Discovering intercultural relations in the digital age with school students. A few Polish-Italian cases

Abstract

This article briefly presents how the implementation of ICT in cultural institutions has improved education and research. The article emphasizes discovering the activity of Italian artists in Poland, thanks to digitization, which was carried out with particular intensity in the last two decades. Digitization has become a great achievement thanks to the funding of numerous international projects by the European Commission. Special recognition in this action should be given to Rossella Caffo and her team, under whose guidance the plan for the coordination of digitization in Europe and numerous detailed projects were created. In addition to the millions of digitized objects sent to Europeana, the project teams also developed several programs. One of them, MOVIO, software for virtual exhibitions, began to be used in projects with Polish schools. One of the virtual exhibitions was devoted to Elwiro Michał Andriolli, an outstanding artist of Italian origin. The exhibition was prepared on the basis of digitized materials available on Polish websites and in Europeana, where we also found unique French and Lithuanian materials. Unfortunately, no Italian objects were found there. We plan to continue searching for the achievements of Italian artists in Poland, in the CrowdSchool project (Creative Learning at School thanks to a collaborative Crowdsourcing Annotation Process), whose aim is to prepare didactic materials useful in distance learning and intercultural connections. Close cooperation is planned here between a Polish secondary school from Jarosław, interested in architecture, and a Liceo Artistico from Bologna.