History of Egyptian Art, the History of Mesopotamian Art, or Modern Art, or Everything you wanna Do.
There's so much incredible information and imagery and knowledge that's just tucked away and it's the books cost $80 or going to the Met means you have to fly to New York. It's an incredible experience, but you have to get there. Yeah. Like all of these things are now unbundled you. If you get it right, you can pull all of the information, all the imagery, all the different looks and feels and dates, but also the critical thinking and the photographs pull 'em all out and suddenly we all have access to them everywhere.
And you can have somebody in Burkina Faso is putting together Rembrandt with something from the Reichs Museum, put from something with their local culture. And yeah, doing something you've just never imagined before. And doing a mural that ends up in the, in that lobby or the MoMA lobby, like we are in a new world now and I just don't know.
We have to get our heads around it.
[00:33:51] Deborah Howes: Yeah, and it would be nice if museums were in that head thinking mix because they've been producing, like you say, all this analog and slightly digital materials, like a lot of things are in databases, but AI could go through the PDFs that make the publications and could go through the databases or receive an output from the databases that's formatted in a way that goes instantly into the brain and prioritized because of the authority.
So it's like we're missing a couple key steps. I don't know what to tell the databases, but I know somebody could figure out what to tell the databases to output, to prioritize. The scraping that the AI bots are doing.
[00:34:35] Alex Sarlin: So one thing that's really interesting about museums is that they try very hard and I think very successful in trying to be inclusive and equitable and accessible to people of all ages and backgrounds.
It's sort of their mandate. How do you think museums can continue to do that in the digital age and with their digital offerings?
[00:34:52] Deborah Howes: I think you've hit on like the next frontier for museums to really take this seriously. You know, in terms of proving our accessibility, I mean, there's really nothing designed, more open, more inclusive, more accessible than most museums, especially if you think about science museums and children's museums.
So this is a very common topic. I don't know that museums really understand completely what it means to be accessible online. And we already talked about like the image tags and things like that. I think. One thing that they haven't really utilized to great effect online is there are vast storehouses, literally of videos and other kinds of deep media content that I never, practically never see used in classrooms for whatever reason.
But museums are constantly documenting what they do and how they do it, whether it's animals doing weird things, or if it's, you know, in the non-live collections, objects getting fixed, things moving from one side to another, people speaking about the objects. There's a lot of really important content that we think, oh, well, you know, it's just about what we do.
We don't always jump to a public aspect of this, but I do think that in some kind of partnership where these things are ideal, and especially for higher ed, it could really be as multidimensional as it is in IRL. Opinion. I think that there's an example of that when you think about the AI study guides.
You know, the logic that goes into making those AI study guides is to lead someone on a journey, right? You don't wanna tell 'em the answers. You wanna kind of guide them through a series of experiences, and then you wanna use your inquiry based learning techniques to bring out their processing and verify their processing, and encourage it to go in certain directions.
I don't know that someone who hasn't actually done that work extensively can really teach an AI coach to do that. I think that every museum, well, every professional museum person, so a curator, a conservator, an educator, we're trained to do that. You know, we have volunteers coming in, we've got, you know, interns, we have a lot of staff churning into our place, and they all have to know how to do this.
Nobody gets to go on the floor unless they understand this process. So there's a lot of expertise in the backend of a museum that I think could really be used in this context. I spoke before about the object-based narratives that are more inclusive, especially in the last 10 years. You know, we have cutting edge research about all the women who make art that we never learned about all the histories that are very important for African American history here in the United States.
And so, you know, these are things that need to find their way into classrooms, and we have the media to back it up.
[00:38:00] Alex Sarlin: You know, when I hear you talk about all the different aspects of museum curation and con conservation, but also museum education especially, it just strikes me that, you know, it's really this sort of parallel world to some of the more traditional educational institutions, the universities, the K 12 schools, the charter schools, the, you know, libraries, and there's so much happening in the museum ecosystem and the museum education world that just isn't visible, I think, to others, even in EdTech.
So I, I guess my question for you is, if you are listening to this podcast and you are an EdTech founder, or if you're an operator at an EdTech company or a tech company, you're an investor, how might you think about the role of museums and museum education in furthering our joint vision of creating meaningful and impactful educational technology?
