PoliCultura Portal: 17.000 Students Tell their Stories about Cultural Heritage

This paper introduces the PoliCultura initiative, promoted by HOC-LAB of Politecnico di Milano.PoliCultura is about digital storytelling: classes (not individual students) are given access to 1001stories, an online authoring tool that allows them to “tell digital stories”, in an easy way. The excitement of the ICT-based activity thus powerfully adds to the cultural experience of visiting a museum, an archeological park, a cultural venue, a monument or of interacting with a cultural expert. All the stories are gathered in a highly innovative portal, where exploration is enhanced through a number of means: facets, word clouds, etc. With more than 17,000 students (aged between 4 and 18) and almost 700 stories, PoliCultura portal is probably the largest collection of students’ generated content, about culture, worldwide.