Description:

MORANA ALAC
Communication and Science Studies, UC San Diego

"On Everyday Encounters with an Educational Robot and the Quest for Individualized Instruction"

Description: US mass media and academic discourses on digital technologies for education are animated by the idea of individualized instruction. I engage this idea in the context of an ethnographic study of a social robotics project in a university laboratory of machine learning. In this project, the researchers design low-cost educational robots geared toward children between 18 and 24 months of age, and, to inform and further evolve the robot’s design, immerse the robot in a preschool setting. Following scientists around, I ended up observing the preschool’s local methods employed in interacting with the robot. In this talk, I pay attention to touch, spatial organizations, and how communicative modes, such as gesture, speech, gaze and body orientation, feature in concerted action between preschool inhabitants, researchers and their robot. While the design of educational robots uses as a resource and inscribes the idea of individualized instruction in its technologies, I show how particular instances of the embodied and multisensory interaction on the occasion of robot’s design and use both produce and challenge this idea.

Research: Morana Alac conducts ethnographic research of scientific laboratories and other settings of technology production and use. She works with video to focus on the dynamics of embodied social interaction.

Alac's main project regards laboratories of cognitive science, neuroscience, and robotics. She is interested in how scientists learn about human thinking and behavior by employing new technologies -- social robots, motion-capture systems, face recognition, and functional magnetic resonance imaging.

reception to follow