“Instant Multimedia” for Educational Setting: A Success Story

Instant multimedia…simplicity, low-cost, and ultra short “time-to-market”. This paper discusses how the above characteristics of instant multimedia are the key of its “success” in educational settings, if we define “success” in terms of acceptability and large scale usage by educational entities and institutions who may need to build interactive multimedia artefacts but do not have technical competences “in-house” and must cope with very limited financial resources. We illustrate an exemplary tool that meets these requirements and was developed at our lab within the PoliCultura Project. The tool was successfully used by cultural heritage experts in Italian small museums and by over 1300 students of 55 schools in Italy, and brought important educational and social benefits to all stakeholders involved. The paper also discussed the educational benefits for schools involved in the PoliCultura project.