Can we deconstruct "race" in the public discourse?
The concept of 'race' is examined from its earliest uses in European languages through th... more The concept of 'race' is examined from its earliest uses in European languages through the era of 'racial' sciences in the nineteenth century. The meanings acquired by the word 'race' are shown to be related to scientific thinking which has since been discredited. The history of efforts to discredit or eliminate the concept in science by twentieth-century anthropologists and others is shown to be complete, but the persistence of the word in public discourse is noted. Ethnographic examples of the problematic nature of the concept are introduced. Results of a study of American college students' understandings of the word are examined, and implication and recommendations for future efforts to discredit its use are presented
Contemporary educational challenges have become amplified through the adoption of onlineonly mode... more Contemporary educational challenges have become amplified through the adoption of onlineonly modes of instruction due to the Covid-19 pandemic. When planning and delivering online instruction, even more than when delivering face-to-face instruction, engineering educators need to involve students at cognitive and emotional levels that encourage authentic, meaningful, and immersive learning experiences. During traditional online learning, students often feel disconnected from their learning communities. They also report a lack of motivation. Emotional engagement is therefore a necessary complement to cognitive engagement, while further helping to facilitate intrinsic motivation and feelings of delight, surprise, understanding, empathy, and trust. This study analyzes the use of scaffolded mini-projects (complex design projects divided into smaller segments) combined with comprehensive electronic portfolios (ePortfolios) in a sophomore-level Design for Manufacturability course. By emphasizing progressively more complex learning experiences and pairing these with electronic portfolios, students may become more attuned to cognitive learning processes such as effective planning and communication of complex ideas. We also hypothesize that they may develop awareness of, and competency in, skills with an emotional component including self-directed learning, autonomous exploration, and creative inspiration. For the purposes of this investigation, mini-projects may be independent from one another or connected as a series. Lessons from previous mini-projects are built into subsequent projects, and each offers loosely-defined analytical questions and open-ended design questions that require independent research. The unfolding of scaffolded mini-projects offers an orderly mechanism for students to grow and demonstrate important engineering competencies, especially when offered in tandem with teaching-learning-assessments via ePortfolios. ePortfolios have been shown to be effective in documenting learning competencies, enabling meta-analysis and personal reflection, and improving skills in the use of social media to communicate ideas. In effect, mini-projects combined with ePortfolios may help to facilitate deeper understanding of course content, make the curriculum more relevant for students, and build connections between classroom and professional learning competencies. This study offers a comparative analysis evaluating the efficacy of using mini-projects and ePortfolios in a face-to-face learning environment (Fall 2019) and in an online-only learning environment (Fall 2020). Participants in the face-to-face Fall 2019 (n = 104) course completed a questionnaire that evaluated specific engagement constructs. The completed questionnaires were evaluated using descriptive statistics and factor analysis. Data from the Fall 2020 (n = 64) course were evaluated using the same assessment methodology. It is hoped that findings from this work may contribute to the development of self-directed learning strategies that enhance students' cognitive and emotional engagement in their learning during online-only and face-to-face instruction.
Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces - IUI '03, 2003
Animated pedagogical agents offer promise as a means of making computer-aided learning more engag... more Animated pedagogical agents offer promise as a means of making computer-aided learning more engaging and effective. To achieve this, an agent must be able to interact with the learner in a manner that appears believable, and that furthers the pedagogical goals of the learning environment. In this paper we describe how the user interaction model of one pedagogical agent evolved through an iterative process of design and user testing. The pedagogical agent Adele assists students as they assess and diagnose medical and dental patients in clinical settings. We describe the results of, and our responses to, three studies of Adele, involving over two hundred and fifty medical and dental students over five years, that have led to an improved tutoring strategy, and discuss the interaction possibilities of two different reasoning engines. With the benefit of hindsight, the paper articulates the principles that govern effective user-agent interaction in educational contexts, and describes how the agent's interaction design in its current form embodies those principles.
Proceedings of 2002 IEEE Workshop on Speech Synthesis, 2002.
