Travelling with the UniOn App: Itineraries of Language and Culture Through the City of Bologna

Authors

  • Antonella Valva University of Bologna
  • Giacomo Mambelli University of Bologna

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2036-5195/8438

Keywords:

Application, Geo-localisation, Integration, Learning, Language-culture

Abstract

UniOn is an application for smartphone and tablets developed within ILOCALAPP (www.ilocalapp.eu), a European project coordinated by the University of Bologna. UniOn exists in four versions, one for each city involved in the project (Bologna, Coimbra, Poznań and Rovaniemi), and it is meant to foster the incidental learning of the language and the culture related to the city (respectively, Italian, Portuguese, Polish and Finnish). The fruition and the understanding of the contents (reading, listening, etc.) directly in the places let the users get in touch with aspects of language and culture in an implicit, non intentional way.
UniOn has been created to cope with the specific needs of international students living a mobility experience, but it has become soon an interesting tool also for other typologies of travellers (high-school students, university students coming from other cities, tourists, migrants). In this article we will illustrate the main app features and its development based on a user-centred design approach. We will focus upon the Bologna version of the app to show how the app is being used, and how both the city and the users’ experience of the city play a crucial role.

References

Ceccherelli, A., Cervini, C., Magni, E., Mirri, S., Roccetti, M., Salomoni, P. & Valva, A. (2016). The ILOCALAPP project: a smart approach to language and culture acquisition. In The Future of Education Conference Proceedings (270-275).

Cervini, C., Solovova, O., Jakkula, A., & Ruta, K. (2016). Mobile assisted language learning of less commonly taught languages: learning in an incidental and situated way through an app. In CALL communities and culture–short papers from EUROCALL 2016 (81-86).

Mirri, S., Roccetti, M., Salomoni, P., Mambelli, G., & Valva, A. (2017). On the design of an app for foreign languages incidental learning. In IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC) Conference Proceedings (111-116).

Mirri, S., Prandi, C., Salomoni, P., Callegati, F., Melis, A., & Prandini, M. (2016). A Service-Oriented Approach to Crowdsensing for Accessible Smart Mobility Scenarios. In Mobile Information Systems, Article ID 2821680, doi:10.1155/2016/2821680.

Valva, A., Mirri, S., & Salomoni, P, (2018). User centred design applied to an app for incidental learning of languages and cultures. In The proceedings of the 12th International Multi-Conference on Society, Cybernetics and Informatics: IMSCI 2018.

Downloads

Published

2019-04-15

How to Cite

Valva, A., & Mambelli, G. (2018). Travelling with the UniOn App: Itineraries of Language and Culture Through the City of Bologna. Almatourism - Journal of Tourism, Culture and Territorial Development, 9(18), 129–133. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2036-5195/8438

Issue

Section

Articles and reports