Building Multimedia and Web Resources for Teaching Mathematical Concepts through their Historical Development

This chapter describes how teachers can use technology to build learning materials and non-traditional lessons that incorporate heritage and history. Students are expected in these lessons to be engaged by a combination of mathematics, cultural heritage, and technological presentation. The chapter describes a project carried out in a teacher training college and presents the structure of the web-based learning environment. Preservice teachers who participated in the project developed the online materials and carried out the educational activities. The technological tools used to build learning materials were based on ICT pedagogical models and were integrated into the mathematical lessons. The chapter also describes various models and teaching settings in which heritage and technology can be utilized and integrated, followed by an example lesson plan which elaborates on the model. The chapter also describes the educational, pedagogical, technical, and logistical difficulties that the preservice teachers confronted during the project. They also struggled with reading historical material and relating it to mathematics. Semi structured interviews revealed that the preservice teachers overcame these difficulties by reflection and by communicating and collaborating with each other and with their lecturers. A questionnaire with yes-no items was used to collect data about attitudes and perceptions of the preservice teachers during the project. They viewed this technological project connected with their heritage as fun, benefiting them, making them proud of their mathematical heritage, and encouraging them to use such projects in their future teaching.

Context-Aware Cultural Heritage Environments

Cultural heritage environments, like museums, archaeological sites and cultural heritage cities, have gathered and preserved artefacts and relevant content for years. Today’s state of the art technology allows the shift from traditional exhibitions to ones with reinforced interaction among the cultural heritage environment and the visitor. For example, mobile applications have proved to be suitable to support such new forms of interaction. Effective interaction exploits information both from the cultural environment, the visitor, and the broader context in which they occur. The aim of this chapter is to present the value of context in applications designed for cultural heritage environments and to demonstrate an infrastructure that effectively exploits it.

Activating the Networked Object for a Complex World

The ‘networked object’ is a concept that resonates with the notion of the operation of virtual collections within mobile fluids and flows of culture outside and beyond the specific museum context concerns of traditional documentation systems. It acts as a mediator between the museum world and public culture, as it circulates between these spaces, and in various cultural, social, political and technological formations, consumed in many different and unexpected ways. The context in which the networked object now circulates and interacts is what cultural theorist Mike Featherstone (2000, pp.166-67) described as ‘global variability, global connectivity and global intercommunication’. This chapter interrogates what happens when the networked object re-connects with public culture in an uncertain, complex and globalising world and how this process intersects with, challenges and re-works the ‘authoritative’ position of heritage institutions.

Web 2.0 and Interactive Systems

This chapter addresses the evolution of state of the art interactive systems aimed at the cultural heritage of the Mediterranean area in Europe, especially Spain and Italy. It covers the last two decades of advances in design and considers the human and technological factors in the effective use and assessment of hypertext, multimedia and hypermedia. The chapter introduces basic concepts to eliminate ambiguities and to (re)acquaint readers with the main components of audiovisual technologies that have been vital to the (r)evolution of on-line and off-line cultural heritage material. It goes on to analyze quality in the communication process between potential users and interactive systems by drawing upon essential concepts in software engineering, human-computer interaction, semiotics, interface design and communicability. The main goal is to establish metrics for the heuristic evaluation of the quality attributes that make up an interactive system, taking as a reference the intersection of the formal sciences and the factual sciences. The chapter mainly focuses on dynamic and static audiovisual media, including digital photography, video, and computer animation. Consequently, this process of diachronic study of interactive systems has allowed the author to generate a methodology—Aesthetics Cultural Heritage for Communicability Assessment (ACHCA)—for evaluating communicability in dynamic and static cultural heritage media. The chapter also includes a table for the heuristic analysis of on-line and off-line systems, based on design categories addressing content, presentation, structure, navigation, panchronism and conection of the interactive system. Finally the chapter presents the results of a study of on-line and off-line systems from the 1990s to 2010.