[00:38:46] Deborah Howes: Okay, here's my.
I think it makes good sense. Like if you think about collaborating with not just museums, by the way, libraries would also be good partners. Some libraries like New York Public Library, they collect, they have objects, they have documents, they've got archives, and many other libraries do too. So just apply for libraries.
Do you know if you partner with a nonprofit public institution that has a record of service and you make content together, you have an automatic good housekeeping COO approval that everybody in the world understands and values. And that is one of the things that the AI products are always tripping up about, right?
Like, wow, where's the inspiration coming from? So I feel like we have a golden key for this particular issue, especially if you are thinking about using, you know, rag type LLM training where all of the content is coming from sources that are authorized and not farmed from the internet. You also, as I started talking about before, you're bringing in seasoned educators, and you don't have to be a museum educator to know how to do this, but people who have really thought along and hard and have received decades of experience beforehand about what does it mean to be as accessible as possible when you are talking about an object or a culture or a history, and you know, of course then that turns into, in the IRL world, a dark, smelly jungle with sounds of birds and whatever, and oh my god, you know, you're in the tropical rainforest.
Well, those haptic solutions are a little hard to do in digital. Maybe they'll come someday, but it doesn't mean you can't produce them in other ways. And so the thing is getting the experts in the room with the technologists, letting them describe the experience, and then from there, experimenting with how these kinds of outcomes, these experiential outcomes.
You know, and I mentioned before that museums just have a huge amount of media already acquired and done. Most museums have a licensing system for things that are not already in the public domain, but a lot of it already is. And also museums are pretty open to unusual arrangements, shall I say, like they're used to having a value exchange.
I mentioned before that museums don't, can't always afford the highest form of digital staffing. You know, maybe this is an opportunity to exchange value in some way that benefits everybody. These are not unusual arrangements for museums to take on and, and, you know, they really need some, I would say across the board, everybody would welcome a well-meaning highly qualified digital.
Helping them through this really difficult moment of transition.
[00:41:44] Alex Sarlin: It's a strong case to differ for partnership, right? You have that good housekeeping seal of approval, that credibility authority, the idea that you're being trained on a data set of real experts and real like high culture objects, or depending on the type of museum, but not just the sketchiness of Reddit and the internet.
Effective and realistic teaching experiences, very hands-on. There's huge libraries of high resolution media or video or audio or you know, imagery or tagged imagery. And then willingness to partner and licensing agreements that are affordable and exchanges where museums say, you know, Hey, they're open to partnering with different kinds of organizations.
I think it's a strong pitch. I mean, I've, I'm an ed tech founder listening to this or a big tech company listening to this. I think, okay, well where does that fit into our strategy? What types of data, what types of. Rainforest experiences where you're discovering, you know, ink and ruins, like that's a pretty, you know, sponsored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art or in partnership with, that's a pretty compelling experience.
So in the age of ai, there's just so many different options you can do with that. You've been at this for a long time and you've been at lots of different museums and you've worked with lots of different types of tech companies. Like what principles have stayed with you and you, you look through the history.
What are some pearls of wisdom that you could pull out and share with our audience about how to work in this, these unusual, you say they can open to unusual arrangements and unusual partnerships, you know, tech and culture partnerships. What would you say have been through lines of your work?
[00:43:09] Deborah Howes: Well, I'm gonna clarify that.
What I'm about to say is really from the point of view of the EdTech people coming in, not necessarily, this is not the advice I give to museums necessarily when they're about to work with EdTech. So I think the most important thing is for. The EdTech community, not to start with the idea that, well, first we have to teach them all about our EdTech product.
That mistake happened over and over again when I was at MoMA, for example. And sometimes, you know, it was a big enough vendor like Microsoft came to talk to us once about what they were developing way back when with Surface. And what ended up happening was that, I mean. We didn't really care about their laptops, to be honest, but they had a large display that they wanted access to people using and watching what they were doing.
And we had a children's area for exactly that. And they worked with the family programs people to figure out, well, what could be a prompt that would be relevant to the museum? And you know, like they kind of worked it in, it didn't just say, Hey, you know, come over to the Microsoft booth. It was reasonably integrated into the thing.
