Designing an Authoring Environment for Community-Created Virtual Heritage Environments: Experiences with the Geografia Platform

Abstract

The melding of geographic data and traditional storytelling methods demonstrates great potential for educators across the social sciences. However, despite the drive toward web 2.0 technologies, authoring a location-based narrative for mobile platforms remains a high-barrier proposition difficult to crowd source. Geografia is an authoring tool that gives communities the power to create a virtual heritage environment detailing their town's history. This paper discusses the design of the Geografia platform and the implications raised from its first deployment in which approximately 80 secondary school students collaborated to form a geo-narrative of an event in their community's history.