To be or not to be... in the classroom [Thesis]

The door opens to a classroom. We see tables, chairs, teaching materials. Students and their teacher enter for class. Among them, a face smiles on a screen posted on a sort of light pedestal, on wheels. The student, who cannot physically attend the class for health reasons, nevertheless circulates in a shared, responsive learning environment by means of a telepresence robot.

This technology, which emerged in the 2010s, addresses several needs: reshaping the organization of work by companies, controlling the carbon footprint by reducing travel, physical distancing for health reasons, and, in the case of this dissertation, an inclusive approach in a traditional teaching context.

A thesis that confronts a technology

Dorothée Furnon conducted the fieldwork for her thesis as part of a doctoral contract at École Centrale de Lyon. One of the challenges was to produce a design guide for a telepresence robot, which meets the ergonomic criteria identified in experiments with students and teachers. At the end of her work, she posed pragmatic and hedonistic criteria for this guide, as well as the desirable level of interaction in an educational setting.

The robots that were used in her action research are the Beam models, produced by the American company Suitable Technologies, and distributed by Awabot in France. Initially designed as part of a diversification of videoconferencing modalities for the company, by implementing an individualization of the interaction, their use has been expanded and evolved in a traditional teaching context.

"The notable evolution in the shift from videoconferencing to telepresence robotics is in the shift from a relatively symmetrical interaction to an asymmetry of postures and agentivity. The person piloting the robot [...]has an open space on the territory of the other and a certain autonomy in its exploration. [...]His interlocutor has the spaces of the robot and the spaces on the screen. [...]In this situation, the interactants are no longer in a mirrored or reciprocal posture. They do not present each other in the same perceptual modality."

Reality and presence revisited

Reality is mixed and composed of different environments that meet, requiring empathetic adaptation on the part of the teacher and sensitive engagement on the part of the student. In addition, the technology requires the establishment of a technical ecosystem necessary for remote control of the robots, as well as identified human relays in the institution.

The robots are completely acted in a perceptual modality, and controlled by their users; in this, they can "represent" the person in a remote environment as the avatar of a god or a player. In this regard and in a polysemy of presence and mobility, Adel, one of the students, speaks in a recorded interview of "coming as a robot."

In fact, what is presence in a learning context? For Dorothée Furnon:

"presence is multimodal and polysemous, it [is]not reduced to its condition of a body caught in a unity of time and place.[...]We situate[its] modality in an interactionist approach, that is, [it]is considered in its reciprocal process of assignment between the person and the situation in which she is engaged."

In an educational situation, this concerns the pedagogical relationship, the use of the workspace, the body techniques acquired by the student, the process of knowledge construction, the pedagogical format, and the user's engagement in the situation.

With the participation of a robot, the student must renegotiate his or her presence within an "embodied approach to the human-machine relationship." "Technology is not an isolated entity that would come to impact the social world as a mere deterministic product. The social and technology are intertwined spaces that mutually merge."

The reciprocal perceptual renegotiation

For the author of the thesis, the stakes of the encounter of the digital and physical world by means of a telepresence robot are articulated around three axes, which she outlines in conclusion:

• "an intersubjectively negotiated access to the environment;
• the transformation of the robot as a spatial referential to make manifest social behaviors;
• the construction of common spaces of meanings to achieve a common perception of the environment. "

Finally, to summarize her research, she states:

"In a teaching context configured in a face-to-face setting and mediated by a telepresence robot, the academic inclusion of the student-user refers to a reciprocal perceptual renegotiation, of the co-presence of the user and the remote environment."

His dissertation shows one of the moments in the dance that humans and technologies share in a world of constant re-creation.

Image - Montage with the Robot Beam - Suitable

To Read

Dorothée Furnon, Using a Telepresence Robot as an Inclusive Technology: What Challenges for Traditional Education? Université Lumière-Lyon 2 (UL2), 2018 (available at HAL).