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A talkback board. We gave everyone post-its in their registration packets and encouraged them to post their questions and comments, especially on the “gaps” in the conference, to the board. The board was directly outside the main conference room.

If you don't engage in multiple back channels, you may not see multiple use cases. Different tools are best for different types of interaction. Just because post-it notes didn't work at WebWise doesn't mean they don't work in galleries... as we know from the success of many talkback boards.If you ask visitors/participants to try a new tool, make sure it has as low a barrier to entry as possible. I have yet to see a museum set something up that is as simple to use as Today'sMeet.If discussion is the goal, you don't need user profiles - you just need a way to talk. If building up a personal profile/relationship with the institution is a goal, people need to uniquely identify themselves.Think about the possibility for asynchronous back channels that allow visitors (and staff) to share deep content with each other over time. Consider, for example, the rich conversation on Flickr about this image from the Chicago World's Fair. You could imagine a comparable conversation available to visitors onsite alongside exhibits or artifacts in the galleries.If possible, find ways to show the real-time location of people who are engaging in the back channel. The Mattress Factory's new SCREENtxt application uses a location-based system so that visitors can identify whether other participants are onsite at the museum or not.Make allowance for emergent back channels that visitors/users "bring with them" to the experience. These tools are particularly valuable for the "portal to the world" back channel use case. Every time I see a kid take a cellphone photo in an exhibit, I know that photo will immediately travel to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, etc. How can your system capture that activity?

As yet more tales of woe appear around failing business models (it’s not just the newspapers that are struggling: it appears Youtube is onto a loser too…), I thought I’d take a coffee break out of course writing to jot down a cynical thought or two about lifelong learning… …because along with the widening participation agenda and blah, blah, blah, blah, lifelong learning is one of those things that we hear about every so often as being key to something or other. Now I’d probably consider myself to be a lifelong learner: it’s been a good few years since I took a formal course, and yet every day I try to learn how to do something I didn’t know how to do when I got up that morning; and I try to be open to new academic ideas too (sometimes…;-) But who, I wonder, is supposed to be delivering this lifelong learning stuff, whatever it is? Because there’s money to be made, surely? If lifelong learning is something that people are going to buy into, then who owns, or is trying to grab that business? Just imagine it: having acquired a punter, you may have them for thirty, forty, fifty years?