Prof. Andrew Ravenscroft from the Learning Technology Research Institute at London Metropolitan University is visiting the group today. He will be delivering a seminar entitled, The thinking web? Designing tools and mashups for cyber-argumentation today at 12 noon in Wolfson.
This talk will review over a decade of design-based research that has: investigated the relationship between argumentation and thinking in learning contexts; and, designed digital tools that model argumentation and support its practice. This Learning Sciences approach to learning interaction design centres around the notion of ‘dialogue games’. This is a paradigm that can be used analytically or prescriptively to further or understanding of dialectical dialogue processes and how these can be
modelled and promoted for educational purposes.
The talk will emphasise: our work in applied computational linguistics that originally investigated and modelled educational argumentation; the design and evaluation of deployable dialogue game tools, on a relatively large-scale, that arose out of the computational modelling; and, present
our ongoing work that is synthesising dialogue game technologies and ideas with SOA and social software approaches – to realise accessible and widespread mashups, or ‘eco-systems’, for cyber-argumentation.
Finally, I will reflect on and open up the discussion about where this work might be taking us in terms of future web-technologies and related digital practices, reflecting on questions such as “What sort of
thinking do we need, by man and machines, in the 21C?”