But when we're talking about developing something together, um, in a collaborative way, and I sometimes even coach the ed tech companies, if I have an opportunity to do so before we actually meet with main people, is that you gotta start with the experience. You gotta say, what is your experience with X and what are your challenges with X currently?
What are your expectations about what it should be rather than what it is? And if you start there. That's something that everybody in the, you know, who's employed by the museum can answer. Everybody can answer that. That doesn't make me feel dumb because I don't have, you know, the experience of using your DI data or whatever.
And the trick is to be able to reflect on the that experience and at the right moment, maybe inch by inch reveal, well that's how it happens in IRL. What if it happened like this in the digital world? And then, you know, offer some feedback moments or just listen to what, oh well that'll never work, blah, blah, blah.
Maybe what they say some, I'd say half the time is probably not necessarily irrelevant. Oh, that won't work. But you have to. Bring it back to the experience. So for example, I work a lot with teachers who are used to teaching IRL. They've only taught in the galleries in the classrooms. They're there for the 45 minutes and something happens.
I've decided that when you are that kind of teacher where you feel like you've got so much control over what's going on, that you seem to think you know, that everybody learned whatever you said, and I've seen this over and over again because when I talked to them about transferring to asynchronous learning, they come up with all sorts of barriers about, well, how can they possibly be learning IE, because I'm not telling it to them.
So then I have to show them, you know, we might do a little experiment. It'll have a discussion board or something like that. And then they read the discussion board and they're like, oh my God, they actually did get all these things. Or maybe they didn't, but now I see how they could. So they would've probably never really believed me if I said up front and we're gonna know that they're learning because blah, blah, blah.
And they're like, I dunno that, that's not gonna tell me. But then they did, or another time when we had them upload videos of a practice they were supposed to learn and it was terrible. And it was the same video of what she did teaching. So she realized that not only is there a better way to do it asynchronously, but the way I've been doing it is actually not good.
So, you know, that kind of experience, you really have to have a lot of trust in your partners to lead through that kind of possibly embarrassing experience. But it really is a lightning rod and everyone we've worked with at Howes Studio, all of the clients, I mean, there are whizzes at all sorts of things now it gives me great pleasure to know that.
And you know, the students are better for it. So that's my advice. Listen to the experience that they have and want.
[00:47:36] Alex Sarlin: Yeah, it's, and it's sort of a combination of meet them on their turf. Right? What is an experience you want? What is the problem you're dealing with instead of. Leading with the solution, right?
Start with the problem, start on the museum's, you know, area of expertise, but then maybe don't be afraid to push a little bit and say, what about transferring this and that aspect of this to digital? And then expect pushback as with lots of people who are not used to technological solutions or, or have done certain things a certain way.
But I think there's these aha moments. I mean, something we heard over and over again at at Coursera was that instructors who came to do courses on Coursera would change how they taught in real life after doing that. And it's exactly what you're saying there is like forcing yourself to sort of put it on paper or on video and then expose yourself to the experience rather than always being behind the podium gives you a whole new perspective.
And sometimes there's a lot of aha moments. I feel like you're saying the same thing happens with some museum educators.
[00:48:34] Deborah Howes: I have so many professor friends who after COVID. Completely changed the way they teach and they upload their, their lectures and they move webinar or in the in-class time, whichever they're doing, into more discussion based on the assumption that they've watched the video.
And that has become a great part of their grading prospect, to be honest. And you can't really AI that like, you know, I mean, you might've used AI to digest the video, but if you can't respond to the prompts that the teacher is asking you, that's a bad mark.
[00:49:10] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. That combination of offline learning in your own time and pace, but then in-person performance Yeah.
Is becoming a norm, you know, across the board right now in AI world.
[00:49:20] Deborah Howes: But also, I have to say, the feedback from the students, this is through the professors. Obviously I'm not teaching right now in graduate school, but students prefer it. They wanna hang out with their professors, they wanna have conversations that go off on all sorts of tangents.
It's a much improved system. And so, you know, no need to change that.
