Making Friends to Influence People

Synthetic characters, agents or avatars are relatively new. This article will look at the possibilities of harnessing a bot (a consersational robot) to aid in learning.

Making a Friend

Bots are one of many objects that are easy to construct in a online environment like a MOO or MUD. Builders in a MOO can construct a bot, and program it to look like whatever they like (pet parrot, albatross, whatever) and say whatever they like. Bot vocabularies include keywords, responses, randoms (idle chit chat), question responses and more complex patterns of grammar.

Yodabot says "Do or do not, there is no try". It is fascinating to watch students making their own bots - they can become virtual friends, someone to talk to when no one in the real world wants a chat, ego-strokers, pay-out machines, jesters, confuzzlers and information repositories. The adult approach to bot creation is rarely as interesting or entertaining (maybe we have had our creativity strangled out of us).

Influence

A bot can be a flexible educational tool - it can be applied to many situations. What follows are some scenarios I have used bots for in my MOO.

• Scenario 1: Visit to a National Park, look at photos of cave paintings and ask the ranger-bot about them. Equip ranger-bot with specific keywords of aboriginal artefacts/ places/ dialects/ painting techniques, program indigenous FAQ as randoms etc.
  
  
• Scenario 2: Build an historic recreation of a Gold Mining Town, have bots staffing the general store, claims office and working down a mine. Have students talk to them, asking them about life and times.
  
  
• Scenario 3: In a murder mystery, have a series of bots with different clues - if you don't ask the right questions, you don't find out what you need to solve the mystery
  
  
• Scenario 4: In a virtual library, ask where books of a particular subject can be found. The dewey-bot can make suggestions on fiction/non-fiction titles that are good to read right now (coupled with 'book-week') activities, this could be a useful source of relevant information
  
  
• Scenario 5: A Reception-bot that can answer questions like phone numbers, other contact information, directions, enrollment procedures and other elpful information that is might be a pain to talk to a real receptionis for. The reception-bot is always tehre, always polite and always helpful - just like real life :)

Conclusions

... um ... just do it - see what you can do with a bot.

What do you think?

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Mail me with your ideas/feedback - I'll post it for others to see if you like.

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