The pollicina project: A collaborative and educational social suite to build cultural itineraries

Abstract

The Pollicina project is aimed at defining a collaborative coordinated learning environment, called Educational Social Network, to allow students to elaborate thematic cultural paths on the territory. The topic is addressed with the “flipped learning” methodology where the socialization aspect assumes a key role in the learning process: students can collaborate and share knowledge and their assessment is obtained as an aggregation of formal (i.e., grades) and informal activities (i.e., soft skills). The starting phase of the project consists in defining a common semantic schema of the heterogeneous material in order to facilitate the work of students when they access to the Educational Social Network. The Pollicina’s e-learning platform presents several innovative services to build the customized itineraries according to the track defined by the teacher, e.g. the “ArtTour” service dedicated to the definition of the cultural paths, the “Magazine” service to collect the most interesting cultural itineraries, etc. The first one is the “Data Filling” service where students have to complete, in a collaborative way, the information of the cultural heritage objects provided by the cultural institutions (museums, churches, archaeological sites, etc.) joined to Pollicina.