Text-to-speech synthesis can play an important role in interactive education and training applica... more Text-to-speech synthesis can play an important role in interactive education and training applications, as voices for animated agents. Such agents need high-quality voices capable of expressing intent and emotion. This paper presents preliminary results in an effort aimed at synthesizing expressive military speech for training applications. Such speech has acoustic and prosodic characteristics that can differ markedly from ordinary conversational speech. A limited domain synthesis approach is used employing samples of expressive speech, classified according to speaking style. The resulting synthesizer was tested both in isolation and in the context of a virtual reality training scenario with animated characters.
Proceedings of the fifth international conference on Autonomous agents, 2001
We describe an initial prototype of a holodeck-like environment that we have created for the Miss... more We describe an initial prototype of a holodeck-like environment that we have created for the Mission Rehearsal Exercise Project. The goal of the project is to create an experience learning system where the participants are immersed in an environment where they can encounter the sights, sounds, and circumstances of realworld scenarios. Virtual humans act as characters and coaches in an interactive story with pedagogical goals.
National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2004
Embodied conversational agents (ECA) have potential as facilitators for health interventions. How... more Embodied conversational agents (ECA) have potential as facilitators for health interventions. However, their utility is limited as long as people must sit down in front of a computer to access them. This paper describes a project that is deploying an ECA on a handheld computer, and using it to assist in a psychosocial intervention aimed at providing training in problem solving skills. The agent is based upon the virtual trainer/counselor in the pedagogical drama Carmen's Bright IDEAS, adapted for handheld use and for interaction with a human caregiver. The system will go into clinical trails in August of 2004. The paper discusses the design and technical issues involved in the transition from laptop computer to handheld device and from 3rd-person view to first-person interaction, and the plan for evaluation. The clinical trial is designed both to evaluate psychosocial outcomes and to assess user preferences in ECA interaction modalities over the course of multiple sessions of use.
The goal of Interactive Pedagogical Drama (IPD) is to exploit the edifying power of story while p... more The goal of Interactive Pedagogical Drama (IPD) is to exploit the edifying power of story while promoting active learning. An IPD immerses the learner in an engaging, evocative story where she interacts with realistic characters. The learner makes decisions or takes actions on behalf of a character in the story, and sees the consequences of her decisions. The story's characters are realized by autonomous agents. We discuss IPD in the context of Carmen's Bright IDEAS (CBI), a multimedia title designed to teach problem solving skills to mother's of pediatric cancer patients. CBI was an exploratory arm of a clinical trial and here we discuss key creative and technical aspects of the design and results from that arm.
Proceedings of the fourth international conference on Autonomous agents, 2000
This paper describes an agent-based approach to realizing interactive pedagogical drama. Characte... more This paper describes an agent-based approach to realizing interactive pedagogical drama. Characters choose their actions autonomously, while director and cinematographer agents manage the action and its presentation in order to maintain story structure, achieve pedagogical goals, and present the dynamic story to as to achieve the best dramatic effect. Artistic standards must be maintained while permitting substantial variability in story scenario. To achieve these objectives, scripted dialog is deconstructed into elements that are portrayed by agents with emotion models. Learners influence how the drama unfolds by controlling the intentions of one or more characters, who then behave in accordance with those intentions. Interactions between characters create opportunities to move the story in pedagogically useful directions, which the automated director exploits. This approach is realized in the multimedia title Carmen's Bright IDEAS, an interactive health intervention designed to improve the problem solving skills of mothers of pediatric cancer patients.
The goal of Interactive Pedagogical Drama (IPD) is to exploit the edifying power of story while p... more The goal of Interactive Pedagogical Drama (IPD) is to exploit the edifying power of story while promoting active learning. An IPD immerses the learner in an engaging, evocative story where she interacts with realistic characters. The learner makes decisions or takes actions on behalf of a character in the story, and sees the consequences of her decisions. The story's characters are realized by autonomous agents. We discuss IPD in the context of Carmen's Bright IDEAS (CBI), a multimedia title designed to teach problem solving skills to mother's of pediatric cancer patients. CBI was an exploratory arm of a clinical trial and here we discuss key creative and technical aspects of the design and results from that arm.
