Evidence-Based Dialogue Mapping for Teenagers
KMi’s Compendium tool supports rapid visual mapping of dialogues and debates through a mix of visual language, tagging and hypermedia structuring. With a track record of use in the workplace, we are now beginning to build evidence of its potential for critical thinking in schools.
With >40,000 downloads and an annual workshop, KMi supports an active Compendium user community (and a growing developer group). It has found application primarily, although not exclusively, in the workplace, the tool of choice for many information analysts and facilitators of collective sensemaking. But could we demonstrate that younger users would embrace its visual language and the extra rigour of thinking that argument mapping requires?
In an exciting workshop led by Ale Okada, a Research Fellow in the Hypermedia Discourse research programme, teenagers judged by their schools to be “gifted and talented” attended a science summer school, and were taught how to map and structure their reasoning about the impact of climate change on the UK. The results are summarised in a new article, and represent the first step in our programme to introduce the next generation to visual, network-centric thinking, a literacy that we think will become increasingly important.
Okada, A. and Buckingham Shum, S. (2008). Evidence-Based Dialogue Maps as a Research Tool to Investigate the Quality of School Pupils’ Scientific Argumentation, International Journal of Research and Method in Education, 31(3), pp. 291–315 (Special Issue: Coffin, C. and O’Halloran, K.A, (Eds.) Researching Argumentation in Educational Contexts: New Methods, New Directions). Article PrePrint: http://oro.open.ac.uk/11773
Oct 30th, 2010 at 10:12 am
[…] people to learn to deliberate and argue critically by making that thinking visible is reported in Evidence-Based Dialogue Mapping for Teenagers, Researching Argumentation in Educational Contexts, Knowledge Cartography, Arguing to Learn, and by […]
Dec 10th, 2010 at 11:12 am
[…] It was a rapid prototype knocked up on the fly, to indicate how we might develop the approach more systematically into sets of templates and tags to scaffold a team engaged in collaborative design of an enquiry project, but it seemed to work as an object to think with, and I look forward to exploring its potential further, since several people were enthusiastic. (Can Compendium be used to engage young people, not just adults planning activities for them? Yes!… examples 1/2/3/4) […]