Dialogue Games and e-Learning: The Interloc Approach

Currently there is considerable enthusiasm for exploring how we can apply digital gaming paradigms to learning. But there are problems with the degree to which these approaches both fit with our learning landscape and define how they actually support the development of social or conceptual processes that are involved in learning. In contrast, this paper will describe a 'dialogue game' approach to e-learning that integrates with existing, or near-future, pedagogical and technological practices, and which seeks to explicitly link game-playing activity to the development of dialogical and reasoning skills that lead to improved conceptual understanding and collaborative knowledge refinement. This paper will present: the background and theoretical foundations for this approach; summarise computational and empirical studies that support it; and, describe a prototype socio-cognitive tool called InterLoc that mediates, structures and scaffolds educational dialogue games. This approach is demonstrated and the implications it holds for designing gaming and related types of educational interaction are then discussed.