This is a short paper that was presented together with a poster in the European Conference of Interactive TV and Video EuroTV2010.

1. Using video and social networks to improve the access
of daycare centers to museums: one case study
Diana de Sousa Mariana Salgado
Media Lab, Aalto University School Media Lab, Aalto University School
of Art and Design of Art and Design
Hämeentie 135C Hämeentie 135C
00560 Helsinki Finland 00560 Helsinki Finland
+358 45 275 2677 +358 40 585 7727
dspsousa@gmail.com mariana.salgado@gmail.com
ABSTRACT entities: Design Museum, Media Lab Helsinki, Zipipop and
ConnectedDay. At present the project is in the prototype stage. A
In this paper we address how social media tools can improve the team of museum docents have been creating content for the web
access of daycares to museums. Our proposal is based on ongoing service and a team of developers have been building the website.
case study started at the Design Museum Helsinki in 2007. This A round of tests at daycares is scheduled for March 2010.
case study is Oswald and the Objects. It aims at making the
museum collection accessible to daycares that are located far The service targets daycare educators and children from 3 to
from the museum. We describe the case study and reflect on the 6 years old. It provides guidelines for the educators on how to
possibilities of social media tools that can be used by a young organize activities at daycares related to the museum’s collection.
audience to make the museum more accessible and engaging. It also offers some of the necessary educational resources,
Using and designing the implementation of social media tools like videos and printable presentations to conduct autonomous
has made us aware of the need to plan particularly carefully due activities related to the museum collection. Our aim is to improve
to sensitive privacy concerns and technical reliability issues. We the engagement of daycare educators and children with these
explain our reasoning behind the selection of services for sharing activities by using social media tools to share materials (photos
photos, documents and videos. We try to show how the specific and videos of the children’s works) among the daycares and the
needs of the project have guided our choice of one service over museum. In particular, we discuss video sharing as an opportunity
another. In parallel to this discussion we try to analyze the to start a museum Web TV directed at daycares.
possibilities of using video for the creation of interactive Web In this paper, we analyze the case study Oswald and the Objects
TV in the context of museums. to explore answers to our research questions: how to design and
implement social media tools in the context of museums? How
Categories and Subject Descriptors can shared video content be reinterpreted as a museum Web TV
channel?
J.5 [Arts and Humanities]: Fine Arts
2. THE SERVICE IN BRIEF
General Terms
Back in 2007 the workshops were led by the members of the
Design, Experimentation. museum’s education team and included a live puppet show
performance using the puppet Oswald, who introduced the
children to a different design object in each workshop. A dialogue
Keywords engaged the puppet and the children.
Design education, informal learning, video, digital media, social
With the online version of Oswald and the Objects [3] we try
media, social networks, user-generated content, internet, daycare,
to offer children an experience similar to the one they would
museum, accessibility.
have if the puppet Oswald and the museum docents could visit
them in person. Our purpose was not to simply translate the
1. INTRODUCTION Oswald and the Objects workshops to an online environment,
rather enhance it with the possibilities of the online media and
Design Museum Helsinki [1] currently offers activities for tools. This “blended” approach aims towards blurring the on-
children but they happen mostly at the museum’s premises. This site activities with the online interaction by using social media
is a major restriction for daycares located far from the museum, tools for sharing materials (photos, videos, audio and texts). In
since it’s difficult to take small children on long distance this informal learning environment children are learning both
journeys. As an attempt to address this problem five workshops from the resources offered by the museum and from their peers,
were organized at a daycare in Helsinki in 2007. They were the with the materials shared by other daycares. The process of
Oswald and the Objects workshops (Oswald is the name of a contributing materials, together with commenting and replies
puppet), part of the project The Secret Life of Objects [2]. from all parties, should create an open dialogue between the
Our current project, also named Oswald and the Objects (in daycares and the museum.
Finnish: Esa ja Esineet) consists of developing an online service Before starting the activities, the children watch a video of the
and a web platform for improving the access of Finnish daycare puppet Oswald from the Oswald and the Objects’s website. This
centers to educational activities offered by the Design Museum in replaces the live puppet show. Afterwards follows a discussion
Helsinki. The project involves collaborators from four different about the design object in the context of the children’s daily

2. experiences, moderated by the daycare educators (instead of the threads visible in several places on the website to increase the
museum docents). Subsequently, the daycare educators lead the probability of people contributing to them. In this way we give
children through a series of creative activities where they draw, more visibility to the threads and encourage active participation
model or design new objects or new contexts for the objects. from the audience.
