The polidaido project interactive digital platform: a five years experience (2007-2012)

The focus of this paper consists in analysing the PoliDaido project as a case study on the use of e- learning and digital communication at extra-European level. This was a project developed in collaboration with the Architecture Department of the Daido University (Nagoya, Japan) and the School of Architecture and Society of the Politecnico di Milano (Milan, Italy). The project involved students of the Politecnico di Milano (Italians, Foreigners from several Countries enrolled in the Architectural Master Degree Course and also Erasmus Students) and students of Daido University in Nagoya attending to two parallel Studio Project Courses. PoliDaido collaboration provided blended activities, face-to-face and via web, with distance exchanges on the platform, mainly in asynchronous mode, and a final workshop (in Japan or in Italy), attended by the teaching staff with the local students. Milanese and Japanese students worked on the same topic in a virtual workshop, called ‘C- scape’, and had the opportunity to interact online among them and with teachers thanks to the multimedia platform “e-project” released by Centro METID of the Politecnico di Milano. As a virtual laboratory PoliDaido focused on two activities: on the one hand the sharing of structured resources, with the exchange of academic materials (hand-outs, readings) and the publication of the architectural projects prepared by working groups, on the other hand distance communication among people, using instant chat channels, but also the graphics functionalities of the platform to facilitate dialogue and confrontation among designers. The technological tool solved the linguistic gap between the users (teachers and students), by introducing a kind of communication mainly written and asynchronous, using English language. PoliDaido was part of a “e-learning” research project with the aim of designing tools specialised for online design training and devoted to the creation of a virtual environment in which students and teachers belonging to different countries and having different cultures could interact by sharing information and multimedia files to develop new ideas and innovate solutions. The paper presents the results of this five-years-long experience, and what we learned from this positive experience.