Teaching Aboriginal Culture Online: sustaining traditions of knowledge sharing

This paper is an account of a research project being undertaken for an Australian Learning and Teaching Council grant to develop Indigenous On-Line Cultural Teaching & Sharing. The project is built on an existing face-to-face interactive presentation based on the theme of Australian Aboriginal Kinship systems, which has been designed for teaching university and school students and their teachers and describes the process used to develop web services that aim to provide more interactive and exploratory learning environments. We are collecting knowledge of the Aboriginal culture in relation to a theme and presenting this in a teaching framework that can be continually updated with community stories. We are consulting with Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students and community members who attended interactive presentations to gather ideas for transferring the model to online format and presenting it with stories relevant to the specific professional areas of our students, such as sociology, law, education and social work. We present here the teaching framework developed in this project for Aboriginal cultural teaching online.