We encourage daycare educators and children to take pictures Another approach to encourage contributions is to pre-populate
or make short videos of the works and processes to later share the discussion threads with comments, questions and answers
online. They can write comments to those images and videos. before launching the website. This initial content has the purpose
For example, the children can tell short stories about their own of breaking the ice and giving leads concerning what kind of
work. If the child cannot read or write the educators can help out. feedback the Design Museum would like to receive.
The comments are a conversation starting point between the Lowering the barriers to people’s interaction is also important,
parties. The museum docents send a reply to the children or the as we learned from a case study about visitor participation at
daycare by also adding the puppet Oswald’s comments to the the Delaware Art Museum [5]. Thus in Oswald and the Objects
photos or by publishing a short video where Oswald addresses there is no need to register or log-in in order to comment in the
and thanks the children for their works. It’s also possible for discussion forums. They are public and everyone is welcome
different daycares to share materials and let the children have to contribute or send feedback. We are aware that this may also
discussions about them. allow for a number of unwanted or inappropriate comments, but
the website administrator will get an email notification for each
new post, which will help with the monitoring of the forums.
3. IT IS ALL ABOUT SHARING AND This post moderation of the comments after online publishing
DISCUSSING has already proved successful in other museum projects [6]
The online version of Oswald and the Objects combines two
different web services: the public website Oswald and the Objects 3.2 Sharing documents
[3], owned by Design Museum, and the online community
website of ConnectedDay [4]. The main language is Finnish. Design Museum needed to share PDF and Powerpoint files
with the daycare educators in order to offer them more specific
information about design history and point out the most important
themes to be discussed during the educational activities. We
decided that the simplest way to share these documents would
be to use an external service for document sharing that was
reliable, free of charge and which gave a possibility to embed the
documents in Oswald and the Objects website. We considered
the embedding option to be the decisive factor for choosing to
use such a service, since this allows the visitors to browse inside
the document directly from the website, without needing to
download it beforehand.
We looked at the two main options among online document
sharing services: Scribd [7] and Slideshare [8]. They both
offered very similar features, so we chose the one that had the
most visitors’ traffic — in the assumption that the more traffic a
service has the more established it is and the less likely it is to be
discontinued in the near future.
Figure 1. The Oswald and the Objects website. However, when we tried to embed the document in our website
we found that the Scribd player hides the control tools from
immediate view. Slideshare was different. Their player shows
The Oswald and the Objects website is used for delivering the the most important control tools at the bottom, like most video
necessary information, documentation and materials about the players. There is a moving arrow floating on top that invites users
educational activities from the museum to daycare educators. to click for the next page. Additionally, it allows direct sharing
The materials include videos, photos, guidelines in Powerpoint, of documents to Facebook, Del.icio.us and a number of other
PDF or slideshow formats. There is also a small discussion popular social networks. One can also send the document by
forum for enabling communication between daycare educators email to a friend directly from Oswald and the Objects website
and the docents in Design Museum. The forum is equally open to just by using the Slideshare tools. Slideshare has also a more
the public for collection of comments, questions and suggestions. appealing visual interface. Because of all these reasons we finally
decided to choose Slideshare to share documents.
3.1 Discussing
We planned to enable discussion forum features in some of the 3.3 Sharing materials from daycares
pages of Oswald and the Objects website. The main purpose We needed a channel with restricted access where daycares could
of these forums is to collect the experiences, concerns and share photos, videos, stories and comments from children about
suggestions of the educators about the educational activities. their works and receive feedback, comments and replies from
The discussion forums are addressed to a set of activities and the docents in the museum. We initially planned to use Flickr
the themes of these activities. Each set of activities has its own [9], since it can handle both photos and videos and it has privacy
webpage and its own discussion thread. We made the discussion options.

3. We changed opinion when we learned that ConnectedDay parallel also brings the benefit of increasing the possibility of
already had its own secure system of photo and video sharing people finding and sharing the videos, giving more visibility to
especially aimed at daycares. ConnectedDay is a community the whole project.
site aimed at professional daycare providers, with the goal of
The reason to use ConnectedDay had mainly to do with logistics.
increasing parental involvement. It provides a secure picture and
ConnectedDay provides daycares with camera phones and
video sharing service from daycares to parents. ConnectedDay
training in using those camera phones to collect photos and
had around 150 daycare and preschools using their service in
videos (which are directly uploaded to the web from the phones).
