Open Digital Heritage Resources and Educational Impact: a case study form the Portus Project

Eleonora Gandolfi@eleonorag1 E.Gandolfi@soton.ac.uk

“Credo sia importante far vedere a tutti, dal notaio all’idraulico, la ricchezza che c’è nella conoscenza. Noi diamo cibo per la mente. Più c’èconoscenza più ci sono equilibrio, saggezza, tolleranza.”

“I believe it is important to show to everybody, from the notary to the plumber, the wealth that exists in knowledge. We give food to the mind. The more knowledge there is, the more balance, wisdom, tolerance.”

Alberto Angela, 2017

"La velocità con cui la tecnologia si evolve è spesso più grande del progressometodologico di molte discipline, specialmente nelle scienze umanistiche. Ciòsignifica che i responsabili degli studi universitari e post universitari hannodifficoltà a tenere il passo con l'uso multidisciplinare delle tecnologie digitali eciò provoca una certa mancanza di coordinamento tra le metodologie e letecnologie digitali stesse.”

“The speed at which technology evolves is often greater than the methodologicalprogress of many disciplines, especially those in the humanities. This means thatthose responsible for undergraduate and graduate studies find it hard to keeppace with the multidisciplinary use of digital technologies, and this causes acertain lack of coordination between methodologies and digital technologies.”

Maurizio Forte, 2008

• How can Open Digital Heritage Resources & MOOCs can be used effectively within compulsory secondary education using CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) and blended learning?

• Can heritage MOOCs increase access to education content amongst secondary school students and develop teachers' skills?

• How can heritage MOOCs create educational links between schools, to promote cultural heritage literacy in geographically dispersed student communities?

• How can heritage MOOCs engage local communities, via secondary school students?

Objectives:

• Identify a methodology for building local, national and international communities around cultural heritage sites, focused on secondary school learners

• Evaluate this methodology in the context of Portus, including:

• The level and type of engagement by different communities with Portus, linked via the MOOC

• The impact on Portus and its region, including visitor numbers, awareness, and new contributions to knowledge.

Aims/Contribution:

• English School system has seen changes in many areas of educational policy since 2000: Education Act 2010, education Act 2011

• More recently, A Levels reform (2016) has changed the subjects available to students (eg. Archaeology and History of art are not available anymore).

Setting the scene English educational context

• Government is keen to develop a unified approach to the historic environment, Maximisingopportunities for inclusion and involvement; and Supporting sustainable communities by putting the historic environment at the heart of an effective planning system.

• “Skills for the Future” (Heritage Lottery Fund) is focused on creating paid, high quality opportunities for new entrants to the heritage sector, and helping to sustain the heritage sector in the longer term.

• In the last couple of year we have seen an increase in activities aiming to engage with local communities.

Heritage in English Context

https://www .gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/78116/hrp_whitepaper_doc1.pdf

• Italian school system at nursery and primary school level, is quite famous in the world (see Montessori and “Reggio Children approach”)

• Italian School system (from nursery to university) has seen some important structural changes since 2000: Riforma Berlinguer (10 Feb 2000, n.30), Riforma Moratti (28 Mar 2003, n.53) and Riforma Gelmini (2008-2011)

• More recently, la Buona Scuola (2015) aims to develop teachers while preparing students to the future. It includes development of “digital schools”, “new literacy” and “work placement”

http://childdiscoverycenter.org/non-traditional-classroom/what-is-the-reggio-emilia-approach/

https://www.beniculturali.it/mibac/multimedia/MiBAC/documents/1460024515998_TD_Lab.pdf

• Article 9 of the Italian Constitution states "Italian Republic protects the landscape, and historicaland artistic heritage of the Nation"

• MiBAC (Ministero per Beni e le Attivita’ Culturali) suggested marketing should be at the centreof Italian cultural heritage development

• In 2014, MiBAC created a Laboratory for Digital Tourism (TDLAB) to define a tourism digitalstrategy. New strategy published 2017-2020.

• In the last couple of year we have seen an increase in activities aiming to promote and preservelocal cultural heritage (ad example. The project created by Fiumicino City Council)

Heritage in Italian Context

Setting the scene Italian educational context

• Children must have some control over the direction of their learning.

• Children must be able to learn through experiences of touching, moving, listening, and observing.

• Children have a relationship with other children and with material items in the world.

• Children must have endless ways and opportunities to express themselves.

• Parents are vital component and are viewed as partners, collaborators and advocates for their children.

• The teacher is considered a co-learner and collaborator with the child and not just an instructor.

• As children proceed in an investigation, generating and testing their hypotheses, they are encouraged to depict their understanding through one of many symbolic languages. They work together toward the resolution of problems that arise.

