Digitizing Cultural Practices: Efforts to Increase Students’ Cultural Knowledge and Reading Interest in Bali

Abstract

The recent digital era has brought a disruptive impact to the conventional cultural practices. This may take the form of printed media-based learning materials that have been widely and recently used by students who are considered the agents of change in the context of cultural preservation. The Balinese cultural preservation, for instance, is carried out in accordance with the vision of the Governor of Bali, namely Nangun Sat Kerthi Loka Bali, which is intended to lead to a new era of Bali by organizing fundamentally and comprehensively the development of Bali which includes such three main aspects as nature, people, and culture. The cultural preservation includes the cultural knowledge and cultural experience, language(s) as well as reading interest. However, data from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), suggest that the reading interest of people in Indonesia is significantly low, around 0.01 percent. This means that, out of 10,000 children in Indonesia, only 1 student is quoted as enjoying reading. Therefore, this study aims to describe the increase of both cultural knowledge and cultural experience and students’ reading interest in Bali through the digitization of Balinese cultural practices. The digitization of Balinese cultural practices, which applies both virtual reality and ethnographic methods, tends to bring an increase of both cultural knowledge and cultural experience. Once the digitization was applied to students in Bali, their reading interest was ultimately and significantly increased.