Finland as of mid 2008 when we asked them to collaborate in
They also train educators to upload and share the contents in
our project. They agreed to participate by providing one camera
ConnectedDay’s secure web environment. They have a structured
phone and one account in their service for the Design Museum,
service already in place, which otherwise would have to be built
free of charge for one year.
by the museum.
When the daycare educators upload the children’s photos, videos
or stories to ConnectedDay they can share them with the museum.
The museum can then access the images and comment on them 3.5 The purpose of video contents
as well; through ConnectedDay the museum can also send a short Video is being used in several ways and for different purposes
video of the puppet Oswald thanking children for sharing their at different stages of the activities proposed in Oswald and the
works. In addition, the museum can act as a dialogue moderator Objects.
by putting different daycares in contact with each other, sharing
images from one daycare to another; the children will be able
to see what kind of works and ideas came from their peers in 3.5.1 Video-samples of the activities
different cities and send their comments to them. These are These videos show the work-flow and outcomes of the workshops
possibilities that we plan to test in the future. done in 2007. They were filmed during the events at the pilot
The idea of using other photo and video sharing services for daycare. The purpose of these videos is to instruct and encourage
materials shared by the daycares was not completely been the educators to use the service. As we have learned from the
put aside, since ConnectedDay is a paid service and many series Design Squad [12] and DragonflyTV [13], the videos show
daycares are yet not using it. The museum docents wish to make a step-by-step sequence of the activities and exemplify the results
Oswald and the Objects accessible to the largest number of achieved by the children. These videos also show how much fun
daycares, therefore a solution for the ones which are left out of the children and educators can have while doing the proposed
ConnectedDay’s network will be prepared in the future. But for tasks. Their role is to stimulate educators to engage with Oswald
the moment our prototype uses this service only. and the Objects. They are an important activating factor.
3.4 Sharing video from Design Museum 3.5.2 Videos of puppet Oswald and the theme object
The videos provided by the Design Museum are currently being These are videos of the puppet Oswald and his stories about the
shared through three different platforms: Vimeo [10], YouTube themed design object for each set of activities. They are viewed
[11] and ConnectedDay [4]. Cost efficiency was the principal by the children before they start each activity. They introduce
reason for choosing Vimeo and YouTube video sharing services. the activity’s theme (as for example the Aalto vase, Teema mug).
They are both ready to use and available for free. This way The videos stimulate the children’s analytical point of view by
our scarce resources could be directed to producing the actual presenting the object out of its usual everyday context.
contents instead of buying media space. Also most video sharing
services already include several social interaction tools which 3.5.3 Videos made by the daycares
can benefit our project. For example:
These videos document the works and processes developed by
1. Commenting and rating options, which can be used as an the children during the Oswald and the Objects activities and
extra tool to collect feedback from a wider audience than they are made by the daycare educators.
just daycare educators. They are located at ConnectedDay’s website and can only be
viewed by people authorized by the daycare educators. These
2. Tagging options, which improve the chances of videos videos allow docents in the Design Museum to follow the results
being found by people searching for related topics or achieved by the children during the activities and give feedback
keywords, and thus help spread awareness of the project. to children about their works. If they wish daycare educators can
share the videos with other daycares to compare experiences.
3. Direct sharing connections to other social networks,
allowing everyone to share the videos and publicize the
project easily.
3.5.4 Videos of Oswald’s replies
These are videos of the puppet Oswald addressing the children
4. Statistics and view counters, which can give us a good about their work. When the daycare educators share images of
idea of how popular the videos are, where our audience is the children’s works with the museum, the museum docents send
located and where the website is getting traffic from. a video of the puppet Oswald back to the daycare thanking the
children for sharing their works. This video is pre-recorded and
We decided to use Vimeo and YouTube simultaneously for
the museum shares it with each daycare individually through
precaution. The services may suddenly cease to exist and there
ConnectedDay’s website. At the moment the video is the same for
is no guarantee that they will be free of charge forever. Thus,
all daycares but in the future it may include personal messages,
if one service becomes unavailable we can alternatively use
for example by mentioning the names of the addressed children
the videos hosted in the other service. Using several services in

4. and making specific comments on their work. AVEK’s Digidemo grant. Special thanks to Andrea Botero for
encouraging us to write this paper, Hanna Kapanen for valuable
comments and Richard von Kaufmann for final revisions.
