Page 113 - Education in a Digital World

100 Local Variations

hair and facial make-up. Saya’s face was programmed to express basic emotions such
as happiness, sadness, surprise, fear, disgust and anger. The robot was trialled
successfully with ten- and eleven-year-old students, taking class registers, monitor-
ing students’ behaviour and issuing behavioural orders (such as ‘be quiet’) when
appropriate.
At first glance the official justifications for robots such as Saya appear to replicate
that of any other educational technology. Roboticists at the Tokyo University of
Science promoted Saya as ‘just a tool’, giving children “the opportunity to come
into contact with new technology” and providing teachers for remote rural areas
where “there are few teachers out there that can teach these lessons” (Kobayashi
2009). Again, as with most educational technologies, a sizable body of empirical and
anecdotal evidence has been produced to support the belief that teaching robots are
‘effective’ classroom tools. As Li et al. (2009, p.479) reported:

In Japan two robots visited a children’s elementary school for two weeks,
with the purpose of teaching English to children. This experiment showed
that, with the robot, children’s recall of new words improved, and that
there was a positive correlation between the frequencies of interacting with the
robot and learning performance.

Much is therefore being made within Japanese educational technology circles of
the educational potential of these new technologies (see also Carey and Markoff
2010, You et al. 2006). As the chief scientist behind the Saya robot recounted
proudly, “children even start crying when they are scolded” (Kobayashi 2009).
Yet despite these apparent successes, the enthusiasm for robotic and holographic
‘teachers’ remains a largely Japanese phenomenon – therefore raising a number of
questions regarding the factors and issues that lie behind the Japanese acceptance of
robot teachers.
As the US anthropologist Jennifer Robertson (2010) reasons, a number of social,
economic, political and cultural issues can be seen to underpin the ‘robotic turn’
within Japanese society. First, from a global economic perspective, Japanese industry
and government have focused strategically on robotics as the next ‘new’ technology
to re-establish Japan as the world’s leading high-technology producing economy. As
Robertson (2010, p.8) reasons, “Japanese robots are forecast to be in this century’s
global marketplace what Japanese automobiles where in the last century”. However,
the Japanese enthusiasm for robotic teachers stems far beyond economic competi-
tiveness. In particular, Japanese society is beset by a combination of demographic
problems – not least a rising shortage of labour, a rapidly ageing population and a
declining birth-rate. For Robertson, then, the notion of the female robot teacher is
an important aspect of the Japanese development of roboticised technologies as a
technological fix to these societal issues. As she explains, there is a growing move-
ment within male sectors of Japanese society against the trend of Japanese women
aged in their twenties and thirties refusing to marry and preferring instead to pursue