Final Project Brainstorming
1) Out of all the different pedagogical agents and intelligent computer-assisted instructional systems introduced in this week and past readings, which agent/system did you find most interesting and why?
Although not really a pedagogical agent, ELIZA is a computer program that really stands out to me. I especially liked being able to try out ELIZA myself to get a sense of how it apply Rogerian theory to build its responses. As someone with a background in mental health, I enjoyed how the creators used the reflection, validation, and summary-based structure of Carl Roger's client-centered therapy to inform ELIZA's responses.
One of the pedagogical agents that really stood out to me was the teachable agent Betty's Brain. I like the idea of students learning by teaching an agent. I think that idea is based on solid pedagogical theory and is a idea that many teachers employ even without using agents, for example when students are tasked with tutoring other individuals. I felt like the way that Betty's Brain visualized her thinking and evoked more metacognition in the student helped the student to actively reflect on their learning. Just the act of knowing that they were responsible for teaching another person can have positive effects on how much a student learns (Schwartz et al., 2009).
I think real potential lies in the ability to take a TA like Betty's Brain and create a physical body that enables it to interact with it's environment. I believe that this type of embodied cognition would not only help a learner internalize more knowledge, but would enable more relevant real-world interactions and adaptations (Mayer & DaPra, 2012).
2) Mini Project:
a) the kind of pedagogical agent/intelligent computer-assisted instructional system you would like to design:
I can imagine creating one of the following two systems:
1) A pedagogical agent that helps individuals develop their active listening skills.
2) A computer-assisted tutor that helps college students or professionals develop their communications/ marketing skills.
b) What does it do? What situation will the agent/system be used for:
- subject area, issue or challenge it addresses:
- purpose/objective:
- interaction scenario:
- target learner and why (e.g., age or grade level)
1) The ideal learner would be a student in the 4th or fifth grade who are actively developing and applying their socialization skills in cohorts. The student would be exposed to a unit that walked them through basic elements of active listening. The student would learn the connection between the speakers emotions and the listener's responses. Several concrete responses would be identified.
The student would then be responsible for teaching the TA how to respond to randomly generated statements. This would help the student to practice active reflection on 1) what active listening skills are, 2) what situations they should be employed in, 3) the effect they have on the speaker, and 4) how they use active listening skills in their own life.
2) The ideal learner would be either students or professionals who do not have a background in Communications but need to learn best practices for how to craft marketing blurbs. The student would respond to several prompts generated by the system such as, "write a short blurb about a networking event," or "write a headline for a new sneaker factory's opening day," or "draft a outreach email to a potential industry partner."
The computer-assisted tutor would be equipped with marketing best practices, grammar tips, and examples of different types of statements. It would make suggestions in order to scaffold the user's learning that help them to rewrite their blurbs. It would also compare key features of first, second, and third attempts at drafting communications. This would help the user to build their communications knowledge, skills, and self-efficacy in order to independently create marketing materials and understand key features to consider within communications.
Hello Grace,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading your two possible topics for your final project.
I think both are very well focused topic areas and interesting.
With regards to the pedagogical agent that helps 4th/5th grade students with their listening skills, you may want to identify the situation (e.g., collaborative learning settings - group work, in debates, negotiations, peer counseling) or active listening that leads to a specific skill (e.g., paraphrasing).
Your interest in a computer-assisted tutor that craft marketing blurbs is also a great topic. If you decide to pursue this agent you will want to look at literature to see what kind of learning/skill or scaffolding is involved when making marketing blurbs, what is considered a good/bad blurb (for the tutor to assess), what kind of feedback can be crafted to help students create blurbs, and how this is linked to communication knowledge skills and self efficacy.
There seems to be marketing blurb generators (see link) below. It does not look like it intelligently generates blurbs, but it may serve as an example in its most simplest form.
https://www.almostanything.com.au/marketing-strategy-branding/brand-value-statement-generator/
FYI Also you may find the marketing logo generators (that sends a visual message) somewhat related. Although this is not a blurb, the system tries to generate creative images that send a message.
Chilton, L. B., Petridis, S., & Agrawala, M. (2019, May). VisiBlends: A flexible workflow for visual blends. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-14).