Information and Communication Technologies and Intangible Cultural Heritage education: opportunities and challenges

The safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) has acquired a growing relevance in the last decades and in particular after the promulgation of the “Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage” (UNESCO, 2003). The convention itself highlights the importance of education to this scope and, for this reason, some projects have been proposed at national and international level. Nevertheless, ICH education remains a scarcely explored topic and poses several challenges, due to the intrinsic characteristics of the cultural expressions and the traditional transmission methods. Considering these challenges, we developed our research question related to which technologies and methods could be effectively adopted in the field of Cultural Heritage, to open up new opportunities for teaching and learning. In this paper, we discuss both the main challenges to be faced in the specific field and the results of our research carried out in the framework of the i-Treasures project. In the project, grounding on the opportunities offered by technologies, were developed innovative solutions in terms of methods and tools for ICH education