The Brief received by the CoLab was the following:
Create a campaign to engage the Class of 2014 and assist them to use and value social media as an academic development tool.
A further aim was to include the Class of 2014 within the UWC/VLIR-UOS Dynamics of Building a Better Society project’s Close Out conference and related festivities.
To establish a Class of 2014 virtual community
The campaign ran from Wednesday Jan 29, 2014 to Wednesday Feb 5, 2014.
We created an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) to address this brief. The ARG game genre was especially useful in the context of transitioning new First Year students to the university's digital properties and physical spaces on campus.
The basic concept was as follows:
•A Memetically inspired, social media driven, reality connected story about an alien named Confucius crash-landing in the nature reserve on campus was created
•The League of Deconfusers was created as an anti-establishment, unauthorised channel following these alien sightings on campus (UWCSightings #deconfuse )
•Various viral videos leaked onto university web-properties
•The nemesis of Confucius is the DONK (“The Doom of Not Knowing”)
•"Not knowing" caused by not being connected to the social media networks and not sharing your info with other students
This project was published here as part of the Civic Media Project edited by Eric Gordon and Paul Mihailidis.
Read more about this exciting project here: http://civicmediaproject.org/