Post # 8

I thought that creating an avatar was fun and I would use it in the classroom for fun. It wouldn’t be interactive but I think that one sided students would enjoy seeing it and having that tell them the days activities. There are tons of possibilities with avatars. While reading a story you could make an avatar look like a character in the book and have them ask students questions about the book that they are to write an answer to and turn in. I think that the main learning though should be coming from a human teacher directed activity rather than a computer. I think that while incorporating more and more technology into the classroom may be fun, I still like to find useful information from text books.

While doing research for this course, I stumbled upon the book The Lolita Effect. I had heard of it before but never took the time to read any of it. I thought that it was a really good book with a lot of good information. The book references the Kaiser Foundation, which we had to study at the beginning of the course. I think that this was a great resource.

I think that the articles were interesting reads but they weren’t really surprising. No matter with a human or an “artificially intelligent avatar able to dynamically converse with learners” Students will push the limits and see what they can get away with. If conversing with a computer, they probably wont learn much unless they are taking their learning seriously and actually enjoy the subject matter. I remember visiting someplace that had an interactive computer person and guys I was with asked some of the same inappropriate questions. I think that there is a line you should just not cross in the classroom learning environment. Sometimes there can be too much technology and I think taking away that human to human interaction is not the way to go.