CITE & Faculty of Education Joint Seminar
Using Simulation and Language Intelligence to Support Digital Literacy Education: From Evaluation to Human-centered Chatbot Design
This talk addresses the latest research on using a simulation to drive youth’s experiential learning of digital literacy and citizenship skills. The speaker will not only introduce a large-scale learning program (currently reached over 700k users) that embodies the core principles of experiential learning, the evaluation of this program in terms of its effectiveness in improving youth’s digital literacy and citizenship skills, but also its undergoing new development – using large language models and human-centered design to build chatbots to enrich the experiential learning process. It will likely spark conversations and future collaborations on AI-based application development for digital literacy and citizenship education.
Dr. Ellen Wenting Zou is an Assistant Professor of Education at The Pennsylvania State University. She is co-hired by Penn State’s Institute for Computational and Data Sciences (ICDS). Dr. Zou earned her doctorate in Education at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research lies at the intersection of learning sciences, learning analytics and instructional design with artificial intelligence (AI). She is specialized in using advanced computational methods to understand the cognitive, social and affective processes in different online learning contexts by analyzing large-scale education data. She also designs AI-supported personalized learning environments to address diverse learning needs. Prior to joining Penn State, Zou worked as an e-learning specialist for the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, providing consultancy services on technology integration in learning and teaching for the enhancement of education equity, quality and efficiency in Global South.