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The lectures and workshops in Ljubljana and Zagreb were well received and well attended by senior museum staff to museology students. The lectures covered the reasons for carrying out evaluation, a short introduction to quantitative and qualitative evaluation, and examples of techniques to use. In the workshops, we put ourselves in the shoes of teenagers and visited the galleries (in the Ljubljana City Museum and the Ethnographic Museum in Zagreb) and used this as a basis for trying out various evaluation methods.
Museoforum (the museum education part of the Slovenian Museums Society) invited me to Ljubljana, and ICOM Croatia invited me to Zagreb.
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To Bratislava, and a visit to the Slovakian National Gallery to see (amongst other things) the contemporary art exhibition Iron Applause by artists from central Europe and the Balkans which used to be behind the Iron Curtain. It is usual, in central Europe, to show appreciation of a performance by clapping slowly and in unison - exactly the opposite of what an English audience would expect to do - hence the phrase Iron Applause.
In Kosovo Albanian culture, parents often name their children after well-respected relatives. In 1999, many parents named their newborn sons Tonyblair, because of Tony Blair's support for them in the war against Serbia. So there was a photograph of a dozen Tonyblairs, in front of an image of their namesake.
Iron Applause again in Budapest, at a concert by the internationally-renowned pianist Ádám Fellegi, held in his living room in a flat in a side street not far from the Opera. He explained, described and played Beethoven's Appassionata, and the applause was indeed slow, in unison, and very enthusiastic.
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To Morpeth for Heritage Open Days, and the circus trail devised by November Club and St Robert's First School. Organised by the Greater Morpeth Development Trust and funded by the Arts Council, the pupils devised a trail around Morpeth based on the true story of an escaped circus elephant. Read more at [link removed 12/12/23 as no longer in existence].
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To the British Museum to see the outstanding gold jewellery and ornaments, and other exceptional finds from Afghanistan's National Museum. These objects, some dating to c2000BC, were hidden away by museum staff at the time of the Soviet occupation, for safe keeping, and have only recently been brought back into view. In contrast at the Foundling Museum, a couple of streets or three away, are the pieces of fabric and other tokens given by mothers to identify their children which they took to the Foundling Hospital in the hope that the Hospital would be able to look after them. Time again to reflect on the poignancy and meaning of objects.