Computer-Supported Collaborative Argumentation for Learning Communities

Workshop Topics

Argumentation research has roots in fields including philosophy, education and design theory. CSCA is concerned with the design of human-computer interaction to augment and mediate argumentation in groups, and broadly, addresses the problems of supporting individuals or groups in:

Analysing the structure of ideas and ill-structured problems
and
Representing and debating the merits of different perspectives.

This workshop is focused on the intersection between CSCA and CSCL: what properties of CSCA environments can support learning? "Learning" is defined from a lifelong learning perspective, embracing physical and distributed communities of practice in both academic school/university contexts, and professional workplaces.

CSCA's successes and failures result from complex interactions between factors including domain and argumentation knowledge, training in CSCA tools, user interface design, and motivation to use CSCA. A focus on any one factor in isolation has proven to be shortsighted.

Intended Audiences

We invite participation from researchers and practitioners actively engaged in the design or evaluation of CSCA systems for learning communities:

• Academic learning communities include high school and university students (e.g. learning to analyse debates and construct scholarly cases), and 'qualified researchers' (e.g. analysing a research literature; formal peer review; conducting structured debates about problems).
• Non-academic learning communities have CSCA-relevant concerns such as analysing ill-structured problems, improving reflective practice and maintaining group memories and rationale (which are course also relevant for academics).

Pre-Workshop Activities

The workshop is adopting the 'bootstrapping' approach of using its own tools to represent its own ideas, with the goal of grounding online and face-face discussions in real, familiar examples:

• workshop participants will use a CSCA web/e-mail environment to discuss position papers prior to and possibly following the conference
• participants will be strongly encouraged to use their CSCA tools to model the ideas and pre-workshop discussions which they will then present at the workshop.

Workshop Format

The workshop adopts an innovative format, starting Saturday afternoon, followed by dinner and informal discusion, concluding the following morning. The program will build on the pre-workshop discussion amongst participants, prioritising discussion, software demonstrations and design critiques to make the best use of our time together.

Post-Workshop Activities

The final part of the workshop will address ways in which to build on the event. Possibilities for discussion include:

• consolidation of workshop papers into a journal special issue
• a more structured software repository for CSCA technologies
• XML DTD working group
• follow-on workshop

Submission Requirements & Review Process

Participation will be limited to 15, with papers selected by the organizing committee.

Authors should indicate clearly if there are associated demonstrations that they will bring.

Position papers should not exceed 6 A4 pages total (12 point font, single column).

Preferred format: HTML (but Word and RTF also accepted)

Organizing Committee

Simon Buckingham Shum (Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK)
Chad Carr (Northern Illinois University, USA)
Jeffrey Conklin (Group Decision Support Systems, Inc., USA)
Thomas Gordon (German National Research Center for Information Technology, Germany)
Albert M. Selvin ( Bell Atlantic Corporation, USA)
Michael Twidale (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)

Workshop Chair's Contact Details: