Arguing for Multilingual Motivation in Web 2.0: a Games-Based Learning Platform for Language Learning

We have seen a significant change in education in recent years with the emergence of online provision, or eLearning, with its flexibility through both time and location independence. We are starting to see further significant change in education with the emergence of new, participatory technologies of information access, knowledge exchange, and content production, associated with the Internet and new media technologies, frequently described as social software or Web 2.0. One particular technology that has been explored in a non-educational content is the Alternate Reality Game (ARG), a form of interactive narrative, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants' ideas or actions. As ARGs are inherently collaborative in nature they have the potential to be a useful vehicle for collaborative activities in an educational context. In this paper, we discuss the development of an Alternate Reality Game for supporting the teaching of modern foreign languages from a technical perspective and how we adapted the open-source Learning Management System, moodle, into a multilingual, collaborative gaming environment. We present the findings of a pilot of the ARG that was carried out in April 2009 and provide suggestions for how this platform could be developed further.