子計畫四：匯聚原住民環境知識之自發性地理資訊數位學習平台

The long history living in Taiwan has made indigenous people having their own way to explore and to treat the mountains, streams, and living creatures. They have completely different pedagogy to establish and to pass their own environmental knowledge, comparing to the western-style science education. However, the young generation of the indigenous people is losing their traditional point of view to their environment under current education system. This is not only a huge loss of indigenous knowledge, but all Taiwanese also lost a chance to treat this island in a more sustainable way. Previous researches most rely on researchers to collect data and edit them into an encyclopedia or a knowledge base, and distribute the knowledge via the world wide web (WWW) over the internet. Indigenous people are passively invited in this methodology. Inspired by the Wikipedia, this research is based on the concept of Web 2.0, which makes every indigenous people as a knowledge provider. A volunteered geographic information (VGI) system is built as a platform to gather and to integrate indigenous environmental knowledge. The knowledge is no longer edited by any authority but by every indigenous participant. All of the discussion and modification to any knowledge rule will be logged into the history. So the system does not only provide the final result, which should be the most commonly accepted explanation, but also provide the complete discussion progress if necessary. Considering the software accessibility, this project utilizes Drupal as the content management system(CMS). Several online map sources are provided as the base map via OpenLayers module, such as the National Land Surveying and Mapping Cloud, OpenStreetMap, and Google maps. So, an indigenous people can draw a map about anything, such as the dangerous point, the tribe’s boundary, the fishing area, the hunting area, the conservatory area, or the landslide area. Benefit from the open and multi-lingual characteristics, this geographic information can be recorded, displayed, and distributed in their native language. After interviewing with the seniors in the three tribes, this project has build some digital learning module based on the indigenous point of view. We hope, in this way, the traditional indigenous knowledge and pedagogy can be preserved and inherited with modern digital tools. This is the 5th sub-project in the whole integrated project, and it closely cooperates with other four sub-projects. The researchers visited the tribes together and shared all information and tools. The VGI system developed after the first year has been introduced to the tribe, and every indigenous people are encouraged to participate. The gathered user experiences and feedback are collected for keep improving the VGI system and digital learning module.