Virtual Peers for Studying and Scaffolding Real Social Interaction

I've just got back from the AISB Convention in Aberdeen. I'm just about up-to-date on reading email and LJ but a long way behind in terms of responding. There are also lots of things I want to blog about including several really interesting talks. I was going to do one big "interesting talks" post but that was intimidating so I thought I'd do lots of short ones.

The first is Justine Cassell's talk on Virtual Peers for Studying and Scaffolding Real Social Interaction. Justine had studied interaction, specifically storytelling, in children and created a "Virtual Peer" which would then interact with a child. This interaction was via a doll's house (half real half virtual). Certain parts of the Doll's House were covered and a child would put a doll behind one of these covers to let the virtual child use it (apparently only AI researchers try to break this mechanism and have one doll in two places). The working of the Virtual Peer involves Justine sitting in a cupboard with a control panel directing its actions and responses. One of the really interesting bits was when they extended this work to autistic children and compared their interactions with the Virtual Peer to their interactions with a real child. The autistic child responded more often and participated more in the joint story-telling when interacting with the Virtual Peer than with a real child - they have some hypotheses why this might be (some of which are testable and some of which aren't - or at least they can't think how yet). They are extending the work to allow children to construct and operate the control panel themselves and are hoping this will enable autistic children to "experiment" with social interaction.

Eldest

When I reviewed Eragon I said I wouldn't be reading the rest of the trilogy. However when my SiL discovered I hadn't read this she thrust it upon me. My SiL had never read a book until she met B's brother and still isn't the sort of person who habitually has at least one book "on the go" at any one time. So, as B says, you have to have respect for a book that gets her enthused. All that said I feel much the same about Eldest as I did about Eragon with the additional caveat that Eldest substitutes events for training sequences and so the novel no longer really benefits from the virtue of paciness. On the plus side Paolini has resisted the temptation to make Eragon's mentor into a "quirky" yoda-esque figure for which I think we should be grateful. Don't get me wrong, Yoda is great, but I'm not sure I could have taken 200 pages of a thinly disguised Yoda rip-off. The book, of course, ends with the "I am your father" scene - only in this case it's "I am your brother"; the Princess Leia part having been conveniently split between Eragon's (male) best friend and an unobtainable Elven princess thus avoiding all the uncomfortable issues raised in Star Wars about lusting over your sister. Though I'm sure the slash writers have ably filled the void thereby left in the tale.

At the end of the day its still a readable novel and, despite my complaints about the training sequences, a relatively pacy one. On the downside its roots are still painfully obvious. As before, I'm more interested to see what Paolini is writing in 10 years time than in reading the rest of this triolgy.