Social Feedback as a Creative Process

Arguably one of the most important activities of a university is to provide environments where students develop the wide variety of social and intellectual skills necessary for giving and receiving feedback. We are not talking here about the kinds of activity typically associated with the term “feedback” — such as that which occurs through individual course evaluation questionnaires or more universal systems such as the National Student Survey, but the profoundly creative and human act of giving and receiving feedback in order to validate, challenge and inspire. So as to emphasise we are talking about this kind of feedback, we coin the term “creative feedback” to distinguish it from the pre-conceived rather dreary compliance-inflected notions of feedback and set out in this paper to characterise its qualities. In order to ground and motivate our definition and use of “creative feedback” we take a historical look at the two concepts of creativity/creative and feedback. Our intention is to use this rich history to motivate both the choice of these two words, and the reason to bring them together. In doing so we wish to emphasise the characteristics of an educational philosophy underpinned by social interaction. By describing those qualities necessary to characterise creative feedback this paper sets out an educational philosophy for how schools, communities and universities could develop their learning environments. What we present here serves not only as a manifesto for designing learning environments generally, but as a driver for designing technologies to support online social learning, as captured in the concept of social Moocs [70]. Technology not only provides us with new opportunities to support such learning but also to investigate and evidence the way in which we learn and the most effective learning environments

Creative Feedback: a manifesto for social learning

Arguably one of the most important activities of a university is to provide environments where students develop the wide variety of social and intellectual skills necessary for giving and receiving feedback. We are not talking here about the kinds of activity typically associated with the term “feedback” -such as that which occurs through individual course evaluation questionnaires or more universal systems such as the National Student Survey, but the profoundly creative and human act of giving and receiving feedback in order validate, challenge and inspire. So as to emphasise we are talking about this kind of feedback, we coin the term “creative feedback” to distinguish it from the pre-conceived rather dreary compliance-inflected notions of feedback and set out in this paper to characterise its qualities. In order to ground and motivate our definition and use of “creative feedback” we take a historical look at the two concepts of creativity/creative and feedback. Our intention is to use this rich history to motivate both the choice two words, and the reason to bring them together. In doing so we wish to emphasise the characteristics of an educational philosophy underpinned by social interaction. By describing those qualities necessary to characterise creative feedback this paper sets out an educational philosophy for how schools, communities and universities could develop their learning environments. What we present here serves not only as a manifesto for designing learning environments generally but as a driver for designing technologies to support online social learning. Technology not only provides us with new opportunities to support such learning but also to investigate and evidence the way in which we learn and the most effective learning environments

Weaving a fabric of socially aware agents

The expansion of web-enabled social interaction has shed light on social aspects of intelligence that have not been typically studied within the AI paradigm so far. In this context, our aim is to understand what constitutes intelligent social behaviour and to build computational systems that support it. We argue that social intelligence involves socially aware, autonomous individuals that agree on how to accomplish a common endeavour, and then enact such agreements. In particular, we provide a framework with the essential elements for such agreements to be achieved and executed by individuals that meet in an open environment. Such framework sets the foundations to build a computational infrastructure that enables socially aware autonomy.This work has been supported by the projects EVE(TIN2009-14702-C02-01) and AT (CSD2007-0022)Peer Reviewe

Towards a Design Framework for Controlled Hybrid Social Games

We propose a framework for designing and deploying games where social behaviour is kept under control. This framework may also be used for designing other dynamic coordinated social spaces.We would like to thank the referees for their comments which helped improve this paper. This research was partly funded by SINTELNET FET Open Coordinated Action (FP7-ICT-2009-C Project No. 286370) and Consolider AT project CSD2007-0022 INGENIO 2010 of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.Peer Reviewe

Social machines for education driven by feedback agents

The aim of this paper is to explain some of the ways in which multi agent system (MAS) theory can be used to describe, design and enhance social machines (also referred to as Socio-Cognitive Systems). We believe there is a really opportunity for the MAS community to engage with emerging theory and practice of designing such systems. Social machines - also referred to as Socio-Cognitive Systems from the MAS community - are terms used to refer to the recent breed of technological systems which allow human and computational agents to socially interact, typically on a large scale and sometimes towards achieving shared goals. Examples include social networking platforms and crowd sourced encyclopaedias. The discussion of social machines and MAS is taken from three perspectives. Firstly, the theoretical notion of an abstract social machine as a socio-cognitive system containing humans and agents is introduced. Secondly, a speci#12;c instance of a social machine which has been designed to enable social music learning supported by agents is described. Thirdly, an agent architecture which is designed for operation within educational social machines is discussed, with particular focus on what we believe is the core currency of these machines: feedback.Much of of this work was undertaken as part of the FP7 project in the Technology Enhanced Learning Program called Practice and Performance Analysis Inspiring Social Education (PRAISE) involving the 1st and 2nd authors. We acknowledge Harry Brenton, Marco Gillies Andreu Grimalt-Reynes, Jonathan James, Edgar Jones, Julian Padget and Harko Harko Verhagen who have helped in discussions. The second author received support from the European Network for Social Intelligence, SINTELNET (FET Open Coordinated Action FP7-ICT-2009-C Project No. 286370) for short term visits to the IIIA to work with the 3rd author.Peer Reviewe

The pop song generator: designing an online course to teach collaborative, creative AI

This article describes and evaluates a new online AI-creativity course. The course is based around three near-state-of-the-art AI models combined into a pop song generating system. A fine-tuned GPT-2 model writes lyrics, Music-VAE composes musical scores and instrumentation and Diffsinger synthesises a singing voice. We explain the decisions made in designing the course which is based on Piagetian, constructivist 'learning-by-doing'. We present details of the five-week course design with learning objectives, technical concepts, and creative and technical activities. We explain how we overcame technical challenges to build a complete pop song generator system, consisting of Python scripts, pre-trained models, and Javascript code that runs in a dockerised Linux container via a web-based IDE. A quantitative analysis of student activity provides evidence on engagement and a benchmark for future improvements. A qualitative analysis of a workshop with experts validated the overall course design, it suggested the need for a stronger creative brief and ethical and legal content