I would like to draw your attention to the Research Projects of the ArticuLab at the School of Communication / School of Engineering at the Northwestern University.At first glance the projects "Collaborative Storytelling with a Virtual Peer", "Storytelling with a virtual peer as an intervention for children with autism" and the project "Alex: Culturally Authentic Virtual Peer" seem to emphasize the benefit of using digital avatars in a learning process. This I suppose may chock many parents or teachers, but I find them most interesting because all these projects are based on a solid theoretical and conceptional framework on literacy development. The researchers emphasize the importance of collaboration, play, role-taking, imagination, storytelling, co-authoring and socio-cultural norms during language learning. Even for teachers or parents who are very critical about the use of computers in education it could be interesting to have a closer look at these research projects because they could help them better understand the mechanisms of learning in a given socio-cultural and/or educational environment and also how important it is for children to participate in collaborative literacy activities like narratives or play. If considered, the research projects could contribute to improve education even without the use of information technology because they offer new settings in which can be described the impact of social interaction and communication and of a child's imagination during the process of developing literacy skills.
The projects of the ArticuLab have a lot in common with the Aurora of the Adaptive Systems Research Group at the Science and Technology Research Institute at the University of Hertfordshire where researches have developed a humanoid robot called KASPAR instead of virtual peers and where they study its possible beneficial influence on children with learning difficulties or autism.
Hello! I am a student on the University of Luxembourg and i have read your article about "Collaborative storytelling with avatars and robots as peers". The article says, that the first aim of tis project is "storytelling with a virtual peer as an intervention for children with autism." I have done my internship at a school of diffentiated education for children with autistic handicaps and i can't really imagine that these children would communicate with a virtual peer. In fact, i would find it interesting, because this tool could help guiding the children to participate in conversations ans develop social skills. Even, this tool could lead us to a better understanding of the language learning processes of autistic children. But, i see quite a few difficulties concerning the motivation and the readiness of the chilren to communicate qith a peer on the computer.
ReplyDeleteAs i have known these children, they have problems to communicate. Most of these children never learn to communicate qith other people, because they don't understand the sense of "our" language and because they aren't interested in talking with other people.
So, if this isn't possible with people, who are part of their daily social context, i can't really imagine how this could work with a computer...