Digital Dialogue Games and InterLoc: A Deep Learning Design for Collaborative Argumentation on the Web

Educational practice and research both readily acknowledge the challenge of getting students, in online contexts, to argue in order to think together in reasoned and intelligent, or ‘scholarly’, ways. In addressing this significant concern we will describe the pedagogical design and rationale, implementation and evaluation of InterLoc - a web-based tool supporting collaborative argumentation and other forms of real-time learning dialogue. InterLoc operationalises a well-attested paradigm of Digital Dialogue Games (DDGs) and provides re-usable learner generated content – that is a textual representation of players’ collaborative thinking (or Collaborative Thinking Text) that can be incorporated into related learning activities and used in various ways. Five case studies, along with a synthesis of the findings are reported, that were performed in a rich and varied range of learning contexts with over 350 students and 10 tutors. Inspired by positive findings from these, we are currently exploring more widespread exploitation through incorporating the approach and technology with near-future semantic and mobile technologies, so this ongoing work will also be briefly discussed.

Keywords: Action research, collaborative learning, collaborative tools, deep learning design, evaluation, games, InterLoc, social software, thinking and reasoning.