Sherry Turkle and Exquisite Learning
Sherry Turkle's Life on the Screen has provided us with a lot of insight as we developed the Exquisite Learning environment. Turkle's book examined how personal computers and the Internet affect our sense of self-identity. She discussed how we have multiple selves that contribute to a whole self instead of a purely single identity. Keeping this idea in mind, Exquisite learning was developed to help learners explore their multiple selves.
In Life on the Screen, Turkle asked, "How can we be multiple and coherent at the same time?" She points to the contradiction of having many identities, yet only having one overall identity. She answers the question using Robert Jay Lifton's The Protean Self. Lifton proposed that our personality is like "a healthy proteon self. It is capable, like Proteus, of fluid transformations but is grounded in coherence and a moral outlook. It is multiple but integrated." In other words, one can have a sense of self without being one self (Turkle, 258.)
In creating Exquisite Learning, we recognize the idea of a multiple self and hope to foster a learner's ability to understand his or her self. Learners will use the Exquisite Learning environment by creating self-expressive artwork and writing accompanying reflection pieces. Two bots will guide learners: a thinking bot and a feelings bot. The thinking bot is designed to ask learners thought provoking questions about their writing and artwork by using key words such as "analyze," "elaborate," "imagine," and more. The feelings bot is designed to encourage a learner's self-expression. For example, if the learner writes, "I am feeling happy." The feelings bot will recognize the word happy and ask the learner to be more descriptive than happy.
The bots are to be designed using a program similar to the description Turkle gives of ELIZA. According to Turkle, the way ELIZA works is through its ability to "recognize the strings of characters that make up words, but…not 'know' the meaning of its communications or those it received (Turkle, 105.)" For example, if a user types, "I am sad," ELIZA would respond by saying, "Why are you sad?" The program would see "I am X" and respond, "Why are you X?"
Although ELIZA cannot truly understand, in the human sense, what a user would type into it, ELIZA would be capable of producing a thought provoking response. Despite the fact it is a computer program, "ELIZA is fascinating not only because it is lifelike but because it made people aware of their own desires…(Turkle, 110.)" The thinking and feelings bots we will use in Exquisite Learning will have the same attributes as ELIZA, except that the thinking bot will strictly focus on guiding a learner's thinking process while the feelings bot will strictly focus on guiding a learner's description of feelings.
By facilitating a learner's thinking about his or her own feelings and thoughts, we hope to promote self-awareness as the learner explores his or her self, yet multiple, identity.
Source:
Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.
Last updated: December 7, 2002