Museums and Web 2.0

Many museums want to use Web 2.0 applications or feel the pressure to do so. In doing so, they might encounter a significant problem as Web 2.0 is based on the notion of radical trust and unrestricted, equal participation, two concepts that are contrary to the museum’s traditional concepts of authority, communication and participation. Until recently, museums presumed control of their content. The crucial question is how much control of its content the museum can afford to lose, since they depend on their reputation for expertise and trustworthiness. The paper analyses the role of authority, its influence on traditional and future museum communication and its effects on participation and trust. The challenge for museums is to find a way to cede authority and control over content without losing status as trustworthy institutions and to open up for social media and user participation in order to attract new audiences and maintain existing ones.

Educational Personalized Contents in a Web Environment

This chapter presents a system called Virtual Museum Net of Magna Graecia, part of a Cultural Heritage project supported by the Regional Operational Programme 2000-2006 to promote archaeological patrimony of Calabria, a region of southern Italy. In particular, the Virtual Museum Net offers personalized learning paths though an intelligent match between a user’s preferences, needs, and requests and Calabrian Cultural Heritage data from museums, archaeological sites and libraries, including maps, images, movies, historical writings, and architectural reconstructions.The system provides educational contents and recommendations on the basis of a thematic search or a map, and the user can select both the contents to visualize and the level of detail. In this way, the educational quality, the users’ entertainment, and the learning process are improved by the virtual experience.

ARCO

In this chapter, a virtual museum exhibition system, called ARCO, is presented. ARCO enables museum staff to create, manage and display virtual exhibitions of museum artifacts in rich 3D and multimedia forms. Such exhibitions can be accessed both internally within the museums and remotely over the Internet. Due to the use of a novel approach to building configurable virtual reality applications, called Flex-VR, virtual exhibitions in ARCO can be easily and quickly built by museum staff, even if they do not have experience in 3D design and programming. The chapter provides an overview of the ARCO system, a description of the virtual exhibition design process and examples of virtual exhibitions built with ARCO.

User Centered Technologies, Serious Games and Learning

The widespread adoption of IT technologies by cultural heritage (CH) has transformed how cultural heritage is presented both to experts and the broad public. In the last few years a large number of multimedia applications, including virtual and augmented reality simulations, have been proposed by researchers and industry alike. However some of these technologies struggle to achieve mass diffusion, most probably due to limitations of their interfaces. Conversely, the recent widespread success of both serious games and mobile applications are laying the foundations for true extensive access to digital information on cultural heritage, creating new possibilities. This chapter illustrates this technological trend, highlighting their potential effects on the public and discussing a number of emerging scenarios of interest for the cultural heritage domain.

An Adaptative User Interface for Genealogical Document Transcription

Lately, genealogy has become a hobby not only in the United States, UK or France but also in many other countries where it is now widespread. The main sources of information for genealogists are different kinds of genealogical documents (census, church vital records, wills, …). In fact, and specifically in Spain, several projects to digitalize heritage and genealogical documentation have developed recently, in order to improve its access and to preserve its conservation state. Such digital information is useful, but it would be even more useful to have its transcription in a searchable support like databases or web repositories. This chapter analyses the opportunities and characteristics of such transcription projects and describes a transcription user interface tool. This proposal allows for easy, intuitive and fast design of a user interface to transcript genealogical documentation, in agreement with the contents of each different kind of genealogical documents. Given an XML Schema (XSD) describing a genealogical document structure and contents, this tool allows the user to adapt and personalize a user interface to transcribe the document contents, while obtaining an XML file to be stored in some database management system or to be shared among genealogists. At any moment during the transcription process, user interface may be adapted to the user requirements and to the document characteristics, so, this adaption is dynamic, intuitive and user friendly.

Multimedia Technology

This chapter describes the design and use of multimedia technology for personal guides and public projections for two exhibitions on ancient and contemporary art. The authors discuss the critical issues, suggest approaches and solutions, and evaluate the results. In both exhibitions, the researchers designed personal guides on Apple iPod touch devices, with rich information structure and rich multimedia content. In one of the two exhibitions they also implemented a narrative path in the exhibition rooms with large displays and projections. They evaluated the guide design with questionnaires and automatic tracing of device use. This chapter reports the project outcomes.