Webinar: Exploring the Promise of Speech Technology for Education Research

Thursday January 12, from 10-11 am Pacific / 1-2 pm Eastern

Webinar Archive

The sophistication of technologies for processing and understanding spoken language has improved dramatically, as anyone who has interacted with Amazon Echo or Google’s translation tools can attest. Speech recognition, detection of individual speakers, natural language processing and more have radically improved in recent years. In fact, many lesser-known technologies can now automatically detect many features of speech, including question asking, dialog interchanges, word counts, indication of emotion or stress, and specific spoken keywords with high accuracy.

However, educational research has barely begun exploring their potential for areas as diverse as collaboration, argumentation, discourse analysis, emotion, and engagement, not to mention the discourse and conversation among students, teachers, and mentors that forms the core of teaching and learning.

Cynthia D’Angelo of SRI International and Chad Dorsey of Concord Consortium will present preliminary findings from a series of focus groups in 2016 with both education researchers and speech researchers.

Some of the questions that we will answer in this webinar:

  • How do we define this intersection of speech and education research?
  • What are current attempts at doing work in this area?
  • What are the funding avenues for this type of work?
  • What should researchers know when starting to work in this area?
  • What are the realities of this kind of interdisciplinary work?
  • What are the characteristics of good partners when working in this area?

There will be an opportunity for an open discussion about other issues and considerations that have not yet been brought up and discuss the current set of findings. All of these insights will contribute to white papers that will be released to the research communities to attract attention onto this emerging area of important work.

This work is supported by a NSF Cyberlearning CAP grant (IIS-1550800).

Suggested Citation

D’Angelo, C. & Dorsey, C. (2017, January). Exploring the Promise of Speech Technology for Education Research [Webinar]. In CIRCL Webinar Series. Retrieved from http://circlcenter.org/events/exploring-the-promise-of-speech-technology-for-education-research/