Issue link: http://www.epageflip.net/i/379168
12 Culture Connect http://cultureconnect.tiged.org Culture Connect is a pilot program that encourages young people to share, reflect on, and better understand the diverse nature of global culture. The program is made possible by TakingITGlobal's Intercultural Innovation Award, a prize awarded by BMW Group and the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations. Throughout 2013, TIG implemented five cycles of the Culture Connect Curriculum, a four week online and mobile experience prompting youth participants to document and explore their cultures and the cultures of other participants from different regions of the world. While reflecting on the similarities and differences between cultures, participants are tasked with producing creative expressions of their lives, their culture and their visions for the future. PROGRAM ELEMENTS The Culture Connect program had several complementary elements including: A four week curriculum built inside TIGed's Virtual Classroom platform, a mobile uploader built using the HTML5 web standard, pre- and post-program assesment surveys for participants in order to track feedback and impact of the Culture Connect experience, and a final Cisco telepresence event (scheduled for the new year) to convene cumulative participants and celebrate the end of the first phase of the program. Participants were selected based on age, geographic distribution, interest and their access to mobile technologies. Countries represented include Algeria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Brazil, Comoros, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Jamaica, Kenya, Malaysia, Morocco, Netherlands, Nigeria, Palestine, Peru, Philippines, Qatar, Somalia, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda, United States and Zimbabwe. FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS Future iterations of the program will focus in on strengthening common aspects of similarity between participants, connecting a group of distributed individuals with something in common, such as connecting a group of female engineers around the world. This higher degree of affinity across participants will be emphasized to create a model of crowd-sourced, peer to peer mentorship along with a feeling of exclusivity and refined focus for some of the activities and tasks in the program. Cycles Countries Images uploaded Participants 5 29 50 244