Kuo-An Wang

Digital Content Development of Folklore Artifacts and Activities for Folklore Education

Digital preservation of museum artifacts has been widely promoted by governments around the world in recent years. However, the artifacts collected by national or local museums are not very exhaustive. Recently, the collected folklore artifacts accompanied with crafts in how to make them and skills and rituals in how to use them have been digitized in Taiwanese Folklore Museum. In order to supplement insufficiency of artifacts collected by the museum, folklore hobbyists are regularly invited to demonstrate their private collections. At the mean time, the task force of digital preservation team digitizes the artifacts for extending its contents. Another way to aggressively increase the number of digitized contents is to sign cooperation agreements with members of the folklore associations by giving services to digitize their personal collections. After having extended the digital contents, we expect that the website of Taiwanese Folklore Museum will become even more popular for teachers and students, especially in kindergartens and elementary schools, to extract and prepare useful materials for folklore education. In conclusion, the paper presents the digital contents which include folklore artifacts and folklore activities developed in Taiwan Folklore Museum. Additionally, other digital contents developed in other museums or personal collectors can be retrieved by using XML technique. The scheme supplements the insufficiency of national or local museums and provides inter-museum architecture for supporting more complete contents for folklore education.

Digitization and value-add application of bamboo weaving artifacts

Chinese people used bamboo to make bamboo weaving utensils for hunting, farming, fishing, and even transportation before. However, bamboo weaving utensils are no longer needed in daily life nowadays. The craft of bamboo weaving utensils is gradually losing peoples attention that few craftsmen can still work on it. In this study, a folklore hobbyist, a craftsman, a horticulturist, and an interior decorator were invited to digitize bamboo weaving artifacts and crafts, as well as to develop value-add applications of the artifacts. Among the 1200 collected bamboo weaving artifacts, 150 artifacts accompanied with 20 weaving patterns have been digitized and stored with image and video formats, respectively. The value-add refers to the adoption of the bamboo weaving artifacts as flower vases for orchid planting and flower arranging with artworks designed by the horticulturist, which were then adopted by the interior decorator to decorate restaurants to elevate the environmental quality. The digitized contents were also used as part of the e-learning materials in a community college. The questionnaire surveys show that the digitized material is useful for learning bamboo weaving craft and flower arrangement skills for students. It was found that combination of bamboo weaving artifact and flower arrangement highly promote quality of service of restaurants.

Digital folklore contents on education of childhood folklore and corporate identification system design

Digital artifacts preserved in digital repositories of museums are mostly static images. However, the artifacts may be lost, degraded, or damaged no matter how well the preservation and exhibition environments have been controlled, which makes the artifacts difficult to recover. Furthermore, if not properly inherited, information regarding making, function, and usage of an artifact might be lost after several generations. Hence, in addition to digitizing folklore artifacts, we have also digitized the crafts in how to make them and skills and rituals in how to use them to be recorded in videos. With abundant digitized collections, the repository website is becoming more and more popular for teachers and students, especially in kindergartens and elementary schools, to extract and create useful teaching materials for folklore education. Recently, folklore contents have been encouraged to be applied in the education of English as second language (ESL), social work, and mathematics. In this study, we applied the digital folklore contents for developing story books to be used in childhood folklore education and for instructing students to design corporate identification system (CIS) as a class exercise. Technology acceptance model (TAM) was used to evaluate perceived usefulness (PU), perceived ease of use (PEU), and behavior intention (BI) in using these digital contents to accomplish their tasks. The results show that the scores of PU, PEU, and BI are all greater than 3 (5-point Likert scale) indicating usefulness and ease of use of the contents and website, as well as a positive attitude toward continuous use of the contents in various educational areas.