The Cultura installation profile provides for an online cultural exchange between two classes or other groups. Participants give anonymous responses to prompts provided by the administrator running the cultural exchange. The software then collates these responses into adjacent lists, one for each culture, and participants can engage in pseudonymous discussion about the cultural similarities and differences revealed by the two sets of responses.

Installation

This Cultura Drupal Distribution for running cultural exchanges is packaged up so that everything you need will be in one download. Just head to Downloads at the bottom of the page— you do not need to individually download the modules mentioned here as part of the distribution.

Background

Cultura is a web-based intercultural project that connects United States students with other students in different countries. Designed and created in 1997 by a team from the French group in the Foreign Languages and Literatures section at MIT (Gilberte Furstenberg, Sabine Levet, and Shoggy Waryn), it has been developed thanks to an initial grant from the Consortium for Foreign Language Teaching and Learning and a subsequent one from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the French Initiatives Endowment Funds at MIT. It was originally created as an exchange between American and French students. It has since been adapted to other schools and languages, for instance connecting students in the US with students in Germany, Italy, Mexico, Russia, and Spain.

Cultura is a project by the French group in the Global Studies and Languages section (GSL), School of Humanities and Social Sciences, MIT. It is not the only web-based intercultural project of its kind, but it is particularly well-known for its pedagogically sound design, approach and methodology, allowing students from different cultures to gradually construct together, via a common web site and a computer-mediated exchange, a deeper understanding of each other’s cultural attitudes, beliefs and values.

Component modules

The following modules were built to specifically support the functionality of a Cultura Exchange — and anyone is welcome to run one — but if the underlying functionality would be useful in a slightly more general presentation, we would be happy to work with you to factor it out into another contributed module. Agaric is very grateful to the MIT Global Studies and Languages section for the opportunity and encouragement to contribute this code. An interesting feature made possible by these modules is creating paired surveys to be taken by two separate groups and then aggregating the responses of people from each group to each question together for comparison.

It also includes an optional module which produces XML-formatted data suitable for import by Cultura Exchange Import:

It works best with this sub-theme of the Bootstrap theme for version 3 of Twitter's Bootstrap:

Supporting organizations: 
Conceived and built to support MIT's Cultura Exchange project.

Project information

  • Created by mlncn on , updated
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