The Interactive Social Language Education (ISLE) Platform

Alex Chisholm · Dan Roy · Andrew Blanco

Wed., June 10, 3:30–4:30, Old Madison (3rd floor, East/Southeast)

The Interactive Social Language Education (ISLE) platform is an open digital platform to support an international community of language learners of all ages, enabling them 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.

The goals of the project are to:

• Support a growing community of language learners and an expanded network of production and development teams interested in building new language learning games and activities
• Launch an immersive front-end experience that invites users to engage in a socially-driven game world that supports language learning; initially, the platform supports ESL and EFL applications
• Build a community of both software and curriculum developers committed to adding content to the ISLE platform; ISLE’s open architecture invites both the addition of new learning applications, and the creation of varied curricular paths through that content, each path tailored to different learning goals

The ISLE platform, with an information architecture that enables developers to build on top of a “bedrock” of global databases, is meant to catalyze experimentation and innovation by reducing the costs required to develop games and activities that are engaging, support specific learning goals, and easily scale to a global audience of English and other language learners. Working with our partners at the Coastline, SuperGroup, MIT Education Arcade, and Fablevision, the Learning Games Network is working to create a solution that will support a variety of pedagogical, creative, and technical frameworks that readily enable expansion and extension by others. ISLE is a space for interdisciplinary design collaboration and game production that provides the kinds of opportunities for new research and development processes to fuel innovation.