With so many social media options floating around in cyber space these days, it’s sometimes hard to know which ones will help you develop relationships with your visitors and audience.

We have been avid Facebook and Twitter users over here at the Museum for a couple of years now, and as you well know, we are frequent bloggers. However, our website redevelopment project has brought to the table a whole new range of social media tools that can help us connect more often, and more meaningfully, with those who care about us.

Our latest social media presence is our Google+ account. When setting up this new account we were asking ourselves questions like “what do we want from this?” and “what do we want this to do?” questions that are more difficult to answer than one might think.We don’t want to be posting all of the same content that our visitors are already seeing on Facebook and Twitter, but we also want Google+ to be a fully integrated member of our social media family.  The answer so far has been: Let’s experiment! Currently we are posting some new content, and some content that might look familiar if you already follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Just for fun we thought that we would take a poll. The question is: How do you use Google+?
If you have any advice or tips for using Google+ we’d sure love to hear them!

You can take a leisurely amble through the A Walk With Kirk exhibit and find yet another fun thing that will capture your attention. Sit down in front of the Trip Shed and use your imagination to build your idea of the perfect museum to house all of our wonderful watercraft and exhibits.

This is what you start with…

Then…see what you can do??

Check out some of the interesting creations that kids from 5yrs to 50yrs have dreamt up and judge for yourself, do you think you could improve, expand or simply knock our socks off?!?

The only way to know is to come and visit and give it a try, I challenge all you kids and kids at heart too, to design and build your dream museum and amaze us all.

All of the building materials: logs, roofing, corners, canoes, and more, are all available from the Museum gift store, so you can practice at home first and become the ultimate expert by your next exciting visit to The Canadian Canoe Museum.

Most of you probably know that we care for the largest collection of canoes, kayaks and paddled watercraft in the world – but, did you know we also use our exhibits and collection as inspiration for engaging and interactive family fun?

Cool 3-D canoe puzzle

This 3-D canoe puzzle in our ‘Canoes To Go’ exhibit is so much fun and ends up looking like a Linkanoe, which is a canoe that comes apart, much like the puzzle does (the real Linkanoe can be seen in the background of the photo above).

Here are some examples of just a few of the hands-on things that are going on in the Museum everyday:

Kids putting on a show in our puppet theater
Photo by Myke Healy, Fusionriver Photography

Our new nature-inspired puppet theater is a great place for parents to sit while their little-ones use our animal puppets as the characters in a story they create.

Kids fishing from an inflatable canoe (donated by Advanced Elements).
Photo by Myke Healy, Fusionriver Photography

Young anglers can catch fish species that are native to Canada in our ‘Canoe Go Fishing?’ area, while you sit on the ‘dock’ in a lawn chair.

Camp table is set for dinner!

Set our summer camp dining table for dinner and serve imaginary camp food.

Building a museum

Build your own log museum and fill it with canoes, just like Kirk Wipper did at Camp Kandalore.

Dress-up!

Play dress-up with traditional capotes (coats made from a Hudson’s Bay blanket).

Be inspired in the ‘Sukkanoe’

Sit in our inspiring ‘Sukkanoe’ and create nature-inspired poetry with magnetic words, then display it for future visitors to see.

Try to find everything on the museum scavenger hunt!

iComplete the Museum scavenger hunt, ‘Canoe Find It?’ and pick up a prize at the desk before you leave.

‘Big kids’ like our hands-on stations too!

Don’t worry if you aren’t a kid, or don’t have kids – ‘big kids’ like our hands-on stuff too!

Visit us and try your hand at our interactive, family friendly exhibits!  Celebrate International Museum Day with us on May 18th from 10am to 5pm – Family admission is just $25!  Click the logo below to learn more about what’s going on in Ontario for International Museum Day 2013:

As you may have heard, The Canadian Canoe Museum is exploring the feasibility of moving to a new on-the-water location in downtown Peterborough. We care deeply about our audience, our community and our supporters and we want to hear your thoughts about our future.

Join us on Wednesday May 8th from 7:00 to 9:00pm to hear an update about this exciting idea and engage in a lively discussion. We need your help to reach our goal of being a locally-loved and nationally-significant cultural heritage institution on the waterfront in downtown Peterborough. Refreshments will be served. Call 705.748.9153 or email info@canoemuseum.ca to R.S.V.P.

