Review by: Reichert, Raimond (2004-07-03)

Computer supported collaborative learning is an important form of e-learning, particularly in open and distance learning. This article addresses one type of collaborative activity, educational synchronous online dialogue between peers. It argues that previous work has shown that structuring and guiding learners dialogue can lead to clear and significant educational benefits, and can help students to develop their argumentation skill.

The authors have developed AcademicTalk, an open source tool designed to provide more structure in online text chats. In standard chat interfaces, messages are displayed in chronological order, which results in sequential incoherence – reply messages are often displaced from the message they reply by intervening messages that may be off-topic. AcademicTalk structures messages by time and topic thread, as is typically done in discussion forums. To help learn to argue, it also requires students to choose sentence openers from a pre-defined list for each message. Sentence openers are phrases such as “Let me elaborate”, “Can you give an example”, or “Is there evidence?” These openers are aimed at furthering argumentation, e. g. challenging, giving evidence, and requesting elaboration. They also make the structure of a dialogue more explicit.

Though the article’s focus is on the educational design of the AcademicTalk software, preliminary findings from evaluations are also discussed. One result shows that using the Talk tool, the number of off-topic messages dropped to 1% of all messages, compared with 28% when using a standard chat tool. Dialogues in Talk were more argumentative: 13% of Talk messages either requested or referred to evidence, compared to only 6% of chat messages. Also, the percentage of reasoned claims and rebuttals was significantly higher in Talk dialogues than in chat dialogues.

The tool developed by the authors shows that interface design, with a sound underlying educational design, can result in clear educational benefits. From an interface perspective, the tool is a small enhancement of standard chat tools, yet the impact on the dialogue is significant. As there is an increasing educational use of computer mediated communication, it would be interesting to see more tools to explicitly support online dialogue.