The economic downturn of the last years has impacted youth and adult populations throughout Europe. A major concern is the rise in unemployment and prevailing lack of opportunities to develop and improve skills of EU citizens. The EU Strategy acknowledges that education and training can help tackle key challenges, while the cultural sector is becoming more and more one of the key successful elements of new forms of socio-economic development. The CrowdSchool project moves from this situation to underline the importance of human and social capital as articulated in the aims of Erasmus+. The project intends to propose a new model for: - enhancing schools with new interactive methods for increasing the creative thinking skills of students, taking benefit of the potential present in the digital repositories of cultural institutions; - creating an innovative tool for applying STEAM Education (i.e. a combination of Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics) as an access points for guiding student inquiry, dialogue, and critical thinking. The background context from which the project originates, comes from the mass digitisation process in the field of cultural heritage, that made available the huge amount of contents in European galleries, libraries, archives and museums. Despite its enormous potential (about 60 million items are included in Europeana), browsing the records interesting for the students to perform learning tasks is strongly limited by shortage of metadata describing the cultural objects themselves. E.g., if you look for paintings depicting a renaissance landscape, and the descriptors of Mona Lisa are only “Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci, Louvre”, this record will be never displayed, thus frustrating the student experience. To overcome this problem, the CrowdHeritage project created an online tool using the power of crowdsourcing (i.e. the joint effort of students who collectively annotate a picture with its key characteristics) to improve quality of metadata and increase the fruition. Some schools have been already involved in 2019 in the piloting phase, however it is time now to start using the platform in a more structured way. The training model proposed by the CrowdSchool project consists of different steps: 1) teachers select some themes of their interest, according to the mission of their school; 2) cultural professionals identify digital collections interesting for preparing lessons, researches, workshops focusing on those themes; 3) jointly the teams work together for defining the terminology to be used for describing the collections for that specific theme. The terminology is translated in different languages, in order to retrieve an item also if it has been annotated in a language different from the one of the users performing the inquiry; 4) the students start the annotation campaign, enriching in a creative way the educational content of the collections, and making them available also to all the students who in future will perform a similar query; 5) annotations done by the students of each school will be also revised by another class of a different country, encouraging in this way the development of critical thinking capacity in the revisers’ group, who will be requested to justify the reason for the non-acceptance of the proposed annotations. All the process will be organised according to a gamification scheme, in order to provide higher scores to the pupils who are more creative in the annotation process and whose tags were less subject to the critical revision of their peers; 6) finally, in order to guarantee the sustainability of the system and pave the way to further annotation campaigns, the students more effective in the first pilot action will become the mentors of their younger colleagues of the following school year, supporting them in the annotation and validation process on a different educational theme. The key results expected by the CrowdSchool project are: - training teachers to use the CrowdHeritage tools; - customizing training materials to the purposes of targeted educational communities, using digital culture heritage to respond to their specific training objective; - acquiring Key Competences, through a creative and critical thinking approach; - promoting co-creation and collaboration of teachers/children with cultural heritage organisations; - increasing awareness of the European teachers community on the relevance of creative and critical thinking capacity, using an interdisciplinary approach combining science and humanities. The project brings together ten partners from six countries and four of them have worked together in CrowdHeritage. The partners all provide considerable expertise and knowledge in the subject area of innovation, creativity and critical thinking. Project results will be disseminated through a range of international and national networks and support by a series of multiplier events, tailored to meet the needs of the local audience.
Pour pallier ce problème, le projet CrowdHeritage a créé un outil en ligne qui utilise la puissance du crowdsourcing pour améliorer la qualité des métadonnées. Certaines écoles ont déjà été impliquées en 2019 dans le pilote, mais il était temps de commencer à utiliser la plateforme de manière plus structurée. CrowdSchool a offert aux écoles partenaires l’occasion d'expérimenter les résultats de nouvelles idées basées sur la collaboration créative avec des professionnels de la culture. Elles ont pu redécouvrir les aspects créatifs, interactifs et amusants du processus d'apprentissage, en s'attaquant à la résolution de problèmes tout au long du processus. Le projet a ainsi démontré que le secteur culturel est un espace dynamique d'apprentissage et de formation et d'échange de connaissances. Le rapport de la MOC "Politiques et bonnes pratiques dans les institutions artistiques et culturelles publiques pour promouvoir un meilleur accès et une plus large participation à la culture" soutient ce processus et encourage la création de liens entre les musées locaux et les écoles, la recherche d'un langage commun pour favoriser un meilleur dialogue avec les publics difficiles à atteindre et l'utilisation pédagogique des collections locales.
La stratégie de l'UE reconnaît que l'éducation et la formation peuvent aider à relever les principaux défis, tandis que le secteur culturel devient de plus en plus l'un des éléments clés du développement socio-économique. CrowdSchool est parti de ce constat pour souligner l'importance du capital humain et social. Le projet visait à proposer un nouveau modèle pour : -renforcer les établissements scolaires avec de nouvelles méthodes pour accroître les capacités de réflexion créative des élèves, en tirant parti du potentiel présent dans les institutions culturelles -appliquer l'éducation STEAM comme point d'accès pour guider la recherche, le dialogue et la pensée critique des élèves. Le projet trouve son origine dans le processus de numérisation de masse dans le domaine du patrimoine culturel, qui a mis à disposition un nombre considérable de contenus dans les galeries, bibliothèques, archives et musées européens, bibliothèques, archives et musées européens. Malgré son énorme potentiel (environ 60 millions d'articles sont inclus dans Europeana), la navigation dans les documents intéressants pour les élèves afin d'effectuer des tâches d'apprentissage est fortement limitée par le manque de métadonnées décrivant les éléments culturels.