‘It’s Almost Like Talking to a Person’: Student Disclosure to Pedagogical Agents in Sensitive Settings.

This paper presents findings of a pilot study which used pedagogical agents to examine disclosure in educational settings. The study used responsive evaluation to explore how use of pedagogical agents might affect students’ truthfulness and disclosure by asking them to respond to a lifestyle choices survey delivered by a web-based pedagogical agent. Findings indicate that emotional connection with pedagogical agents were intrinsic to the user’s sense of trust and therefore likely to affect levels of truthfulness and engagement. The implications of this study are that truthfulness, personalisation and emotional engagement are all vital components in using pedagogical agents to enhance online learning

Blog Content and Structure, Cognitive Style and Metacognition

Fifty blogs were analysed and classified according to both their content and formal structure. The SOLAT questionnaire, aimed at assessing the right (i.e., intuitive-holistic) vs. left (i.e., systematic-analytical) thinking style, was put online, and blog owners were asked to complete it in order to match their cognitive style to the "style" of their blog. Respondents were also asked some metacognitive questions in order to explore their awareness of the psychological processes that are activated by the blog that they had devised, both in their own and in other people's mind. Results showed that blog owners are able to use effective communication strategies by differentiating the formal structure of bogs according to the content, but they lack metacognitive awareness about the mental processes activated by the blog. No relationship between the blog owner's cognitive style and blog style was found. Implications for the educational use of blogs are discussed