I found these two articles on Conversational Agents (CAs) to be extremely obvious. Since each article was written by the same two authors, Doering and Veletsianos, I will refer to the two articles by the third author: When Sex, Drugs, and Violence Enter the Classroom: Conversations between Adolescents and a Female Pedagogical Agent (Scharber-the third author) and Conversational Agents and Their Longitudinal Affordances on Communication and Interaction (Yerasimou-the third author).
Before getting into this, I would like to make my opinion on the use of CAs known. I think they are almost entirely useless. These are just animated versions of the Help Menu located in most software programs, which I also find almost entirely useless. Some things to consider when viewing these over-hyped computer animations - CAs:
- They are not HUMAN! They are not your friend; they have no feelings; they have no SOUL!
- They are animated versions of the Help Menu, commonly found in computer programs. They are no different than that useless animated paperclip found in early versions of Microsoft Excel and Word. Now that paperclip has been replaced with a dog. At least Microsoft had the decency to use an inanimate object, the paperclip, to try and interact with users. They didn’t insult anyone’s intelligence by making you think you were communicating with an actual person.
- They are supposed to be set up to provide you with the answers you seek, but this rarely happens.
As stated previously, I found these two articles to be extremely obvious. I also found the Yerasimou article to be disturbing.
I’ll start with the Scharber article, which details a study of 59 middle school social studies students and their anonymous interaction with a CA. The article keeps referencing that the CA looks like a female wearing professional clothing. There were 745 interactions between the CA and the students in a two day time period. Of the 745 interactions, only 38 (5.1%) were related to the social studies assignment. The authors seem surprised by the fact that 117 of the student’s side of the interaction were unacceptable for a school setting of which 52 were sexually explicit. Only the researchers got to see the transcripts from the interactions, not the teachers or parents. So what the study did was remove responsibility for the students to obey school rules and stay on task whilst using the computers. Give me a break. Have the researchers ever been around middle school students? Puberty is happening, kids are curious about the opposite sex, and there is no supervision. Yet the researchers are shocked that students are writing sexually explicit messages to the CA.
But wait, there’s more.
The researchers talk extensively about the abuse that happens between the students towards the CA. They site an example on page 297 regarding the use of severe vulgar language. The CA corrects the student; the student gets mad and uses vulgar language. That sounds exactly like something a middle school student would do, so why does this shock anyone? The point is that it shouldn’t shock anyone who has ever spent time with middle school students.
The Yerasimou article was extremely obvious and disturbing. This time the study involved grad students using the CA for help in a technology class. The students could choose either a male or female CA. Even at the college grad student level, the vulgar and sexually explicit abuse happened. One of the female students wrote, “When I was with other people, that’s when all the dirty questions came up, they were like try that, try that, so I was like, “Ok, this better not come back to my name.”” (pg 264)
The disturbing part of this article was the students viewing the CA as a friend. I was sickened by the following quote, “Most of our participants reported connecting emotionally with the CAs due to the human-like interactions.” (pg 262) As stated previously, the CA is not human, it has no feelings, and it is not anyone’s friend. It really disturbs me that people can get so emotionally attached to a computer animated Help Menu.
The third thing to consider is the CAs is supposed to be set up to provide you with the answers you seek, but this rarely happens. In each article, students tried using the CAs for help with their assignments, but the CAs failed. Most students quit asking the CAs anything assignment related, and just started asking other types of questions. Had the CAs been able to answer even simple questions, maybe the so-called abuse would have been less. The Yerasimou article states, “when participants did not receive a correct answer to their on-task eFolio-related questions, they would often switch to asking the CA unrelated, off-task questions.” (pg 260) The Scharber article states that when a non-intelligent response occurred from the CA to the student that, “most commonly, the participants simply stopped asking the agent for help and did not engage in further discourse, or the student switched to a social conversation with the agent.” (pg 297)
As far as I can tell, there are two positive attributes of the CA and both of these come from the Yerasimou article. The first is that it was available to students at all times. The second is that “participants reported that they found the dual format in which CAs delivered their answers – both text and audio – a very helpful feature.” (pg 258)
I have stated that the CAs are almost entirely useless. Almost. If I HAD to use this type of technology in the classroom, here is what I would do. The type of assignment would have to be relatively easy but perhaps heavily dependent on terminology. For instance, our commercial analysis assignment was relatively easy, but it had a lot of different definitions. This would be a good assignment for the use of a CA. The students could ask the CA the definition of a word, and the CA could communicate with the student in both audible and written form. If the student needed further help with the definition of the word, the student could ask the CA for an example. The trick to making this go smoothly is that the students would have to be told the capabilities of the CA and the types of questions the CA will respond to correctly. In addition, students should know there are written transcripts for each student-CA interaction, so appropriate school behavior is mandatory. Students will be held responsible for their actions. Depending on the age of the students, perhaps a copy of the transcripts could be sent to the parents. This should keep students on-task.
