Pedagogical Agents

I really don’t know where to start in my reaction to these articles. After reading, I no longer feel that these Conversational Pedagogical Agents are very useful in the context of learning. Actually, I would like to qualify that statement and say that only applies for undirected use of CPAs. Since a huge majority of the students in both of the articles used the CPA for reasons that have nothing to do with the educational purpose intended, I would say they were better off without using the CPAs, especially in the case of the high school students, because they just end up getting abused. Regarding the inappropriate comments made to the CPAs, I have to wonder about the set-up of the students work environment. I don’t remember reading about it in the article, but especially in the case of high schoolers, their position in relation to one another could be a factor for the overwhelming amount of improper comments. For example, when I was in 9^th grade, AIM was a really big deal. AIM, for those of you who may not know, is basically a way to chat with people one-on-one, but with many conversations between you and another person simultaneously. Anyways, one of the “people” that you could talk to was SmarterChild (at least I think that’s what his screen name was). He was a form of CPA that was online to answer questions. He could also tell you movie times at any theatre, play games such as hangman and trivia, and show you cool pictures. Anyways, the point is that my friends were much more apt to ask SmarterChild inappropriate questions when there were a bunch of people who could laugh with him. SmarterChild was a lot less entertaining when you were by yourself. That said, I think students would be more likely to behave in this manner towards the CPA if their peers were with them. Is it possible that everyone’s computers were next to each other? Could this be a possible scenario?

This is a tangent, but I thought Asimov’s robot laws were interesting and I realized I had seen them before; they are the exact laws that are used in the move I, Robot with Will Smith! Awesome. Since this is a media class I thought I’d mention it J

Both of these articles also implied, at least somewhat, that the CPAs would potentially be treated differently depending on the gender. The Veletsianos et. al. article states that they, “found that participants applied gender stereotypes to computers even though the only suggestion of gender was vocal cues.” This also supports the idea that humans tend to project human-like qualities on the CPAs. This information can be used to create a better CPA character that the students respect. This was also addressed in the article and examples were given such as: A character with glasses, a name beginning with Mr. or Dr., or positive occupational roles. However, I wonder how this would play out in terms of the gender problem that both articles referred to. Can you have a respected CPA that is a woman? How would that woman become the proper authority figure? Would applying the changes that Veletsianos et. al. suggested be enough to garner respect?

The fact that only ONE student said ‘thank you’ to the CPA is incredible. However, I don’t think this shows the disrespect that these students show their authority figures; rather I believe it is an effect of the students realizing that the CPA is not a real human. No one is reading these transcripts so literally nobody knows what is being said in these conversations. Actually when I think about it, if I had to ask a CPA for information today I don’t know that I would say ‘thank you,’ and it isn’t because of my lack of respect. I don’t say thank you to my Word document when it opens either. Hmmm, this is interesting to think about; would that mean I would be disrespecting the CPA?

Overall I think these articles are really interesting and it makes me want to work with CPAs to see what it’s like, especially in an educational capacity.