4. CONCLUSIONS
In this case study, we encourage daycares to connect with the
museum collection, the museum docents and with other daycares
6. REFERENCES
by using video, photo and document sharing services, and online [1] Design Museum (2007). Design Museum website.
discussion forums. The conversation is nurtured and guided Retrieved February 2, 2010, from http://www.
by the museum through the suggested themes, activities and designmuseum.fi/
tasks. Daycare educators are also encouraged to tell about their
experiences, obstacles and suggestions for improvement. [2] The Secret Life of Objects (2007). Blog of the project.
Retrieved July 12, 2009, from http://thesecretlifeofobjects.
Social media tools, as for example the services for sharing video,
blogspot.com/
can be used in parallel and in this way ensure reliability and
enhanced multi-platform exposure; for example the previously
[3] Oswald and the Objects (2009) Website of the project.
mentioned benefits of publishing content both to Vimeo,
Retrieved January 25, 2010, from http://www.esajaesineet.
YouTube and ConnectedDay as simultaneous strategy to ensure
com/
the availability of our materials and to reach a broader audience.
In order to get the most out of the implementation of social [4] ConnectedDay (2009). Website of a daycare service
media tools they need to be merged into the daycare and provider. Retrieved January 9, 2010, from http://www.
museum ecology. It has proved beneficial to plan and design connectedday.com/
the implementation of these social media tools in collaboration
with the museum and the daycare personnel. The tools must [5] Fisher, M., et al., The Art of Storytelling: Enriching
be integrated with the existing know-how of museum docents Art Museum Exhibits and Education through Visitor
and daycare educators. Content planning should also be a group Narratives, in J. Trant and D. Bearman (eds.). Museums
effort. Through active collaboration these services could be a and the Web 2008: Proceedings, Toronto: Archives
powerful means of promoting cultural education among younger & Museum Informatics. Published March 31, 2008.
audiences. They could also promote more opportunities for Consulted September 28, 2009.http://www.archimuse.com/
cooperation between daycares and museums. mw2008/papers/fisher/fisher.html
In this paper we described how the needs of the project guided
[6] Salgado, M., Jauhiainen, T., and Díaz, L., 2009. Re-
the choice of the services selected for sharing photos, documents
thinking an Annotation Tool for Museum Community-
and videos. Choosing the right social media services is part of the
Created Content. Nordic Design Research Conference.
design process as they will lend their identity to the final project.
Nordes, August 30- September 1, Oslo.
Our experiments with using video as a communication tool
between daycares and the museum have led us to formulate [7] Scribd (2010). Website for document sharing. Retrieved
the hypothesis of creating a museum Web TV channel directed July 9, 2008, from http://www.scribd.com/
at schools. There is inexpensive technology available to make
this possible. Digital video is becoming an extremely popular [8] SlideShare (2010). Website for document sharing.
medium. A wide range of photo cameras and most mobile phones Retrieved January 21, 2010, from http://www.slideshare.net
already provide very reasonable video recording capabilities; and
most laptop computers now come with an integrated webcam. [9] Flickr (2010). Website for photo sharing. Retrieved January
In addition internet is quickly penetrating classrooms. This 25, 2010 from http://www.flickr.com
phenomena points out the need for further research on these
issues. [10] Vimeo (2010). Website for video sharing. Retrieved July
9, 2008, from http://vimeo.com/
The contents of a museum’s Web TV channel are mostly video-
on-demand that educators and children browse according to their [11] YouTube (2010). Website for video sharing. Retrieved July
needs. Video content focuses on presenting certain topics and 9, 2008, from http://www.youtube.com/
proposing a series of activities and tasks, as in the case of Oswald
and the Objects. Video contributions from the children and a set of [12] Design Squad (2008). Website of the project Design Squad.
social interaction tools, such as commenting, tagging and rating Retrieved January 30, 2010, from http://pbskids.org/
options and rapidly sharing links to other social networks are designsquad/
used to improve audience engagement and content distribution.
Although we acknowledge that more work needs to be done [13] DragonflyTV (2008). Website of the project DragonFlyTV.
for developing the concept of a Web TV channel for museums Retrieved January 30, 2010, from http://pbskids.org/
and daycares, our project explores some of the possibilities and dragonflytv/
obstacles that this type of channel could provide.
5. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We thank the daycares and children who participated in the
workshops. We are grateful to Ilpo Kari and all colleagues in
Media Lab, Design Museum and Zipipop for their collaboration
and assistance. Oswald and the Objects was supported by