365 Social Comic

This is the name of the webcomic organized by the educational social network Aula365, awarded with the 2011 Guinness Record for being the comic written by the world’s largest number of authors, breaking the previous record held by Kapow! Comic Con, which had had 62 participants.^[1][2][3][4]

This social comic was produced through Aula365 platform, a social learning network and a technological education project of the Argentine company Competir, whose purpose is to narrow educational gaps through ICT innovation.

The name of the story was “Adventures in the World of the Future” , and was composed of 20 episodes published every 15 days on Aula365 site.^[5][6] Its production period lasted from April to October 2011.,^[7] totalling 21 episodes and 7 specials. 365Social Comic was originally created for the web only, but in the end 2,000 copies were printed. The emergence of E-comics, as they are also called, or of the traditional digitalized comics, has let comics reach not hundreds of readers but millions of potential internauts.^[8] •

Participations

All those registered in Aula365 social network were asked to suggest different endings for every new episode. In this way, the most voted endings every week then became the starting point of a new episode. .^[9]

Out of over 8,000 proposals submitted by 3,800 different people^[10] on how to continue with the different episodes of the comic, only 81 were selected to become part of the plot, which through its 21 episodes in 28 weeks made up the comic.^[11][12][13]

Guinness Record

File: Guinness World Records logo.jpg Guinness World Records “Adventures in the World of the Future” received the 2011 Guinness Record on November 8, 2011to the collaborative comic with the world’s largest number of authors. The award was granted in Buenos Aires, Argentina, by Ralph Hannah,^[14][15] Guinness World Records adjudicator, to Pablo Aristizabal, founder of Aula365, representing all the users who made this new record possible, and to Andrés Tahta,^[16] marketing manager of Speedy,^[17] the broadband internet business division of Movistar group.^{[18][19][20][21]}

Web 2.0

This kind of production is part of the search for a “collaborative intelligence”, which has been going on since the development of the new Web 2.0.

Today, Aula365 social network has over 2,000,000 users around the world and over 350,000 in Argentina. It provides school support to students and parents, with contents of the four basic teaching areas: Language, Mathematics, Science and Social Studies, as well as English and Italian, which are in line with the Core Learning Priorities set out in the Educational curricula of the different Ibero-American countries.^[22][23][24] The number of users and the contents provided have positioned it as the most important Spanish-speaking school support service.

Plot

“Adventures in the World of the Future” begins at a school, when one of its characters forgot about his biology experiment, for which he had been heating a meteorite extract for a week. When he got to the lab, the experiment had turned into a portal to travel into the future. Children, being curious by nature, entered the portal. Once in the future, things would look different. Society was going through a period of ignorance, subjected to an evil scientist, who intended to satisfy his yearning for power and domination through fear. By experiencing different adventures, the children would find a way to let the rest of the society know about such scientist’s plans. And with the help of an old acquaintance, they would solve the conflict, bringing truth to the world.

The different topics 365 Social Comic dealt with were meant to integrate the fun of reading a comic with several school-related topics. Some of those topics are the school in the future, experiments, life in space, food of the future, toys, holidays, communications in the future, clothes, sports, future leaders, and several others intended to set the children’s imagination in motion and encourage their collaboration within a moderate online community for different ages.

References