eCUTE: Education in Cultural Understanding, technology enhanced

The eCUTE Project aims at improving the understanding between different cultural, ethnic and religious groups.

In our 21st century society it is common, that we have to live and work with people from another cultural circle. Often this is no problem, but sometimes it can lead to misunderstandings or even conflicts. A frequent problem is the communication between ethnically different people, though this doesn't mean it is always a matter of language knowledge or rhetoric. A very large proportion of human-human communication is non-verbal (Mehrabian & Ferris 1967). For example a person from Japan is offended by a simple "thumbs up", because for her/him it means "be like that".

To avoid problems like that there are many educational approaches involving case studies and role plays, but to our knowledge there was and is no other project using ICT. A main problem of existing approaches is the lack of interactivity, in case of written material, films or audio, and in case of role plays the difficulty to convey the right meaning. In contrast the eCUTE project uses virtual world simulations including intelligent interactive graphical characters, which represent people from different cultural societies. Hereby the advantages of both methods, the accuracy of written material and the interactivity of role plays, are combined and can be used to target specific problems, rather than being too generic.  

The project will:

• Develop pedagogical approaches to education in cultural understanding grounded in psychological and educational theory
• Create believable cultural learning scenarios based on theoretical approaches that connect with the experiences of the target learner groups
• To establish an operational parameterization of theoretically derived cultural behaviour and use it to create synthetic cultures and characters that behave as if they live within such cultures
• Develop expressive behaviour for synthetic characters that is culturally appropriate
• Create two cultural Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), one for late-primary children and the other for young adults based on virtual dramas using synthetic characters with culturally-specific interaction behaviour
• Evaluate the created systems with stakeholder, teacher and learner groups, demonstrating the learning efficacy of the showcases with the intention of leveraging further funding and commercial opportunities.