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.
