By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Kids' relationships and learning with social robots
Jacqueline M. Kory Westlund, MIT Media Lab, 2019/03/08
One of the things MIT and Media Lab do really well is to get their reserachers to communicate their work in straighforward and engaging narrative. I wish more institutes (including our own) did this. Anyhow, this article describes how children forming relationships with robots demonstrates greater learning outcomes. The relationships are created by having the robot itself engage in relationship-behaviour: "interacting multiple times, changing in response to those interactions, referencing experiences shared together, being responsive, showing rapport (e.g., with mirroring and entrainment), and reciprocating behaviors." Children responsed with similar behaviours, and those that did had the higher scores. There's a lot still to unpack here, and this work is worth watching with interest. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Summarising learning materials using AI - paucity of data, abundance of stuff
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2019/03/06
Could we use artificial intelligence (AI) to create open educational resources (OER)? Ignatia asked and I suggested I didn't really know of any (notwithstanding the utility of AI in automatically generating metadata, as I showed in my OER talk). Donald Clark responded with this post pointing to his Wildfire service. More...

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Some questions to use when discussing why we shouldn’t replace humans with AI (artificial intelligence) for learning
Dave Cormier, Dave’s Educational Blog, 2019/02/25
"All of our design and most of our assessments are created in an effort to help people know things," writes Dave Cormier, "and yet there is no clear agreement in education on what learning actually is." This point is especially salient when we ask what it would mean for an AI to function as a teacher. What would it need to know? The AI needs to know both the knower and whatever it is that they want to know - in the sense that they want to know it. More...