Amy Ogan MTS Talk at UC Merced

Описание: Adding a Human Touch to Personalized Digital Learning
Amy Ogan
November 07, 2016
Mind, Technology and Society Talk Series
UC Merced

Developing a personal connection with educational technologies is as important as connecting with a human teacher or peer learner. Fortunately, recent advances in computing mean personalized learning systems can now additionally become interpersonal. For example, the incorporation of technologies such as virtual agents and dialog systems allow us to put a human touch on educational systems through conversation, context awareness, and an understanding of temporal dynamics. A carefully designed social system can create an engaging, meaningful, and personalized learning experience. To achieve this vision, a key challenge is to develop a computational understanding of how humans develop relationships when learning with a human partner, and how this changes when the partner is digital. Adding to this challenge, relationships change over time in complex and unexpected ways, and their meaning and expression in an educational context varies depending on factors such as culture. My talk will discuss the development of technology with models of social behavior that help sustain long-term interpersonal and pedagogical relationships with learners.

Amy Ogan is an Assistant Professor at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where she leads projects investigating the development of educational technologies that incorporate understanding of social context. She was an Institute of Education Sciences Fellow, and has since been named a Rising Star in EECS by MIT and has received the Jacobs Early Career Fellowship to study the use of educational technologies in emerging economies. Dr. Ogan has additionally been a visiting researcher at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies and the Catholic University of Chile, and has recently conducted field research on the deployment of educational technology in seven international sites. Her broader research goals are supported by several NSF grants, Google, and the Simon Initiative, and include the support of under privileged students through technology, and the use of technology to support students in adopting new perspectives. Her website is www.amyogan.com.