DEVELOPMENT OF ARGUMENTATION SKILLS VIA

LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS

Bringing together Argumentation Support Tools and Learning Management

Systems

Nikos Karousos

, Spyros Papadakis

, Michalis Xenos

, Nikos Karacapilidis

and Manolis Tzagarakis

Internal Assessment and Education Unit, Hellenic Open University, 26222, Patras, Greece

IMIS Lab, MEAD, University of Patras, 26504, Patras, Greece

Department of Economics, University of Patras, 26 504 Rio, Patras, Greece

Keywords: Argumentation, Argumentation Support Tools, Learning Management Systems.

Abstract: This paper highlights the need for bringing together features and functionalities from both Argumentation

Support Tools and Learning Management Systems (LMSs) in order to support the trainers in the

construction and implementation of argumentation learning designs. In this context, it is also proposed that

sharing learning designs across argumentation and critical thinking is one way to introduce different

teaching and learning approaches that address this issue. The development and implementation of an

Argumentation Learning Activity Tool (or the exploitation of an existing one) within an LMS will help to

effectively address the problem of teaching argumentation skills.

1 INTRODUCTION

In tomorrow's learning and working environments,

people will be more and more involved in tasks

within multidisciplinary, multicultural and

physically distributed teams. The participation in

such tasks puts heavy demands on the individual,

both in the cognitive and social realms. On the one

hand, one must capitalize on informal reasoning

(cognitive) skills, such as constructing and

evaluating arguments. On the other hand, one must

make use of social skills of collaboration. However,

research indicates (Ian Beatty, 2004) that people are

not prepared to exploit such cognitive and social soft

skills, as practices, from primary school to

university, very poorly address their acquisition.

A recently European Union (EU) study (PISA

2009) pointed out that although the EU learners are

continuously supported with new educational

methods, material and processes aiming at

enhancing learning, the level of proficiency in

reading and the overall learning skills remain in a

not satisfactory degree. The major amount of the

learners cannot perform tasks relative to location and

organization of information. Therefore, the need of

improvement of the learners’ critical thinking in

most of the EU countries is imperative.

The issue of critical thinking is strongly related

to the development of argumentation skills, since the

later is a crucial factor for the former. A lot of

learners have not the ability to craft a balanced,

reasoned, well-thought argument. They too often

confuse argument with opinion – that is, they write

papers that are subjective and self-oriented rather

than objective and reader-based. They are sometime

black and white thinkers, unable or unwilling to

address the complexities of an issue. The

competence to comprehend and follow arguments of

a scientific nature is, we would contend, a crucial

aspect of scientific literacy in its fundamental sense.

Inferring meaning from science texts requires the

ability to recognize the standard genres of science,

their appropriate use and, in the case of argument, to

evaluate the claims and evidence advanced. The

construction of evidence-based arguments requires

critical thinking and abstract reasoning. In particular,

apart from knowledge building, collaborative

argumentation may promote more complex and

critical thinking (Wegerif et al., 1999) which is the

base for EU policies in the field of formal education,

no-formal education and informal learning.

Moreover, learning design for the Life Long

474

Karousos N., Papadakis S., Xenos M., Karacapilidis N. and Tzagarakis M..

DEVELOPMENT OF ARGUMENTATION SKILLS VIA LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS - Bringing together Argumentation Support Tools and

Learning Management Systems.

DOI: 10.5220/0003691304740477

In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development (KEOD-2011), pages 474-477

ISBN: 978-989-8425-80-5

 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

Learning environment is a complex task, especially

in light of the increasing diversity of the adult

learners. Learning materials need to be designed to

take advantage of different adult learner ability

levels, learning approaches & media, and curriculum

developed to support a huge variety of outcomes in

argumentation. The quality of the learning

experience is highly dependent on the teacher, and

how they conduct the learning process. If we are to

succeed in using technology to transform education,

then we need the specialized tools and environments

for learning design that will enable the teaching

community to act in the most scholarly and

professional way possible in pursuit of educational

innovation (Laurillard, 2007).

Most of the existing Argumentation Support

Tools have a high level of formality. Unfortunately

when using these tools the focus often is shifting

from learning of argumentation to understanding the

tool. On the other hand, the Learning Management

Systems (LMS) have been attempted to encourage a

variety of learning activities involved in critical

thinking but have been unable to adequately support

efficiently the development of argumentation skills.

