ARGuing European Project a crée une plateforme pour l’apprentissage des langues de façon collaborative: elle se fonde sur l’utilisation de internet, mais aussi sur le développement d’un jeu Tower of Babel. Le projet a été financé par l’Union Européenne sous le programme Comenius, Lifelong learning.
Le plus du jeu consiste dans le développement d’une méthode éducative etde cours pour les enseignants pour qu’ils apprennent à utiliser internet. L’alphabétisation digitale des élèves et des enseignants fait donc partie du ‘paquet éducatif’.
Mais aussi dans la nature du jeu elle-même: un Alternate reality game,
The ARGuing project helps teachers use the Internet (see Web 2.0 ) within language education. The project is funded by the European Union within the Comenius Lifelong Learning Programme. The project has developed and piloted a massive and very successful Alternate Reality Game (see Alternate Reality Games ) called the ‘Tower of Babel’ to ‘Engage’, ‘Motivate’ and ‘Excite’ students to learn languages using the new possibilities that the Internet age offers us (see more). ARGuing will build an educational methodology and teacher training guides and courses that can be used by teachers and teacher trainers to learn and understand how they can use the Internet, in a similar way to how their students are already using technology. Around the Tower of Babel game, and drawing on the experience, the ARGuing project has built an educational methodology, teacher training guides and courses that can be used by teachers and teacher trainers to learn and understand how they can use an Alternate Reality Game to understand how to use technology in a similar way to their students. You can download documents, presentations and academic papers about the project and game.
The project has brought together a highly unusual mix of specialists, as only a combination of skills can achieve the innovation being achieved. Included in the partnership is a University Department of Computers, an expert in Alternate Reality Games (ARG), specialists in educational methodology, language teacher trainers and an Internet communication specialists.`
The project has constructed a special type of puzzle game called an Alternate Reality Game (ARG)* that utilises digital technology as a communication tool for international, multilingual, peer student communities that have to solve the puzzle by working as a massively, multiplayer, collaborative group, in multiple languages. It is important to understand, that an ARG is not a computer game that is played solely in front of a computer screen by an individual, but is a collaborative puzzle that can include online and offline elements and can only be solved by multiple players working in groups. The participants are not in competition to solve the puzzle.Before the game commenced teachers were registered on to the game platform and sent a initial guide (technical and methodological). They were introduced to the teacher guide section and asked to create a profile. They undertook training through the platform with the online support of the project team. Students were then registered and asked to complete profiles and join Guilds (collaborative groups if students across all the participating schools). Students and teachers were asked to complete pre-game questionnaires. Each day of the game the students were delivered blog posts of the storyline of the game and asked to complete Quests. There were a total of 15 quests, most of which were multi-part. These required students to search the Internet for information, view videos, create their own content, add posts in forums. Most of the quests were designed for collaboration. *One of the earliest ARGs was developed in 2001 to market Steven Spielberg’s film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence and a series of Microsoft computer games based on the film. It was based on a complex murder mystery played out across hundreds of websites, email messages, faxes, fake ads, and voicemail messages. The game had over three million active participants worldwide; in essence, it was a type of massively multiplayer online game (MMOG). Due to the size of the assets involved in the early stages of development, the game became known as “The Beast ”. Microsoft also used this type of game to create significant market hype around the launch of the XBox game Halo 2. Called I Love Bees , the game wove together an interactive narrative and a War of the Worlds-style radio drama set in the future, broken into 30-60 second segments and broadcast over telephones worldwide. The gameplay of I Love Bees tasked players around the world to work collaboratively to solve problems, with little guidance. For example, the game gave players over 200 pairs of GPS coordinates and times, with no indication as to what the coordinates referred to. Players eventually worked out that the coordinates referred to telephones and the times to when the phones would ring. Each time a player correctly answered a phone question, the player was treated to 30 seconds of new material. One of the most exciting elements of the game for some players was the possibility that they would get one of the rare live calls in which the drama’s actors talk to the person who answered the phone and then incorporate the conversation into the drama itself. The game culminated by inviting players game to visit one of four cinemas where they could get a chance to play Halo 2 before its release and collect a commemorative DVD. McGonigal (2008) argues that the gameplay within I Love Bees develops “collective intelligence” through three stages: a) collective cognition, b) cooperation, and c) coordination. She believes these distinct stages of collaboration occur through three aspects of game design, namely: a) massively distributed content, b) meaningful ambiguity, and c) real-time responsiveness, and “that these elements form a reproducible set of core design requirements that may be used to inspire future learning systems that support and ultimately bring to a satisfying conclusion a firsthand engagement with collective intelligence”. (http://arg.paisley.ac.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=23&Itemid=55)