If you can’t join us in person, you can call (705.748.9153), write (The Canadian Canoe Museum, 910 Monaghan Road, Peterborough, ON K9J 5K4) or email (info@canoemuseum.ca) to tell us what you think. We will also be setting up an online way for you to share your thoughts–stay tuned for a separate announcement. Your participation is important to us, and we look forward to hearing from you.

To make the day even better, NICK OFFERMAN will be at the Museum to take in the various demonstrations and exhibits.  Joan Barrett and Ted Moores’ of Bear Mountain Boats‘ invited Nick, their colleague, friend and Bear Mountain boat builder, to attend the day and he said YES!!  Nick Offerman currently stars as Ron Swanson on NBC’s wildly popular show, Parks and Recreation.  Nick will be hosting a special dinner at the Canoe Museum for Bear Mountain Boats and Ted Moores’ 40th anniversary. Tickets are sold out for this.

If you are a fan of Nick Offerman, then this is the event for you.  An informal, intimate and likely hilarious Q&A with Nick Offerman will be from 2:30pm-4:00pm in the Education Room at the Canoe Museum on Saturday June 22nd.  Appetizers and 2 drinks are provided with your ticket. Tickets are $30 and seating is limited.  To purchase a ticket, click here.

A Global Museum
What do you think of when you hear the word “museum”? Do you think of old, quiet rooms where nothing can be touched? Do you see the security guard in the corner and a bunch of things that simply go over your head? Well, here at The Canadian Canoe Museum, things certainly go over you’re head too, that’s how your portage a canoe!

Trust me, the typical museum couldn’t be further from the reality and mission of The Canadian Canoe Museum. As a Watson Fellow, I have traveled the world building traditional canoes with native masters. I thought there would be a stutter of disconnect when I arrived to spend three weeks at the Museum and to study their incredible collection of traditional canoes. Yet, when I arrived, I realized that I had shown up amidst another community of canoe builders and enthusiasts. It wasn’t just a single tradition at a time like I had experienced before. This time it was many traditions. That got me thinking…. Hmm, perhaps this museum has a bigger role in preserving the canoe. This is a place for global cultural dialogue.

So what does that dialogue mean? Spanning time periods, cultures, and various ecosystems, the collection at the Museum is in its nature global. There is a ceremonial canoe from Papua New Guinea showing lineage and tribal cosmology through its dramatic carvings. There are birch bark canoes spanning all of the regions of the north. There are canoes from every stage of innovation over the past centuries in Canada; from bark, to wood, to synthetics. There are so many others. Each of the different pieces in the collection is a story to be told of culture and creativity. At the Museum, these stories are being told and retold by building them, performing with them and telling of them everyday. Put together, the collection itself is a network of stories that, piece by piece, tell not just a story of canoes but also tell the human story of innovation, meaning, survival and joy.

What if? What possibilities lie in front of such a unique collection, such a unique gathering of knowledge and such an important expression by humanity in every corner of the world? As The Canadian Canoe Museum makes its epic push to acquire a new location so many fun possibilities come to mind. Will there be a global network of traditional canoe builders? Will there be more opportunities to learn, do, and make rooted in traditional cultures from around the world? What new traditions will appear, ready to be learned by community members at the Museum? Walking in the front and paddling out the back isn’t just a goal, it is a necessity for such an internationally significant institution to be fully realized, right here in Peterborough, Ontario.

Having spent the last 8 years working in the not-for-profit sector, I have heard comments such as: “I want my donation to do something, not to support operations,” or “operations are the black hole of a charitable organization.” These comments bring up an interesting point: can an organization truly achieve its mission without putting funds toward operations? For example, could The Canadian Canoe Museum teach and inspire our children through the exploration of the canoe and canoeing traditions? Or could local, national, and international visitors continue to experience paddling and Canadian history, character, and spirit all year long? The answer is no.

As Richard Perry so accurately states in his Passionate Giving Blog post in December, 2012 (shared with Jeff Schreifels): “If you didn’t have overhead you wouldn’t have anything. It is still mind blowing to me to sit in a meeting with seemingly intelligent people and have them imply that overhead is bad, must be pushed down to levels that make it impossible to run the organization and must be hidden in financial reports so ill-informed donors can’t find or discern where they are or how much they are. This is truly comical.”

