Digitizing Cultural Heritage
CCCH9051 Digitizing Cultural Heritage in Greater China
This is a common core course developed by Dr. Hu.
This course aims to help students better recognize and appreciate the importance and values of cultural heritages in Hong Kong, China and around the world, and to open their eyes to how digital technologies can be used to conserve and preserve cultural heritage worldwide. For more course description please refer to CCCH9051.
Students’ Work
So far the course has been taught twice. Students built 43 digital galleries of cultural heritage which have been linked to the Common Core student work exhibition centre in a featured online exhibition, so that any visitors of this site will be introduced with these sites at their first sight. Visitors will be incepted with the ideas of cultural heritage and its digitization and preservation, as well as subject matters stemming from the particular cultural heritage(s).
In addition to joining the Student Learning Festival in the second semester of 2017/18, our course also participated in this Festival towards the end of the first semester of 2018/19, where we presented selected VR stories of cultural heritages. Visitors of our counter were invited to use their smartphones to scan the printed QR codes for accessing online VR stories of various cultural heritages (e.g., Che Kung Temple in Hong Kong; Mandarin’s House in Macau). Though such student artefacts are not direct deliverables of this project, they still serve as digital products of Chinese cultural heritage for public access. It is also worth mentioning that our participation in the Festival led to connections with the HKU e-Learning Development Laboratory, thus bringing about potential collaboration on integrating such VR stories into a variety of e-learning initiatives.
In support of the video contest organized by The Common Core and the U-Vision (the official HKU campus TV channel), the instructional team of this course encouraged student groups to participate by producing and submitting a video that could be integrated into their group project (i.e., a digital gallery showcasing one or multiple cultural heritage(s)). Subsequently, five project groups in the second delivery of the course produced videos. For instance, a group introduced the cultural heritage in Sham Shui Po (a district in Hong Kong) while another group promoted the food culture in Hong Kong. Selected submissions will be broadcast on the U-Vision TV both on campus and online, prospectively reaching a diverse range of audiences within and outside the HKU community. Viewers of these videos would hopefully, in addition to the aforementioned benefits, gain awareness of the seemingly common yet unique tangible and intangible cultural heritage in this highly urbanized and commercialized city.
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning
Hu, X., Yu, B., Alman, S., Renear, A. H., & Carbo, T. (2017). Teaching information science and technology to the world? Practices, challenges and visions. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 54(1), 566-569. (Link)