Bridging the Spheres: Political and Personal Conversation in Public and Private Spaces

For some theorists, talk about politics is infrequent, difficult, divisive, and, to be efficacious, must proceed according to special rules in protected spaces. We, however, examined ordinary political conversation in common spaces, asking Americans how freely and how often they talked about 9 political and personal topics at home, work, civic organizations, and elsewhere. Respondents felt free to talk about all topics. Most topics were talked about most frequently at home and at work, suggesting that the electronic cottage is wired to the public sphere. Political conversation in most loci correlated significantly with opinion quality and political participation, indicating that such conversation is a vital component of actual democratic practice, despite the emphasis given to argumentation and formal deliberation by some normative theorists

Ladd Looking Forward - A Reading Group

In the summer of 2017, the staff of Ladd Library and Muskie Archives at Bates College embarked upon a semester-long, bi weekly reading group. Facing the upcoming search for new leadership, we spent the Fall 2017 semester discussing a broad array of topics relevant to the profession as a whole and what we might consider for our own future. We asked all participants to engage with a growth mindset, and set down rules to push the conversation beyond “this is the way we’ve always done it” as a justification against change

A Generative Model of Group Conversation

Conversations with non-player characters (NPCs) in games are typically confined to dialogue between a human player and a virtual agent, where the conversation is initiated and controlled by the player. To create richer, more believable environments for players, we need conversational behavior to reflect initiative on the part of the NPCs, including conversations that include multiple NPCs who interact with one another as well as the player. We describe a generative computational model of group conversation between agents, an abstract simulation of discussion in a small group setting. We define conversational interactions in terms of rules for turn taking and interruption, as well as belief change, sentiment change, and emotional response, all of which are dependent on agent personality, context, and relationships. We evaluate our model using a parameterized expressive range analysis, observing correlations between simulation parameters and features of the resulting conversations. This analysis confirms, for example, that character personalities will predict how often they speak, and that heterogeneous groups of characters will generate more belief change.Comment: Accepted submission for the Workshop on Non-Player Characters and Social Believability in Games at FDG 201

The development of tape recorded discussions and check lists for evaluating progression in grades one through four.

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

The Choice of Topics in Male, Female and Mixed-sex Groups of Students of Petra Christian University in Their Chatting

This study analyzed some conversations in the male, female and male-female groups of some university students. Using McCarthy\u27s classification of topics, the results show that \u27Persons\u27 is the typical topic in the female group, while \u27Objects/ belongings\u27 is the most favorite topic in the male group. In the mixed-sex group, it is interesting to see how both sexes negotiated the topics by proposing the typical topics of the other sex group

Negotiating textual talk : conversation analysis, pedagogy, and the organisation of online asynchronous discourse

This paper uses Conversation Analysis to investigate the ways in which participants in an online asynchronous postgraduate reading group managed and negotiated their contributions within the discussion. Using the conversation analytic concerns with sequential organisation, adjacency pairs and topicality, this article shows the analytic insights that this perspective can bring to the examination of written asynchronous discourse. The paper shows that in the section of the discussion analysed here, the discourse displayed remarkable similarities to the ways in which face-to-face conversation has been seen to operate in terms of the organisation of conversational turns, the application of specific interactional rights, the lineal development of topics of conversation, and the structural use of question-answer turn pairs. The paper concludes by showing how this form of analysis can relate to the formation of reflexive pedagogy in which course design can be created to take account of such findings. It shows how a detailed understanding of how pedagogy is played out in interaction is fundamental for reflecting on the relationship between pedagogic aims and educational practice

Crowdsourcing for Reminiscence Chatbot Design

In this work-in-progress paper we discuss the challenges in identifying effective and scalable crowd-based strategies for designing content, conversation logic, and meaningful metrics for a reminiscence chatbot targeted at older adults. We formalize the problem and outline the main research questions that drive the research agenda in chatbot design for reminiscence and for relational agents for older adults in general