First thoughts about what a useful-bot might be
I have been thinking a lot about what a useful bot might look like in terms of the prototypes we have been asked to devise. On the one hand there are bots that could be construed as instrumentalist; highly useful tools to minimise teacher workloads, taking on administrative, time-consuming tasks. These are certainly ‘useful’.
However, what might a bot look like that is ‘playful’ (Bayne 2015)? What teacher functions might it fulfil? Might my bot be a teacher-coach? a talking-head? Perhaps it might take on the role of teacher-facilitator and be a ‘guide at the side’. (All these terms I have taken from Selwyn’s chapter). What is the most important function of a teacher and could my bot in some way contribute?
Idea #1
A bot that will generate information pictorially as well as using text for a situation that may not be classroom based. There would hopefully be some ‘ambush-teaching’ along the way. My embryonic idea is for a someone studying botany for example who needs to learn the taxonomy and classification of plants. There would be a algorithm that could be developed along the hierarchical lines of botanical taxonomy. The bot would be programmed to answer sometimes with a diagram, sometimes with a photo, sometimes with text or even a recording.
Idea #2
Some of the most successful and interesting teaching and learning that I carried out with 12 and 13 year olds was a series of lessons that revolved around open-ended learning. The students had to come up with a question (on any topic) and answer their question in the form of an extended project. It could be multi-modal. My role was as a facilitator, but also beyone that, more along the lines of an ‘expert designer’ (Goodyear, as cited in Selwyn). I needed curriculum expertise, but also the ability to guide the students in useful directions. In some ways it was the most demanding experience as a teacher I have ever had. In the same way, the IDEL system of blogging and posting on the forums is a form of expert designing/facilitation/teacher conducting. It allows for collaboration; is a collective endeavour (Selwyn), there is inquiry-based, guided learning. So therefore, maybe a bot that guides and asks provocative, timely questions in order to generate discussion? The Teacherbot (Bayne) perhaps achieved that?
It seems to me that the future of a useful bot is a combination of access to knowledge, humour, and exploiting the visual and aural as well as the written word. I loved the phrase ‘ambush-teaching’ coined by a student when confronted with Teacherbot. (Bayne). That struck me as an unexpected success of the experiment, which should be aspired to. Hopefully two-way communication would also develop (thus creating a useful relationship) along the lines of Teacherbot, and the bot would generate something educational. (a fundamental according to Bayne).
Yes, “ambush teaching” is a good phrase! Your two ideas for teacher bots both sound interesting and useful – with #2 being potentially a more playful example. It would be interesting to discover how accepting of a teacher bot 12 & 13 year olds would be. The Edinburgh Teacher Bots have been accepted by students largely as information provider or as a fun experiment. The example of Jill Watson example suggests that through Machine Learning, a pretty sophisticated teaching assistant could be created – but I think the classes it was used in were pretty conventional and a bot to act as a guide to support the development of pupils’ learning processes could be another layer of complexity to cope with (and there are plenty of examples of bots not getting it right – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)
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I think 12 and 13 year olds would far prefer a teacher bot to a real teacher!
Good point!