Review by: De Ascaniis, Silvia (2009-05-06)

This article appeared in a special issue of the International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (ijCSCL) entirely devoted to the use of argument graphs to support collaborative learning. It describes an experimental application of an argumentative software called Digalo to support a learning activity with the aim of examining how students construct knowledge and develop argumentation skills while debating a controversial question. This encompasses different disciplines:

• A psychological attempt to understand the meaning-making processes,
• pedagogical considerations on the difference between teaching a discipline (here argumentation) and providing students with the opportunity to learn form that discipline,
• instructional design strategies to integrate ICT tools in the instruction plan and to define the mediators' role,
• a new method for argumentation experts to analyze dialogical interactions, and
• suggestions for information scientists on how to improve the functionalities of visualization tools.

Digalo has been developed in the context of the European Project DUNES, Dialogical argUmentative Negotiation Educational Software. It is an interactive environment that helps to explicate and visualize the main elements of an argumentation (claims, arguments, counterarguments) thanks to visual intuitive functionalities like shapes and arrows, and thus to get a snapshot of the ongoing discussion. The article presents and comments the use of Digalo in a university setting by students debating a controversial question in History. Eleven students in their third and fourth year of studying psychology and education were asked to role-play the three main characters of the famous Valladolid Controversy, which took place between 1550 and 1551 during the Spanish invasion of the Aztec territories in the “New World”. The issue at stake was if New World Indians had a soul and therefore if they could be considered human beings. The activity runs through seven well-defined phases, consisting of: (1) a presentation of the historical context of the controversy, (2) the division of the class into three subgroups (one for each character), (3) the individual reading of historical texts, (4) a first collective debate supported by Digalo, (5) the subgroups' elaboration of a map with Digalo gathering arguments from the documents, (6) a second collective debate with Digalo and, finally, (7) a collection of comments from the participants about what they learned.

The data collected consist of two intergroup maps that represent the two collective debates. They were analyzed with a descriptive approach seeking to discover regularities rather than imposing theoretical categories. Two interconnected dimensions were considered: the topic construction made by the participants and argumentation processes developed during the collective debates. As for the first dimension, they focused on the content of the utterances written down in the shapes of Digalo and on when they appeared in the course of the discussion, in order to identify the subtopics brought by the groups to support their position. As for the argumentative processes, the unit of analysis they chose were the “argumentative sequence” suggested by Selma Leitão, consisting of an argument (position + justification), a counterargument (response to the argument) and a reply (reactions to the counterargument). The identified sequences were then individually observed and compared.

Results show that going on throughout the different activity phases, participants became even more able to identify themselves with the characters and to articulate their perspectives to each other, thus enriching their topic-specific knowledge. The maps built with Digalo provided a written and stable form of the discussion to look at, to discover interconnections among the utterances, to maintain the others' attention, to clarify points of view, and to render an idea salient.

This study shows that argumentation provides not only a strategic method to persuade other persons about an opinion or to evaluate the “reasonableness” of a standpoint, but that it is also a powerful tool for learning.