Can we deconstruct "race" in the public discourse?
The concept of 'race' is examined from its earliest uses in European languages through th... more The concept of 'race' is examined from its earliest uses in European languages through the era of 'racial' sciences in the nineteenth century. The meanings acquired by the word 'race' are shown to be related to scientific thinking which has since been discredited. The history of efforts to discredit or eliminate the concept in science by twentieth-century anthropologists and others is shown to be complete, but the persistence of the word in public discourse is noted. Ethnographic examples of the problematic nature of the concept are introduced. Results of a study of American college students' understandings of the word are examined, and implication and recommendations for future efforts to discredit its use are presented
Contemporary educational challenges have become amplified through the adoption of onlineonly mode... more Contemporary educational challenges have become amplified through the adoption of onlineonly modes of instruction due to the Covid-19 pandemic. When planning and delivering online instruction, even more than when delivering face-to-face instruction, engineering educators need to involve students at cognitive and emotional levels that encourage authentic, meaningful, and immersive learning experiences. During traditional online learning, students often feel disconnected from their learning communities. They also report a lack of motivation. Emotional engagement is therefore a necessary complement to cognitive engagement, while further helping to facilitate intrinsic motivation and feelings of delight, surprise, understanding, empathy, and trust. This study analyzes the use of scaffolded mini-projects (complex design projects divided into smaller segments) combined with comprehensive electronic portfolios (ePortfolios) in a sophomore-level Design for Manufacturability course. By emphasizing progressively more complex learning experiences and pairing these with electronic portfolios, students may become more attuned to cognitive learning processes such as effective planning and communication of complex ideas. We also hypothesize that they may develop awareness of, and competency in, skills with an emotional component including self-directed learning, autonomous exploration, and creative inspiration. For the purposes of this investigation, mini-projects may be independent from one another or connected as a series. Lessons from previous mini-projects are built into subsequent projects, and each offers loosely-defined analytical questions and open-ended design questions that require independent research. The unfolding of scaffolded mini-projects offers an orderly mechanism for students to grow and demonstrate important engineering competencies, especially when offered in tandem with teaching-learning-assessments via ePortfolios. ePortfolios have been shown to be effective in documenting learning competencies, enabling meta-analysis and personal reflection, and improving skills in the use of social media to communicate ideas. In effect, mini-projects combined with ePortfolios may help to facilitate deeper understanding of course content, make the curriculum more relevant for students, and build connections between classroom and professional learning competencies. This study offers a comparative analysis evaluating the efficacy of using mini-projects and ePortfolios in a face-to-face learning environment (Fall 2019) and in an online-only learning environment (Fall 2020). Participants in the face-to-face Fall 2019 (n = 104) course completed a questionnaire that evaluated specific engagement constructs. The completed questionnaires were evaluated using descriptive statistics and factor analysis. Data from the Fall 2020 (n = 64) course were evaluated using the same assessment methodology. It is hoped that findings from this work may contribute to the development of self-directed learning strategies that enhance students' cognitive and emotional engagement in their learning during online-only and face-to-face instruction.
Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces - IUI '03, 2003
Animated pedagogical agents offer promise as a means of making computer-aided learning more engag... more Animated pedagogical agents offer promise as a means of making computer-aided learning more engaging and effective. To achieve this, an agent must be able to interact with the learner in a manner that appears believable, and that furthers the pedagogical goals of the learning environment. In this paper we describe how the user interaction model of one pedagogical agent evolved through an iterative process of design and user testing. The pedagogical agent Adele assists students as they assess and diagnose medical and dental patients in clinical settings. We describe the results of, and our responses to, three studies of Adele, involving over two hundred and fifty medical and dental students over five years, that have led to an improved tutoring strategy, and discuss the interaction possibilities of two different reasoning engines. With the benefit of hindsight, the paper articulates the principles that govern effective user-agent interaction in educational contexts, and describes how the agent's interaction design in its current form embodies those principles.
Proceedings of 2002 IEEE Workshop on Speech Synthesis, 2002.
