Date: Thursday, October 8th, 2009
Time: 3pm Pacific / 6pm Eastern / 10pm GMT (next day) (international times here)
Duration: 1 hour
Location: In Elluminate. Log in at http://tinyurl.com/futureofed. The Elluminate room will be open up to 30 minutes before the event if you want to come in early. To make sure that your computer is configured for Elluminate, please visit http://www.elluminate.com/support. Recordings of the session will be posted within a day of the event.
The Learning Games Network is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization, whose mission is to develop and facilitate the use of computer games as educational tools. Its flagship project, ISLE, is an online gaming platform in which users will enter a virtual world and engage in activities and games that will help teach a new language. The development of the Interactive Social Language Education (ISLE) platform is an effort to create an international community of learners of all ages to explore and acquire second language skills through a wide variety of digital media channels that both create an immersive electronic learning experience and complement local informal and formal instruction. This builds upon the initial work of another Hewlett Open Educational Resources project, the Open Language Learning Initiative, which is currently undergoing testing in Chinese middle schools.
A consortium of partners, which includes the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Learning Games Network, The SuperGroup, FableVision, and MIT Education Arcade, is creating the web-based ISLE gaming platform as well as a series of initial games and activities to support Spanish-speaking English Language Learners in U.S. middle and high schools. This development is being pursued as part of an open strategy, which enables multiple developers and organizations to build on top of the platform.
The ISLE platform provides an underlying information architecture that allows games and activities to use vocabulary coded with multiple variables in its Global Learning Object database. With these objects tied to language-specific learning goals, data captured during game play can be used to measure student performance and generate assessment reports. Depending on learners’ achievement and scoring, the system can either raise the bar and introduce more difficult words and phrases or remediate by re-populating the games with the learning objects to reinforce the basics.