[00:49:41] Alex Sarlin: Yeah. I think one of the ironies, the sort of interesting parts about that type of asynchronous ed tech is that, especially when it comes to higher education, the sort of power imbalance or the distance between a lecturing professor and the students in the room is pretty high.
The distance between a lecturing professor who's on video and the students watching it wherever they are in the libraries or on the bus or wherever they're in the world, is even higher. But I think when you do that, you sort of say, this part is going to be the high distance learning experience. And then when we're actually together, let's decrease the distance.
Let's actually talk a little bit more as peers, let's do discussion. Let's go deep. Let's do collaborative learning. You can almost like split the high distance, more formal learning lecture style with the less formal Socratic. Let's get into it and let's go on tangents, as you're mentioning. Yeah, and it's this sort of ironic, interesting.
Byproduct of asynchronous learning. It actually by increasing the distance in some ways, that is how I see it. You know, by increasing the distance in some ways it decreases it in others.
[00:50:37] Deborah Howes: Yeah, you're absolutely right.
[00:50:38] Alex Sarlin: So you have a very particular perspective and vantage point on ed tech. You've worked with big tech, you've worked with ed tech, you've worked with lots of different companies over the years.
From this particular angle of working with really high impact cultural institutions of these big museums, what is the most exciting trend that you see right now when you look forward? And you know, I always preface this as, you can't just say AI is the trend, right? But what aspect of EdTech, including maybe aspects of AI, do you think are coming that are gonna particularly interesting in your realm?
[00:51:08] Deborah Howes: Well, for K 12, I really, really think that what I was saying about the AI study guides and tutors and so on, I think this is a huge topic. And I don't think that, for example, museums have to dominate the whole thing. But you probably did the same thing I did when the was first announced, when the AI buzz started.
I went over to, name's not coming to me, but anyway, one of the first education providers who put out a tutor and you could choose a historic figure, right? And so I went right to Vincent Van Gogh and I could tell from just asking Vincent Van Gogh a few questions. Vincent Van Gogh, that he was trained on a catalog.
[00:51:51] Alex Sarlin: The internet version of Van Gogh, right?
[00:51:53] Deborah Howes: No, actually it was the opposite that somebody gave them. They said, oh, this is interesting. Every letter that Van Gogh has ever written translated really to English from the Dutch. I know that catalog because I had to teach it. That's amazing. And so I'm like asking him questions.
And by the way, I think this is still true, but there are no visuals at all. So what did they think a K12 student was gonna ask this? Artists. The only thing they knew was that he cut off his ear probably if they know anything. Right? So they were prepared for that discussion. But it, when I prompted it for something else, it was quoting me back these letters.
It was the weirdest thing.
[00:52:35] Alex Sarlin: That's impressive. I wouldn't have thought that's where they would go with the training data. That's really cool. I
[00:52:39] Deborah Howes: mean, at least they went to an authoritative source, although there was no reference to it. But from my point of view, it's like, oh my goodness, they need a museum person in here ASAP to help them figure this out.
And I'm sure they knew that, but it was so, it was Khan Academy, what I was using. Their tutors haven't been back in years. So that got me thinking, that was the jumpstart to saying, you know, there's a lot in these tutors. It's very difficult. Can't be creepy. But I do feel like there's a lot of training that goes behind.
Even think about like the historic sites that have the people in costume, you know? Yeah. Like Williams, Williamsburg, colonial Williamsburg. Like there's so much pedagogy about how to do it right, how to do it. So it's not creepy and it is an interactive thing. You can't just go blah, blah, blah, here's my lecture.
So anyway, I feel like that is a big area where museums could really excel depending on what your topic is. Second thing for higher ed is something that you and I have a long history in, and that is about the LMS focus. I think you or one of your colleagues wrote a recent article about LMS as a portal for AI integration.
Yes. And having been an active graduate school instructor, I can say that the last thing I wanna do is change my LMS. When I was at Hot Johns Hopkins for only three years, we went through three LMS systems. It was a hot moment and were good reasons for it. But you know, we just had another, sometimes I teach there as an adjunct and we just had another change.
