Conversational agents for academically productive talk: a comparison of directed and undirected agent interventions

Clinical Virtual Reality tools to advance the prevention, assessment, and treatment of PTSD

“…There is a growing literature in this area and it is not hard to see the power of VH applications to foster roleplay training that targets social interaction, anger management, relapse prevention for addiction, and many other areas where clinical populations could benefit from low social risk interaction with a non-judgmental VH (Albright, Adam, Serri, Bleeker, & Goldman, 2016; Bickmore et al, 2016; Rizzo et al, 2016b; Tegos, Demetriadis, Papadopoulos, & Weinberger, 2016; Zhang, Bickmore, & Paasche-Orlow, 2017). Although some authors have expressed legitimate concerns about the role of VH ‘automation’ supplanting the role of clinicians (Innes & Morrison, 2017), VHs applications developed thus far serve more to fill gaps where a clinician is not available, than to aim at replacement of human providers.…”

Studying with the Help of Digital Tutors: Design Aspects of Conversational Agents that Influence the Learning Process

“…Apart from the traditional dialogues there also exist trialogues in which three entities are involved. The possible interaction configurations for these scenarios would be (1) one conversational agent representing the tutor and two human learners [21,22], or (2) one conversational agent representing the tutor, another conversational agent in the role of a co-learner and one human learner [11].…”

“…They encourage students to build on their prior knowledge and link this to new domains discussed in the course. Tegos et al [22] built upon this and found that the impact on learning outcomes of the individual learner is even greater when the conversational agent does not address both learners simultaneously but uses directed intervention to target a specific learner. With regards to the second scenario Ju et al [11] have shown that not only can a conversational agent influence learning outcome through acting in the role of a teacher or tutor, but also by representing a co-learner, more specifically a high-performing co-learner.…”

“…(F2) Discussion helper: When acting in the function of a discussion helper the pedagogical agent can take on both the role of a tutor, or then the role of a co-learner. A discussion helper in the context of small groups helps one or more human learners in their discussion on a specific topic by actively mentioning certain keywords to be considered and therefore guiding a discussion into the right and academically useful direction [22].…”

Building community together: towards equitable CSCL practices and processes

“…Their overall aim is to argue in favor of what they refer to as "ambitious learning practices", which they argue are practices that "can empower students, support shared meaning-making, and potentially disrupt social inequality". They connect discussion of these issues with a current trend in CSCL research, namely adaptive forms of scripted collaboration (Wang et al 2017), especially in connection with conversational agents (Tegos et al 2016;Rosé and Ferschke 2016). In their article they weigh and balance their perspective on the potential costs and benefits of automated forms of adaptive collaborative learning support, raising questions related to blind spots, bias, or lack of nuance in underlying model predictions.…”