Text-to-speech synthesis can play an important role in interactive education and training applica... more Text-to-speech synthesis can play an important role in interactive education and training applications, as voices for animated agents. Such agents need high-quality voices capable of expressing intent and emotion. This paper presents preliminary results in an effort aimed at synthesizing expressive military speech for training applications. Such speech has acoustic and prosodic characteristics that can differ markedly from ordinary conversational speech. A limited domain synthesis approach is used employing samples of expressive speech, classified according to speaking style. The resulting synthesizer was tested both in isolation and in the context of a virtual reality training scenario with animated characters.
Proceedings of the fifth international conference on Autonomous agents, 2001
We describe an initial prototype of a holodeck-like environment that we have created for the Miss... more We describe an initial prototype of a holodeck-like environment that we have created for the Mission Rehearsal Exercise Project. The goal of the project is to create an experience learning system where the participants are immersed in an environment where they can encounter the sights, sounds, and circumstances of realworld scenarios. Virtual humans act as characters and coaches in an interactive story with pedagogical goals.
National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2004
Embodied conversational agents (ECA) have potential as facilitators for health interventions. How... more Embodied conversational agents (ECA) have potential as facilitators for health interventions. However, their utility is limited as long as people must sit down in front of a computer to access them. This paper describes a project that is deploying an ECA on a handheld computer, and using it to assist in a psychosocial intervention aimed at providing training in problem solving skills. The agent is based upon the virtual trainer/counselor in the pedagogical drama Carmen's Bright IDEAS, adapted for handheld use and for interaction with a human caregiver. The system will go into clinical trails in August of 2004. The paper discusses the design and technical issues involved in the transition from laptop computer to handheld device and from 3rd-person view to first-person interaction, and the plan for evaluation. The clinical trial is designed both to evaluate psychosocial outcomes and to assess user preferences in ECA interaction modalities over the course of multiple sessions of use.
The goal of Interactive Pedagogical Drama (IPD) is to exploit the edifying power of story while p... more The goal of Interactive Pedagogical Drama (IPD) is to exploit the edifying power of story while promoting active learning. An IPD immerses the learner in an engaging, evocative story where she interacts with realistic characters. The learner makes decisions or takes actions on behalf of a character in the story, and sees the consequences of her decisions. The story's characters are realized by autonomous agents. We discuss IPD in the context of Carmen's Bright IDEAS (CBI), a multimedia title designed to teach problem solving skills to mother's of pediatric cancer patients. CBI was an exploratory arm of a clinical trial and here we discuss key creative and technical aspects of the design and results from that arm.
Proceedings of the fourth international conference on Autonomous agents, 2000
This paper describes an agent-based approach to realizing interactive pedagogical drama. Characte... more This paper describes an agent-based approach to realizing interactive pedagogical drama. Characters choose their actions autonomously, while director and cinematographer agents manage the action and its presentation in order to maintain story structure, achieve pedagogical goals, and present the dynamic story to as to achieve the best dramatic effect. Artistic standards must be maintained while permitting substantial variability in story scenario. To achieve these objectives, scripted dialog is deconstructed into elements that are portrayed by agents with emotion models. Learners influence how the drama unfolds by controlling the intentions of one or more characters, who then behave in accordance with those intentions. Interactions between characters create opportunities to move the story in pedagogically useful directions, which the automated director exploits. This approach is realized in the multimedia title Carmen's Bright IDEAS, an interactive health intervention designed to improve the problem solving skills of mothers of pediatric cancer patients.
The goal of Interactive Pedagogical Drama (IPD) is to exploit the edifying power of story while p... more The goal of Interactive Pedagogical Drama (IPD) is to exploit the edifying power of story while promoting active learning. An IPD immerses the learner in an engaging, evocative story where she interacts with realistic characters. The learner makes decisions or takes actions on behalf of a character in the story, and sees the consequences of her decisions. The story's characters are realized by autonomous agents. We discuss IPD in the context of Carmen's Bright IDEAS (CBI), a multimedia title designed to teach problem solving skills to mother's of pediatric cancer patients. CBI was an exploratory arm of a clinical trial and here we discuss key creative and technical aspects of the design and results from that arm.
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Papers by Kate LaBore