Not-for-profits need to be more transparent and we need to re-define our thinking about overhead. If we do, imagine what our generation’s legacy could be?

If you want to find out more about the Museum’s financials firsthand, please join me and the rest of the Museum’s team for the Annual General Meeting tomorrow evening at 6:30pm (April 24, 2013).

By the way, here’s the awesome group of Pathfinders (plus two Girl Guides), looking intrepid and chipper the morning after their sleepover here:

But back to me and Sir Ken in the middle of the night.  His talks on creativity and education are full of irreverent wit and sharp insights into the fundamental weakness of how we teach children. ”If you’re not prepared to be wrong,” he says, “you’ll never come up with anything original… but our education systems… are set up so that the worst thing you can be is wrong… we’re educating people out of their creative capacities.”   I’ve seen it myself: my daughter used to draw trees as wild, multi-hued scraggles filling her skies. Now she dutifully creates tree trunks that are exclusively brown, with puffy green-cloud tops. Maybe a token apple, red, floating in the monolithic green.

“Creativity must have the same status as literacy,” Robinson says. Right now, our education system “progressively teaches us from the waist up, and is a protracted training for university entrance, favouring academic intelligence. ” The result “is that many brilliant, highly talented, creative people think they’re not,” a tragedy for each of those individual lives, in my opinion. But Robinson’s thinking about the bigger picture:  we can’t afford to squander different kinds of intelligence, he suggests. The kids entering kindergarten today will retire around 2075 – a world we can’t imagine from here, and will require new thinking to navigate.

Listening to these talks, I laughed (he’s very funny), I cried (it was late: I was fragile) and I was so inspired.

In the education department here, we do get wrapped up in this skewed existing system, not least because the wonderful teachers who bring their kids on fields trips to broaden their experience must justify these trips in terms of curriculum links — and we meet teachers’ needs by shaping our programs around those curriculum links.  And as I listened to Ken Robinson talk about the hierarchy of subjects — math and languages at the top, down through humanities, with art way at the bottom (or off the list entirely) — I had to acknowledge that it is indeed new science programming that’s got top billing on our to-do list around here (see The Perfect Machine for an example).  Not that there’s anything wrong with science and math!  But I was reminded to celebrate creative expression, and our arts programs, as valid and equally important part of education — the most important part, according to Ken Robinson.

In that spirit, I’d like to share some recent photos from some of our creative arts programs here — Rhema Christian School’s visit yesterday for Watercolour Painting and Soapstone Carving, and The Children’s Montessori School’s visit last month for Watercolour Painting.  In both programs, students participate in a hands-on introduction to new and specific techniques, and to the Museum context for these arts, but then they are free to create what inspires them.  Kids in our arts programs often can’t believe it at first:  ”Can we really go anywhere in the Museum”?”  ”Can I really paint (carve) anything?”  ”Can I paint something other than a canoe?”  YES! YES! YES!

For more information on our arts and other school programs, please visit our website, or contact me at 705.748.9153 x203 or karen.taylor@canoemuseum.ca

To hear Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talks, click here.

The students put all of the skills and knowledge we passed on to them last fall to use in designing all of the graphic panels for this new exhibit and a short time ago they came back to the Museum to print and mount the graphics. Having worked with them both in their classroom at Fleming College and in the Museum’s own exhibit studio, I am delighted to say that they have done professional-quality work and should be proud of what they’ve accomplished. It has been a real pleasure to work with them and Gayle McIntyre and Deb Scott, their instructors.

The model that was used to plan the exhibit is in the foreground.

Q: How many firefighters does it take to hang up a historic ladder?

Carefully placing artifacts into exhibit cases, with gloves of course!

The deciding factors for this new concept included the demise of the penny, but also to assist the “young” consumer.  The forlorn look on the face of a young child when they find out they don’t have enough money to pay for an item because of tax also prompted the change.  We will also be altering our Member Discount program to a “Member Pricing” format instead.  There will be a few exceptions to the evenly rounded price though – customers entitled to an exemption of the Provincial portion of HST and certain percentage discounts will still have to be “manually” rounded for the lack of the penny.  We are confident that this new system will be beneficial to you our Museum’s visitors and perhaps we will start a trend for businesses!  And for those of you that would like a keepsake, the “Canoe Penny Scratcher” is still available in the Gift Store.