Abstract:

There are lots of projects that give evidence of the effectiveness of e-learning and digital communication in supporting collaborative working in educational intercultural contexts thanks to their potential of overcome multicultural, linguistic and geographical differences and stimulate collaborative working. 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 in order to identify relevant models in intercultural educational contexts.
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 Erasmus Students) and students of Daido University in Nagoya involved in two parallel Studio Project Courses. The teachers involved in program were 2 from Politecnico di Milano and 3 from Daido University. PoliDaido collaboration had 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. Italian and Japanese students of the two courses worked on the same topic in a virtual workshop 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, already used for the developing of the ‘I∆OL project, Interior Architecture OnLine’, a research project between Politecnico di Milano and Tianjin University (China). The 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 solutions adopted for PoliDaido were a mixture of synchronous and asynchronous tools that conciliate training and technological requirements of the context in which the course took place. Through online collaborative environments students and tutors could share the same feelings and atmosphere they are used to, in face-to-face Design Studio activities.
The paper presents the results of this five-years-long experience, and what we learned from this positive experience, and it opens a window on the new version of PoliDaido, started on 2012/13 thanks the brand-new e-learning platform BeeP powered by Centro Metid of the Politecnico di Milano.

Keywords:

e-learning, digital communication, collaborative working, Architecture Department, Politecnico di Milano, Daido University.