Recently, and it's like, you just don't wanna do it. And so it just messes everything up. Plus I've lost now a connection to anything I've done in the past in terms of courses that weren't being offered anymore. I, I can't get to them, so it's a big disruption. So I am really excited about the fact that maybe this means that if I choose the right LMS, that I won't have to change that again, but that I have these increased activities that I can depend on them for.
And of course, like everything else we said, you know, making rag type resources for that are based on authoritative sources like libraries and museums. But also I think we need to spend some time thinking about how to make these resources malleable for student use. I know a lot of what we talk about in educational reform, especially in higher ed, is helping students make things.
Not just write papers, but actually make experiences or design digital twins or create walkthrough experiences that shows your command of history. Like those are museum type experiences, if you'll allow me that. And I think that we haven't really understood what the modular component would be that could be shared in that way.
I mean, is it just a 10 minute video? Probably not. Or maybe AI helps do that in a way that, you know, can still be called authoritative. I don't know. But that's like a step that probably needs some thinking. I don't think it's a big one, looking at how much progress has been made. Not just in Gen AI with text, but also the visuals that are being generated and they're getting better and better.
And then again, just to plug for that inclusive histories and visuals, information that are outside your dusty textbook, but are important and connect with the global world in a way that's very valuable.
[00:56:26] Alex Sarlin: One of the things I'm hearing you say for both the higher ed and the K 12 side, which I think is really interesting, is that.
Museums, and stop me if I'm sort of misrepresenting your take here, but like museums have a really rich history, especially museum educators have a really rich history of taking resources, taking artifacts, taking even, even sort of personas and translating them and actually figuring out how would this work in an educational context?
How does this turn into a student project? How does this turn into a inquiry-based experience? And what a lot of AI people are doing, AI ed tech folks are doing right now is they're finding resources. They're saying, oh, you wanna talk to Van Gogh? You know, or you wanna look at the Rosetta Stone or whatever it is.
Here it is. Well, we have it because it's on the internet, so we trained on it. You can do it. And you're saying that there's this sort of missing layer in between the artifacts or the people and the actual, what makes it educational? Just having access saying, I could ask Van Gogh anything. Maybe that's not actually the right experience.
Yeah. Maybe the experience is Van Gogh's there. How do you create a conversation that's actually gonna deepen your understanding of art? Yeah. Or of, of his art or of anything like that. I think that's a powerful insight and I think it's something, obviously EdTech companies do have their own educators, they do have instructional designers.
It's not like they go in totally blind to that. But in particular, the idea of translating this type of learning in a digital realm, this is exactly what museums have been doing for decades and decades, and I think we, we should really value and tap into that expertise.
[00:57:52] Deborah Howes: Yeah. You know, this is really, it loops up to the question you asked earlier about like, what is the challenge for museums to go digital?
And I mean, this is that challenge. They take so much for granted because it's in the room and everybody can see it and that people should be able to understand it. Even if you have a pamphlet, even if there's a wall label that'll tell you, you know, the top three things, you probably don't even wanna know what that is, including the accession number.
But you know, we have to do better. We have to do better. And I think this engagement with education, I mean, frankly, museums are at risk of becoming irrelevant. Funding's down 30% since COVID, and it hasn't come back after COVID. Some of the audiences, the big museums in the large cities are doing okay, but the smaller cities, the ones that have always had creaky funding, and then with the latest activities at the federal level, a lot of funding has disappeared and it's made them very risk averse, no surprise, but to partner with people who really understand this market that we've always thought that we were essential.
I mean, who didn't go to school and not go on a field trip, but even field trips are down. It's too complicated to get them scheduled into the day, and so we're really at risk at like being forgotten. I mean, that sounds really dramatic, but. And so if we don't put energy into this direction, we museums, even though I don't work directly for one right now, I'll speak for them.
You know, if we're at risk of really becoming forgotten or irrelevant or a place where a lot of stuff is that, you know might be relevant to you, but you're not sure.
[00:59:37] Alex Sarlin: It's a double-edged moment. 'cause I think it's, it's a scary moment. Irrelevance is the worst thing for any cultural institution of any kind, any educational institution.
