immersive tech

Using ChatGPT as a learning simulation tool

Reading Time: 6 minutes

This article was originally posted to LinkedIn during April 2023.

About five years ago at Brightwave, we worked on a chatbot prototype for The Samaritans. The chatbot was a learning simulation tool, with the chatbot acting out the part of Bella, a bullied teenager. The training was for listening volunteers who were increasingly supporting people via chat channels rather than telephone calls. Bellabot offered a safe place to fail, to hone their responses on a text-only interface.

Bellabot was a completely scripted experience that only had a small range of conversational prompts about how she was being bullied and how that made her feel. As a volunteer, you had to listen to and chat with Bella. Despite the limitations, everyone who ‘talked to’ Bella was astounded at how emotionally engaged they became in the conversation. It was as if Bella was a real person, not a bot. Immersive is a word usually reserved for high tech, virtual reality simulations, but this low tech, text-based experience was one of the most immersive learning experiences I’d ever had. Now that Brightwave has been merged into Capita most of the original online blogs and presentations seem to have been taken offline which is a real loss, but the team ran quite a lot of webinars and conference sessions to talk about this at the time, it was a fantastic learning experience in how to use chatbots as a learning tool.

Fast forward to 2023 and you’d need to have been living under a rock to not know that chatbots have moved on somewhat since then. ChatGPT offers some amazing possibilities. One of the earliest and most intriguing uses of ChatGPT was when some child realised you could use it to generate text based MUD games, where you give the chatbot a scenario to play out and let a text based adventure unfold.

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A vendor view of Learning Technologies 2017

Reading Time: 5 minutes

I spent two days last week at the Learning Technologies 2017 exhibition, working on the LEO stand (below). This annual event is split over two floors, with a paid conference upstairs and free exhibition downstairs. The stand was really busy for both days and the whole team came away absolutely exhausted, but I did manage to wander around the exhibition looking to see what the trends were this year and seeking out interesting new products.

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Is Google Glass failing our children?

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Following on from my initial exploration of Google Glass, I was keen to see what my kids would make of this device. As anyone who has seen a toddler using an iPad will know, some technology is just so intuitive that kids take to it like a duck to water. So I wondered what challenges Glass would throw up for a child, whether they would reflect my own challenges and frustrations in getting familiar with this device. After all, I had to undo decades of engrained user interface practice, whereas my daughter only had a few years of computing under her belt. Sharing Google Glass with my daughter turned out to be just as exciting and eye opening as I had hoped, but what really surprised me was the rather sobering reflection it led to, about just what kind of future we are leading our children towards.

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Getting to know Google Glass

Reading Time: 5 minutes

A colleague at Epic is part of the Glass Explorer programme, and this weekend I was pleased to be able to take a Google Glass home to learn and experiment with. We took the device up to the LT14 show last week and it was a bit of a draw on the stand and was great to introduce people to this new world of wearable technology.

GoogleGlass_MarkA

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