Artificial Intelligence
I wonder if someone will read these two articles in twenty years and laugh until they drop... Clearly we are making strides in technology every year, coming out with new gizmos and such, but looking further down the road is something we just can't do with accuracy. As for now, I can definitely see the validity in utilizing a CA for an online course or for something of that sort being that studies have shown that pedagogical agents can "increase motivation, perceptions of comfort, stimulate learning, and give a personal connection to learning (2).
Boys will be boys, so studying how women avatars are more likely to suffer abuse than male ones is a no-brainer to me. It would make an interesting debate, that is, on whether a teacher should have access to transcripts, but I suppose it totally depends on the circumstances.
I really think that the idea of having a "companion" throughout a lengthy course where an online portfolio is created is pretty cool. As the authors said, today we tend to "move towards learning with technology," rather than "from technology" (18). As for now, I really don't think that we have enough technology to provide pedagogical agents with enough content-based intelligence, but we'll look to the future and see!