E-Learning and the Process of Studying in Virtual Contexts
During the last several decades, the cultural pressures exerted by urban societies on the rural ones have led to a loss of cultural identity in the villages of South-East Europe. We believe that e-learning represents a solution for the preservation and co
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E-Learning and the Process of Studying in Virtual Contexts Dragos Gheorghiu, Livia S tefan and Alexandra Rusu
Abstract During the last several decades, the cultural pressures exerted by urban societies on the rural ones have led to a loss of cultural identity in the villages of South-East Europe. We believe that e-learning represents a solution for the preservation and continuation of the cultural identity in rural communities, as defined by traditional technologies and crafts. The present approach is based on a learningby-playing teaching method and mobile-learning in real and virtual contexts. An original software application was designed for mobile devices making use of Augmented Reality technologies and delivering as main educational content 3D reconstructions of traditional environments and objects. The application integrates AI elements in the form of software agents. In this chapter the authors present the application prototype focusing on the role of software agents for the development of narrative e-learning tools and on the evaluation of the educational outcomes. Conclusions of this research and future work are also presented.
Keywords Cultural identity Augmented reality learning Blended learning Learning-by-playing
Software agents Mobile-
D. Gheorghiu A. Rusu National University of Arts, Bucharest, Romania e-mail: [email protected] A. Rusu e-mail: [email protected] L. S tefan (&) Institute for Computers ITC, Bucharest, Romania e-mail: [email protected]
M. Ivanovic´ and L. C. Jain (eds.), E-Learning Paradigms and Applications, Studies in Computational Intelligence 528, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-41965-2_3, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014
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3.1 Introduction 3.1.1 The Vanishing Identity of the Traditional Societies A crucial problem of contemporary traditional societies is the protection and continuity of their cultural identity. The pressure exerted during the last decades by urban societies on rural societies has led many villages of South Eastern Europe to lose a significant part of their identity. Starting from the premise that traditional crafts represent one of the crucial features of the identity of rural societies, it follows that their disappearance, due to the phenomenon of modernization, is particularly prejudicial to traditional societies.
3.1.2 A Brief History of Rural Romania For centuries Romania was a country with a predominantly agricultural economy which, after World War II, was affected by a rapid process of industrialization and collectivization [13], changes which severely undermined the traditional rural society [52]. The period of the communist regime introduced more dramatic social changes, with even the creation of a new folklore, a new ideology, new forms and materials replacing the traditional ones, and the oral culture based on visual narratives, specific to the village mentality being replaced with a culture of the text, based on foreign models. This process continued during the last decades at a
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