This paper highlights the need for bringing

together features and functionality from both

Argumentation Support Tools and LMSs in order to

support the trainers in the construction and

implementation of argumentation learning designs.

In this context, it is also proposed that sharing

learning designs across argumentation and critical

thinking is one way to introduce different teaching

and learning approaches that address this issue. The

development and implementation of an

Argumentation Learning Activity Tool (or the

exploitation of an existing one) within an LMS will

help to effectively address the problem of teaching

argumentation.

2 SUPPORT FOR TEACHING

ARGUMENTATION

2.1 Argumentation Support Tools

Existing approaches to support argumentation

through ICT vary in terms of the problem dimension

they principally address and the context they

particularly target: One category, focuses on a

meaningful representation of the related items and

their interconnections in a collaborative environment

while others pay more attention in the provided

functionality for structuring and evaluating one or

more arguments.

For instance QuestMap (Conklin et al., 2001)

resembles to a ‘whiteboard’ where all messages,

documents and reference material for a project,

together with their relationships, are graphically

displayed. Compendium (http://www.compendium

institute.org) is a tool that supports dialogue

mapping and conceptual modeling in a meeting

scenario, and can be used to gather a semantic group

memory. In the same context, Belvedere (Suthers et

al., 1995) is used for constructing and reflecting on

diagrams of one's ideas, such as evidence maps and

concept maps.

Other approaches such as Sepia (Streitz et al.,

1989) and QOC (MacLean et al. 1991) focus on the

representation of knowledge.

In the context of argumentation theory, systems

supporting the visualization of argumentation have

played a considerable educational role by supporting

the teaching of critical thinking and reasoning skills.

For instance, Araucaria (http://araucaria.computing.

dundee.ac.uk/doku.php) supports the contextual

analysis of a written text and provides a tree view of

the premises and conclusions. In the same line,

ArguMed (http://www.ai.rug.nl/~verheij/aaa/) and

Athena (Standard and Negotiation) (http://www.a

thenasoft.org) build on a formal argumentation

approach to addresses the issues of argument

mapping.

Considering the above systems when teaching

argumentation, apart from the aforementioned

functionalities, there are some useful observations

from past researches that are worth mentioned: (a)

visual representation of an argumentative dialog

seems to be more efficient than text representation

(Pinkwart et al., 2008); (b) structuring and

evaluating an argument can be absolutely enhanced

with the exploitation of such tools; (c) both

collaborative argumentation and argumentative

collaboration may also be supported in order to

advance the argumentation skills of the learners

(Scheuer et al., 2010) and (d) a wide set of such

tools has already be used for both learning and e-

learning purposes with satisfactory results (Scheuer

et al., 2010).

However, the choice of using such tools for

teaching argumentation is not always the optimal

due to the following issues:

 Most of the well known Argumentation

Support Tools are stand-alone applications

that require installation for each learner. In

addition these tools do not support

collaborative work in a classroom and

DEVELOPMENT OF ARGUMENTATION SKILLS VIA LEARNING MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS - Bringing together

Argumentation Support Tools and Learning Management Systems

475

consequently they lack provision of a

complete set of functionalities.

 Furthermore, it has been pointed out (G. Rowe

et al., 2006) that the complexity of such tools

force learners to spend enough of their time

not to participate in argumentation courses but

to focus on how to use the argumentation

tools.

 The supported language for both the Interface

and the content of each tool plays a critical

role in the exploitation of the provided

functionalities. Unfortunately most of the

provided argumentation tools do not support

multilingualism.

 Finally, the context off the usage of such tools

is always limited inside a particular scenario

with the presence of a trainer or a mediator.

Hence, the capability to include the particular

learning process as a part of a complete

learning design scenario is not provided.

In general, these tools are exploited out of the

context of an LMS. Thus several issues related to

time, efficiency and learning design flexibility are

still open.

2.2 Argumentation through LMSs

Hall (2003) defines an LMS as: ”software that

automates the administration of training events. All

Learning Management Systems manage the log-in of

registered users, manage course catalogs, record data

from learners, and provide reports to management.”

