Promoting cross-cultural awareness through exposure in game-based learning

Arnab, Sylvester and Protopsaltis, Aristidis and Jacey Lynn, Minoi and Dunwell, Ian and de Freitas, Sara (2010) Promoting cross-cultural awareness through exposure in game-based learning. Learning Technology Newsletter, 12 (1). pp. 40-43.

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Abstract

With the global market constantly evolving through a globe-spanning network of communications, collaborations and immigrations, individuals are encouraged to be equipped with cultural literacy. To offset cultural division, it is essential to promote “cross-fertilisation across all boundaries, between ‘majority’ and ‘minorities’, ‘dominant’ and ‘sub’ cultures, localities, classes, faiths, disciplines and genres, as the source of cultural, social, civic and economic innovation”. Three main campaigns are: 1) Pluralism, which aims to promote positive diversity by encouraging understanding and respect. Britain, for instance, has increasingly diversified in ethnic and religious terms as a result of continued large scale immigration from a far wider set of source countries. 2) Homogenisation, that goes beyond co-existence through tolerance by promoting one common identity based around citizenship and assimilating minorities into the society. Malaysia, for instance, is running ‘1Malaysia’ campaign to promote homogenisation while celebrating diversity. 3) Globalisation: Awareness nurtured at the root level can be extended into a more global setting. The lack of cross-cultural awareness can be detrimental to the success of global marketing campaigns, business meetings and international relations. Within the domain of game-based learning (GBL), this article briefly describes the attributes of the e-VITA project, which may be adopted by future initiatives in exploring games to support cross-cultural awareness campaigns, such as ‘1Malaysia’ and multicultural Britain.

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