After watching the video in our most recent unit, I was intrigued when “Guardians of the Mo’o” was mentioned. Particularly because it was referred to as an Alternate Reality Game (ARG). I wanted to find out more about the project, and given that they referred to groups of target learners, I assumed that a formal paper was done regarding it, and it turns out there was! http://hdl.handle.net/10125/67832 From my experience with ARGs, they are a lot like scavenger hunts that have a mix of online and real world components. I participated in an ARG called “ Flynn Lives ” that promoted the movie “Tron: Legacy” in 2010. It combined playing online games, solving puzzles received through the mail, and even traveling to real world locations. An online community formed that allowed participants to work together to solve all of the overarching puzzles and mysteries. While that ARG had a commercial purpose of building hype for the movie, I think that same sort of creativity could be used to create
I was drawn to the paper that I read for this post because of its comparative nature. The focus being whether ELL students had better results by working with partners, or working with technology. Since both of these ideas are usually viewed positively by educators, I was curious if there would be hard data that suggested that one of them was intrinsically better than the other. The author does a great job at setting the stage not only for his paper’s focus, but for the plight of ELL students in general. I feel like it transcends normal research papers and almost serves as a narrative of some systemic problems that ELL programs face. He outlines the difficulties that both ELL students face, and the concerns of teachers who are struggling to adapt to an increasing amount of ELL students in their classrooms. He also details some potential strategies that could be utilized to solve some of the issues he raises. The bulk of the data provided is more qualitative than quantitative. The stud