Cultura

Cultura is a web-based, intercultural project that connects American students with students in other countries. The goal is to help students gradually to construct a deeper understanding of each other’s cultures by sharing their attitudes, beliefs, and values. Participants first analyze materials from their own culture (by answering questions or remarking on an image or word), make observations, and draw preliminary hypotheses. Then, they exchange views with other students remarking on similar materials from their own cultural perspective. The Cultura site provides educators with information on the Cultura concept, methodology, and technology, as well as related articles. Users can view current and archived Cultura exchanges and set up new exchanges on the site. And, since the intercultural partners communicate in their native languages, students and teachers alike gain access to a rich source of authentic cultural discourse.

The CULTURA project -- designed and based at MIT and funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities -- shows a concrete and dynamic way in which the Web can be used to foster understanding between American and French students. It offers learners (and teachers alike) on both sides of the Atlantic a unique comparative, cross-cultural approach for gradually constructing knowledge of other values, attitudes and beliefs, in an ever-enlarging construction of the foreign culture.

Even though the focus is on the cross-understanding of French and American cultures, CULTURA provides a basic and broad methodology which can easily and effectively be applied to the cross-understanding of any two cultures, whether they are national cultures, business cultures and even sub-cultures.

Hyperstudio provided project management, software development, user interface design, and hosting services.