Francesca Maria Dagnino è assegnista di ricerca all’Istituto Tecnologie Didattiche del Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (ITD-CNR). È psicologa e psicoterapeuta cognitivo-comportamentale.  I suoi principali interessi di ricerca sono l’apprendimento basato sui giochi, il learning design e l’uso delle tecnologie nella didattica del patrimonio culturale intangibile. Negli ultimi sei anni ha partecipato a progetti di ricerca nazionali ed internazionali su queste tematiche.

Updates from the WikiToLearn project The i-Treasures project: Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in support of Intangible Cultural Heritage Education (ICH)

In the last years, ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) started to be adopted in Cultural Heritage Education (Branchiesi 2006), but if they already plays an important role in the field of Tangible Cultural Heritage (Ott & Pozzi 2011), they are less adopted in ICH education; this is probably due to the nature of these expressions and their typical transmission modality, that usually happens in informal contexts by experts or so-called Living Human Treasures , who own the knowledge and pass it through apprenticeship. In order to widen educational opportunities to different publics (not just apprentices), the i-Treasures project (an Integrated Project co-financed by EU under the ICT theme of the FP7th) wanted to go beyond the current practice by developing “an open and extendable platform providing access to ICH resources enabling knowledge exchange between researchers and contributing to the transmission of rare know-how from Living Human Treasures to apprentices” (Dimitropoulos 2013). Therefore, i –Treasures aims to go beyond the simple ICT-enhanced dissemination and the mere digitization of cultural contents; it, rather, wants to provide new contents and learning opportunities by analyzing and modeling the different ICHs and making this specific knowledge available through innovative tools (game-like applications).
i-Treasures makes an in-depth use of cutting- edge ICT technologies in order to capture the hidden knowledge of experts in a selected number of cultural expressions (10) belonging to the fields of: dancing (Tsamiko, Căluş, Walloon and contemporary dances), singing (Cantu a Tenore, Canto in Paghjella, Byzantine music and Human BeatBox), music composition (contemporary music composition) and craftsmanship (pottery).
The core of i-Treasures lies in the identification of specific patterns (e.g. gestures, audio, affective states, etc.) in ICH performances and in the use of multi-sensor technology (e.g. 2D/3D optical/inertial/ultrasound sensors, microphones, electroencephalograms, etc.) in order to capture the data related to the basic features of these patterns. Besides other research scopes, these data serve as an input for creating 3D models of the performers and use them for teaching and learning purposes (Yilmaz et al. 2015). All the information collected and resources developed in the framework of the project are made available on the platform, which is structured in 4 main areas: Home page; Use cases (this area is mainly oriented to the general public and includes information about the 10 cultural expressions studied); Educational Processes (this area is oriented to learners and includes a set of tools and resources); Repository search.
In the following, we provide a short overview of one of the technology made available for supporting the transmission of the considered cultural expressions: the 3D game-like applications.

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