Students

Students

Students

Community is students

Students

students

Guastalla (Reggio Emilia)

“Reggio Approach”

Students

Some of the most recent improvement includes:

• The School system gets up-to-date: training & innovation

• Digital schools

• “Cultura in corpore sano”

• New literacy

• School-at-work.

https://labuonascuola.gov.it/index_en/

Why Portus?• Portus is not well known to Italians (non-local Community)

• Portus is quite well know in the UK via Southampton(website, TV documentary, MOOC with material translatedin italian)

• MOOC on Portus has attracted italian speaking from allover the world

• Potential to promote cultural heritage via “local” italiancommunities

• Identify and develop opportunities derived from different educational structures

• Massive Open Online Course

• “Archaeology of Portus”

• Free

• 50,000+ learners so far (broad demographic)

• Part of a suite 14 of courses produced at Southampton with many partners, including the British Council, with more than half million students

• Collaboration between Soprintendenza, FutureLearn, British School at Rome

• Significant increase in downloads of research publications

• > 50 million global viewers of our broadcast and online materials

• Significant interest in Portus as a heritage tourism destination

The Portus MOOC

• Encouraged contributions by the MOOC community to build up a picture of Portus using the same structure.

• Each week we relate an artefact to the history of the site for that week and to the scale for that week.

• Each video is less than 5m in length

• The FutureLearn model based on social learning around “steps”

Topics:

1. Archaeological practice

2. Portus in the Roman world

3. Scales of archaeological analysis

4. Types of archaeological materials

Opportunities:

• Portus exemplifies “open scholarship”

• Creative business collaborations

• Innovative digital on-site interpretation

Broadening Education:

• Using MOOC in face to face education at Southampton

• Potential to offer courses for credit, externally, as with the Portus Field School

• Continuing Professional Development – Conservation?

• Broadening reach of Portus globally, irrespective of access to resources

Early experiments providing access to “virtual Portus”

• Bing Maps tours

• Interactive panoramas

• Series of online tours

• Analysis of visitor movement and interests at Portus

• Linking research papers to data

• Creating interactive timelines for children and scholars

• Sharing 3d models

• Building repositories for research data

• Italian, British and other students and colleagues at the heart of the MOOC filming and writing

Co-creation of the course

• The project “Learn Portus” has involved the IV Liceo of Liceo Gioberti in Turin

• The class is formed of 30 students of which one was an exchange student from the USA

• CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) integrated with flipped classroom approach were applied in this project

• Students have been asked to complete a questionnaire at the beginning and one at the end of the project to understand their level of knowledge and identified the level of knowledge of Portus, Rome’s archaeology and Ostia.

Case Study: Collaboration with Liceo Gioberti, Turin

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Preliminary findings:

• Only 17 students have visited Rome, and only 1 out of 30 have been in Ostiabefore.

• Only 11 students have heard of Portus before, and 3 specifically stated it was mentioned in the class by the teacher.

• All students have stated they are interested in visiting Portus

• 1/3 of the students stated they have watched documentaries and tvprogrammes about archaeology/heritage

• 26 students out of 30 stated they normally learn history on School books whilethe remaining are learning from websites and documentaries.

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Number of students

How confident do you feel in using English in the classroom?

n=30

After Project Pre-project

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Number of students

How much do you think is your knoweledge of the Roman world?

n=29

After Project Pre-project

“I'm very glad to have participated to this project and wish that you all keep on do it with other classes in order totransmit them you passionality for archeology.”

“In my opinion, this project was really interesting and useful in order to learn new things in a different way. I think thatthis activities should be encouraged even more because they're much more involving than studying the same things atschool with books. “

“I really enjoyed this experience and I would really like to go to Portus in order to have a more complete knowledge aboutthis project”

It' s great to see that progress are made even by the ministries! I think that' s very important that archeological sites likethese are now centre of interest after a long time

3D model created as part of the project

“I have found very useful the videos because they have given me basic notions about what was the role of Portus in theRomans empire and in all the world. As well as this, I think it has been useful to have had a detailed map of the RomanWorld and its provinces to have an idea of the position of the sites that we have talked about. Last, the virtual tour ofPortus was very involving!What I liked most of this project was the fact that everything has been carried out in aninteractive way.Moreover I used to think that I already know lots of information about Romans, due to the fact thatevery italian student has studied it for a long time, but this project astonished me giving me a load of new informationabout Romans and its harbours in particular, about which I did not know anything.Learning so much about a sitearouses me the curiosity to go over there and effectively visit the place. I will think about it in the future as anopportunity, but until now I’m truly satisfied with what I have learned.Thank you!.”

3D model created as part of the project

Educational Portal

Menu Allows overlaps between plans and 3d renders

Language selection

Possibility to export images from the tour

Direct access to the Portus Tour created by Peter Wheeler

Functionality

The left side menu opens by clicking the numbers on the map. It includes all info related to that particular building

The 3d Panorama can be accessed by the map or the menu.

This links all current publications that mention the building.

This will link all blog pages mentioning this building (eg. Portus MOOC blog)

Functionality

• The project will re-run September 2017 – June 2018

• Twinning A levels schools in England with Italian Schools equivalent

• Development of virtual environment to support international classroom andfacilitate cross-cultural/interdisciplinary discussion via blogs and co-creationof online open context (Wikipedia pages, 3d models….)

• Co-design on Italian and English lesson plans to be integrated by the MOOCmaterial which has been aligned to Italian and UK curricula

• Creation of a UK-Italian network of teachers to share best practice andsupport teacher development

• Open Badges and Micro-credential

• Develop links with “local” communities and value potentialvalue potential economic impact

• Maintaining Heritage Data Open and Accessibleusing Blockchain technology (decentralizedarchaeological database)

Present and Future

The Image illustrates the value of Open badges. (Image of Bryan M. Mathers)

Thank you

شكرا