Dirkin, Mishra & Altermatt (2005)

by | Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Dirkin, H. K., Mishra, P., & Altermatt, E. (2005). All or nothing: Levels of sociability of a pedagogical software agent and its impact on student perceptions and learning. Journal Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia. 14(2), 113-127.

Abstract:
This article reports the results of an experimental study on multimedia learning environments, which investigated the impact of increasing the social behaviors of a pedagogical agent on students’ learning experience, and learning. Paradoxically, in this experiment students detected higher degrees of social presence in both the text only and the fully animated social agent conditions than students in the voice only and static image of the agent with voice conditions. Furthermore, students had more positive perceptions of the learning experience in the text only condition. The results support the careful design of social behaviors for animated pedagogical agents if they are to be of educational value, otherwise, the use of agent technology can actually detract from the learning experience.

Topics related to this post: Design | Learning | Psychology | Publications | Research | Technology

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Creativity, Digitality, and Teacher PD

It has been almost 5 years since my research interests shifted formally to issues related to creativity, technology and teacher education. This line of work (though less influential than my TPACK related work) has led to multiple journal articles and research studies....

21st Century Learning, one school’s ongoing story

Recently I had been invited to the Birmingham School District to speak to the administrators, teachers and broader community about their recent initiatives on 21st Century Learning. I had a wonderful visit - which I was reminded of by this article (On the Front Lines...

Announcing: Short film competition, cool prize for winner!!

Those of you who have been following this blog know, over the past few months I have made a few short videos with my kids. The ones I am most proud of are a set of three made around the words Explore, Create, Share (you can see them all here). There were great fun to...

Wicked problems, Design & Horst Rittel

Matt Koehler and I have often talked about the wicked problems of design and teaching with technology (most specifically in our handbook chapter on TPACK). We take the idea of wicked problems from a classic paper written by Rittel and Weber back in 1973. As Wikipedia...

Design & Creativity at Purdue

I will be at Purdue University, at the School of Engineering Education later this week, making a presentation titled: Unpacking Design and creativity: What I think I know, and what I (quite certainly) don't. I am quite looking forward to this trip, mainly because I...

Finding myself in EduPunk

Matt Koehler introduce me to the idea of edupunk. As this Chronicle story (Frustrated With Corporate Course-Management Systems, Some Professors Go 'Edupunk') says, Edupunk seems to be a reaction against the rise of course-managements systems, which offer cookie-cutter...

Thoughtless acts? Technology, creativity & teaching

I have always been interested in the manner in which people use (or re-use) everyday things for purposes they were never intended for. Be it a piece of red tape to mark a glass door so that people don't slam into the glass (as I see at the MSU clinical center every...

Postdictable, the commercials

I had written earlier about the idea of "postdictable" which was defined as something that is "surprising initially, but then understandable with a bit of thought." It lies at the spot between predictability and total chaos. The movie Sixth Sense is postdictable in...

Manoranjan ka baap

The Indian Premier League, Twenty20 cricket championship was a great success. I had a chance to watch a few games (including the finals and semi-finals) when I was in india and it was a blast. This posting however is about an extremely creative commercial for the IPL...

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *