VIRTUAL: Prague Heritages
Abstract
Our increasingly interconnected and fast-moving society is flooded with information from multiple sources. Information conciseness through highly interactive mediums is essential as youth tend to skim impatiently through several sources of information for a quick answer or news update. Therefore, education must constantly adapt to the students’ needs while not distancing itself from domain specific learning objectives. Heritage education as defined by the Council of Europe in its Recommendation No R (98) 5 represents a “a teaching approach based on cultural heritage, incorporating active educational methods, cross-curricular approaches, a partnership between the fields of education and culture and employing the widest variety of modes of communication and expression.” In this presentation we focus on active learning through immersive learning experiences in an interdisciplinary context where undergraduate students with various backgrounds and skills learn together about heritage sites by combining archaeology with astronomy, and arts with computer science. We show how they learn how to work together and become familiar to new technologies and ancient places through exploratory hands-on approaches (mixing mainly historical, archaeological, and dark sky heritage education) and entertainment. As opposed to enclosed monodisciplinary rigid frameworks, information provided through this approach is comprehensible to a larger number of students. This study is motivated by our experiences with undergrad and grad students studying computer science and interdisciplinary astronomy in culture classes who use their complementary skills and knowledge to enable immersive experiences of heritage sites by incorporating the skyscape and taking participants beyond a traditional site visit.
Dr. Marc Frincu is a senior lecturer at Nottingham Trent University, IEEE senior member, and vice president of the European Society for Astronomy in Culture. He has published numerous peer-reviewed papers ranging from computer science to archaeoastronomy. His current interests include studying dark skies as part of the intangible heritage and their impact on well-being, as well as combining dark skies with cultural heritage sites to enable an immersive experience through virtual and augmented reality techniques.
Dr. Ioana Frincu is a researcher focusing on 19th-century texts. She has a special interest in heritage and methods of increasing public, scholar, and student awareness. She has co-authored several articles on the history of translation, archaeoastronomy, and modern museums.