Discussions > Why emotion-adaptive TEL is crucial...
Why emotion-adaptive TEL is crucial...
|
Fridolin Wild
121 days ago |
My uncle used to work in the library of a university. Since he was the head of the supervisory office, he was called every now and then on a week-end to come in, typically around the time of the final exams in the study programmes, as the library building had gained over the years notoriety as the highest building of the university for being a qualified spot to commit suicide.
Why am I telling this morbid story? To illustrate the following point: Cognition and affect are linked; and understanding and utilising this connection to positively influence engagement in learning experiences is surely a necessity. Stress situations can negatively influence learning and cognition; highest performance is often reported ‘in the zone’ where everything fits together and everything just flows. Curiousity, boredom, frustration – all these are cognitive-affective states that impede on learning experiences.
At the same time, affective computing has had break-throughs in recent years: sentiment detection helps to analyse the emotion expressed in textual messages, skin conductivity provides insights into stress levels, facial expression recognition detects whether a person is smiling. Affect states in learning are different to affect states in general. Further investigating this and making use of detection systems is within grasp.
|
|
Nicolas Balacheff
121 days ago |
"Affect states in learning are different to affect states in general."
-- could you comment that more precisely? Is there evidence of these differences?
|
|
Fridolin Wild
120 days ago |
Ekman's taxonomy of basic emotions lists e.g. anger and sadness (or in the revised version guilt and shame). For learning, affective states such as delight, boredom, or frustration are much more important.
|
|
Nicolas Balacheff
119 days ago |
Just remember feeling guilty because of a "mistake" (especially spelling mistakes in my case...), or being ashamed for a misconception just revealed in a discussion with peers or the teacher. I am uncertain about the relative importance of one or the other of these "emotions". Actually, emotion means very different things whether you consider them from a behavioural or a neuroscience perspective. The former is quite ill defined and proposes general categories (although it seems that in each case one seems to know what it means). The later refers to more specific physiologic phenomena, relating rewards and memory and treatment of information (e.g. The Physiology of Truth: Neuroscience and Human Knowledge from jean-Pierre Changeux). I think that understanding and exploring this perspective could allow us to inform the kind of interactions or feedback we implement in TEL environments.
|