Learning Management Systems can be used in

different ways. However, a common idea behind

LMS is that e-learning is organized and managed

within an integrated system. Different tools are

integrated in a single system which offers all

necessary tools to run and manage an e-learning

course. All learning activities and materials in a

course are organized and managed by and within the

system. LMS typically offers, file sharing,

management of assignments, mind maps, wikis,

discussion forums, chat, etc. Furthermore, an LMS

should support a collaborative learning community,

offering multiple modes of learning—from self-

paced coursework to scheduled classes (live

instruction in classroom settings or online) to group

learning (online forums and chats).

Selecting a traditional Learning Management

System (LMS) requires balancing learning and

management. LMSs like Blackboard, Atutor,

Moodle, Sakai and Desire2Learn offer their greatest

value to the organization by providing a means to

sequence content and create a manageable structure

for instructors/administration staff.

Using Argumentation Support Tools represents a

different approach to organization of e-learning than

the utilization of an LMS. Using an LMS, an e-

learning course is delivered through and takes place

within an integrated system. Our research on the

most widely used LMSs, pointed out that building a

training course for the development of

argumentation skills is not based on specific

argumentation support components. Instead, each

trainer tries to fulfill the specific argumentation tasks

in the design of the course by using (or combining)

one or more components that are not created for that

purpose. For example components such as

discussion forums, rating and voting tools, and mind

maps are usually combined in order to support a

formal argumentative discussion within a training

course. This approach may partially satisfy both

trainers and trainees, however it is obvious that it

cannot support all kind of argumentation courses

such as construction and evaluation of an argument

and argument discovering as well. Furthermore, the

results of an ongoing argumentation cannot be

structured and represented visual and cannot be

imported as initial input to a next training task.

2.3 Bringing Argumentation Support

Tools and LMSs together

The study already done and presented in this chapter

highlights a missing point between argumentation

and learning management process in terms of the

absence of a common means for design

argumentation oriented courses within the scope of

an LMS. Apart from an interesting development of a

plug-in for importing and sharing Compendium

maps in Moodle (http://compendium.open.ac.uk/

institute/support/collab-compendium.html) and the

approach of CICERO tool that is a wiki based

argumentation support tool (http://cicero.uni-

koblenz.de/wiki) the LMSs have not be augmented

with argumentation functionality yet.

Thus, from one hand, traditional argumentation

software approaches are no longer sufficient enough

to support teaching of argumentation inside the

scope of a learning management system while, from

the other hand, trainers who uses LMSs cannot

perform specific design tasks for development of

argumentation skills within the context of the LMS.

The main target of our research is to make this

point clear and to proceed to the design and the

implementation of an argumentation support tool

that operates as a component within an existing and

KEOD 2011 - International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Ontology Development

476

widely accepted LMS such as LAMs or Moodle.

Such approach will benefit from both points of

view (argumentation support and learning design)

and it will allow the dissemination of specialized

knowledge combined with cooperative learning and

learning in communities.

Towards this direction, there will be several

critical steps related to the appropriate methodology

that has to be followed: (a) Further investigation of

trainers’ needs through real scenarios of building

and teaching argumentation courses via LMSs.

Feedback of these scenarios will be valuable for

both the design of tools specifications and integrated

functionalities; (b) Development (or using an

existing one) of an argumentation support tool as a

component of an existing LMS. Both tool and LMS

should be widely accepted, open source licensed and

should also support multilingualism (c) Re-engage

the trainers to build and teach the same courses with

the integrated LMS and evaluate the feedback

against the initial requirements. (d) Enhance the

provided functionality with particular features

derived from the evaluation.

3 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

WORK

The enhancement of an LMS with native

argumentation capabilities remains an open issue

towards the development of argumentation skills.

This paper tries to obtain the benefits of specific

purpose Argumentation Support Tools and

encapsulate them within the context of an LMS in

order to provide efficient capabilities for design and

implement training scenarios for teaching

argumentation.

The future work in our research is initially

focused on the design of the specifications and on

the integration of an argumentation tool in an LMS.

However, we are aiming at the investigation of some

interesting questions that may be addressed during

our research: (a) what learning designs can be

readily adopted by teaching argumentation & critical

thinking as templates for best practice?; (b) what

pedagogical issues emerge from the implementation

of learning designs in argumentation & critical

thinking context? and (c) how can identified barriers

to educators’ adoption, adaptation and reuse of

learning designs for teaching argumentation &

critical thinking be overcome?

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