At the same time, I think we've talked throughout this conversation about how museums have a lot of very unique and special things to offer, especially in this moment, this AI world moment. Yeah. They have particular types of data. They have artifacts, they have labeled data and trained data. They have expertise and authority and credibility.
They have huge catalogs. They have the ability to bring all this educational experience and this experiential education experience. So if you could just in a sentence put together, I know we're at the end of our time. You're the head of a museum right now and it's one of these museums you mentioned it's in a smaller place.
It's in a small city or, or it's struggling with funding, but it knows AI is here. It knows education is part of its mission. What is the sort of headline of how you should think about joining this AI revolution or this ed tech revolution and not being left on the side?
[01:00:36] Deborah Howes: I'm actually on the board of a really small academic museum that has very little budget, but a really interesting collection and an interesting relationship to, its its student body, which is a primarily art school, but it's a four year liberal arts college.
It's known for its art programs. So I think about this because, let's just take an extreme example. Most of the examples I've been giving you today have been from, you know, large international museums with budgets galore and access and ability to take a picture of anything they have and make video. Like.
Let's go to the opposite. You know, if I were director of a small academic museum, I would have to take stock first of the community within that university and see what do they teach, what do they know, what do they need, and then probably work with that C community to develop. They have very little digital materials, photos, whatever, to look at that and see where do I need support?
And then work with other partnerships to see if maybe there could be some, let's say partnership with the photography department. Do these students need to know how to take pictures of objects? Why not lighting? It's whatever. Like that's just one small example. And then, you know, looking farther afield, if they're making kind of roadmap, once they had a body of materials, let's say on a topic, let's say African American artists, they have a strong collection and that, and they have, uh, history of supporting that in the Hudson Valley, where they're located.
That could be a body of content that somebody would be interested in, you know, from a pedagogical point of view. And it could even be Google for goodness sakes. You know, like, I don't know about you, but I thought a lot about like, how could museums create. A series of notebooks, literally Google notebooks with everything that I think is a good thing on these topics.
Let's say African American art and license those for use to other or, or trade or do something. So that value is exchanged so that if I'm teaching that at whatever level, I can get access to a museum's Google Notebook on this topic. I think it's doable.
[01:03:00] Alex Sarlin: Sure. I think the only thing missing is the sort of commerce part of it is the like licensing part of, yeah.
I don't know if it's fully in place. The idea of if you train a small model or if you train a notebook on a proprietary data set, how do you get paid for somebody to use it in a way that is based on how many students or how they're using it? That doesn't seem out of scope at all. It seems like something they could definitely be figured out.
[01:03:24] Deborah Howes: Well, that's why I think I would talk to Google. I mean, whoever in Google is interested in this topic, you know, wouldn't talk to Mr. Google, but, or Mrs. But somebody's gonna be interested and maybe it's an LM.
[01:03:37] Alex Sarlin: Or maybe it's something you go back to your donors for and say, we are trying to enter the digital and AI age.
We have this particular project, we need, you know, a funding push to do it. But that's a very different type of ask than support the museum with your yearly gift. You know?
[01:03:51] Deborah Howes: And that's a great example because right there, what you just said would be so much more persuasive to the board if they had a partner who was an ed tech component and was going to be helping the museum.
Because we've seen this movie before, right? I didn't, I talk about video diss earlier. I mean, we've poured so much money into video dis production and all of a sudden nobody had a player.
[01:04:15] Alex Sarlin: Player. Yeah. Anybody under a certain age listening to this is like Googling video disc right now. They're big.
[01:04:22] Deborah Howes: They were, they were from museums because we could play them over and over again and they were quite sturdy, more sturdy than video tapes.
So museums ended up using video disc a lot longer than the public ever did. Technical detail. No,
[01:04:36] Alex Sarlin: that's interesting. Deborah Howes is the president of Howes Studio? She brings three decades leading educational technology programs at the most recognizable international art museums in the country, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, MoMA in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art.
It's, which is an amazing museum, mocha in Los Angeles. Thank you so much for being here with us on EdTech Insiders.
[01:05:01] Deborah Howes: My pleasure, Alex. Thank you so much for inviting me.
[01:05:04] Alex Sarlin: Thanks for listening to this episode of EdTech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community.
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