In her recent talk, Professor Siân Bayne from the Centre for Research in Digital Education, talked about the teacherbot that was launched as part of the the E-learning and Digital Cultures MOOC on Coursera.
Built by human teachers, the teacherbot automated elements of the teacher function within Twitter, and included some attempts at empathy, emotion and affect. Siân’s talk used teacherbot’s forays in emotion to consider the ‘compulsory anthropocentrism’ of education and what that might mean for its digital futures.
Questions asked by the audience included:
- To what extent does the teacherbot’s performance of emotion mirror human emotion performance?
- Will the teacherbot be able to move from performing emotions to having emotions in the future?
- Did students on the MOOC want the teacherbot to be human/humanize him/her?
- Was the teacherbot purely algorithm-based or was there an element of artificial intelligence?
- How does the teacherbot help us reflect on processes of automation in education?
What Siân’s video to find out more – coming soon.