Session Title: The Interactive Social Learning Environment (ISLE) Platform: Creating Open Gaming for Online Language Learning
Presenters: Andrew Blanco, Director, Program & Business Development, Learning Games Network
Time & Date: 12:00 P.M. - 1:30 P.M., Friday, August 14, 2009
Location: Rm. C150
Session Description: 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 OER 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.
As learners find themselves in diverse environments, ranging from formal to informal learning settings, the ISLE platform aims to provide opportunities in both instruction and immersion, balancing curricular scaffolding and frameworks with open-ended explorations, task-based activities, and community spaces for social and cultural exchange. The platform will also enable organic development of relationships and roles among teachers, mentors, and learners.
A key mandate for the large-scale platform is to establish its sustainability through business development efforts with open and commercial partners that can provide open and proprietary authentic media resources to support language learning, to develop a suite of services around the community, including student instructional support and evaluation, teacher training, and data analytics, and to extend the interactive media and game models to other applications.
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