Supporting Conceptual Awareness with Pedagogical Agents

Anders Mørch (1) , Silje Jondahl (2) , Jan A. Dolonen (1)

1 InterMedia
2 The County Governor in Rogaland

This paper describes a series of efforts in building and conceptualizing software agents for distributed collaborative learning. The agents are referred to as pedagogical agents. We have integrated pedagogical agents within two collaborative environments, TeamWave Workplace and Future Learning Environment. The role of agents in these environments differs from past work on software agents in their function as extended awareness mechanisms, focusing on task and concept awareness (conceptual awareness). Our approach is stimulated by Mead's theory of the 'Generalized Other'. The agents collect statistical information on user activity and analyze the information based on principles of collaboration and knowledge building (participation, group interaction, and scientific discourse). Furthermore, the agents define a trajectory in a pedagogical agent design space, which we define in terms of four dimensions: presentation, intervention, task, and pedagogy. We end the paper by comparing our approach with related work.

Keywords: group interactions

Domains: Technology for Human Learning

Anders Mørch, Silje Jondahl, Jan A. Dolonen. Supporting Conceptual Awareness with Pedagogical Agents. Information Systems Frontiers, 2005, 7(1), pp.39-53. ⟨hal-00190528⟩