“Robots are all about people” (Cynthia Breazeal, TEDWomen, December 2010).  In her TED talk, Breazeal focuses on the humanistic side of robotic technology and how such technologies affect the way people interact with robots.  It seems we tend to develop affective bonds (however loose they may be) to robots.  If robots are all about people, I believe robot-human interactions have the potential to greatly  enhance learning – particularly in conjunction with the mixed reality technology that Breazeal shows us near the end of her TED talk.

Education research has shown that learning in a social context is more effective than learning in isolation, and that affective involvement/investment (on the part of the learners) in such learning further enhances learning.  If robots have a way of tugging at our heart strings, this could very well be an effective way to pull learners into all sorts of learning!  How could this work in a classroom situation?  What would it look like?  More on this later as I continue to think about this while working on my class presentation about Conversation Analysis…