Investigating Cultural Learning in Digital Environments through Perudigital

Abstract

This article examines the PeruDigital project, a digital ethnography project that presents Peruvian festivals and folklore on the Internet through an immersive and interactive environment. This project, like others that employ the Participatory Design model, is an iterative process, one that involves evaluation and garnering feedback into the design loop. In addition to employing. Participatory Design principles, the project seeks to bridge current work in digital heritage with the concerns of current anthropological theory. This article focuses on current interdisciplinary research between faculty in Digital Media, Anthropology, and Education to study what and how students learn about cultural heritage from the website. The experience tentatively suggests that the role-playing and immersive potential of digital environments can be used to facilitate cultural learning, but that pathways through those environments need to be carefully structured so that cultural knowledge can be learned.