Helping Users Customize Their Pedagogical Agents: Issues, Approaches and Examples

Pedagogical agents are user interface agents embedded in interactive learning environments to provide awareness of social interaction and knowledge building. We have developed and evaluated pedagogical agents for computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) scenarios. These scenarios, which are open-ended, have stimulated our interest in customizable (end-user modifiable) agents. We have built a pedagogical agent customizer (RuleEditor) that allows end users to modify the presentation (“what to say”) and intervention (“when to say”) attributes of the agent. We survey past work on customizable agents and group them into information search and filtering, delegation of repetitive tasks, and advice giving and design support. The RuleEditor reuses past work and contributes to it in new ways by bringing in the specific concerns of distributed collaborative learning, emphasizing the social dimension of human-agent interaction. We end the paper by discussing the implications of customizing interface agents in multi-user environments, which includes the means for users to exercise a new form of control over their environment (“social empowerment”) that may extend as far as redefining social relations within a community of users.