Abstracts of Three Studies Related to Pedagogical Agents
Karl Kapp, Kapp Notes, 2014/12/17

Quoted from the article:

• "Pedagogical agents produced a small but significant effect on learning."
• "Gender bias affects learner’s perception on virtual agent. Implications are discussed in terms of how stereotypes of expert-like and peer-like agent can be effectively utilized"
• "Students who viewed a highly embodied agent also rated the social attributes of the agent more positively than did students who viewed a nongesturing agent."

So - students get more out of agents that act like people, but that isn't always a positive thing.

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Try Out / Please Break TRU Writer?
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2014/12/17

So I like this idea: "The idea of the TRU Writer is a simple way for faculty, researchers, students to publish web content in a rich, media form without having them create accounts. Rather than try and explain, take a ride on the random example spinner (Randomness is something I nearly always try to toss into the mix)." You can try out the TRU writer here.

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Adaptive learning markets: talking Turkey
Philip J. Kerr, Adaptive Learning in ELT, 2014/12/17

This post looks at work being done to advance adaptive learning in Turkey. "OUP," writes Philip Kerr (referring to Oxford University Press) "probably the most significant of the big ELT publishers in Turkey, recorded ‘an outstanding performance’ in the country in the last financial year, making it their 5^th largest ELT market." Why is Turkey special? Kerr lists several reasons: it has a young population, it's " in the middle of a government-sponsored $990 million project to increase the level of English proficiency in schools," it "one of the world’s largest educational technology projects: the FATIH Project," it has a "burgeoning private education sector," and is in the process of adopting educational technology. My main counsel to Turkey would be to be cautious: the private sector will promise the moon, but you have to hold them to outcomes.

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EMMA project meeting – Madrid
Grainne Conole, e4innovation.com, 2014/12/17

Grainne Conole summarizes an EMMA project meeting - EMMA is "The European Multiple MOOC Aggregator" and collects information from, as the name suggests, several MOOCs. The MOOCs (and we're beginning to see this as a trend) had a small number of participants, about 70 each for five MOOCs. At the bottom iof the post is a set of criteria to assess MOOCs I(that are pretty specific to this project).

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