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right scheme to their arguments, which increased
the moderators' workload.
Though students participation may have been
influenced by their perception that the experiment
was a course task for which they could be evaluated
by their professor, their informal face-to-face and
on-line comments, posted on the deliberatorium
as well as on a threaded discussion forum run
independently by a students association web site,
showed that they found the experiment interesting
and appreciated the innovative characteristics of
the deliberatorium.
As expected, at the beginning of the experiment
most users really did not grasp the IBIS logic.
Rather, many users adopted a kind of forum frame
in which they tended to publish posts as news ar-
ticles (e.g. “France creates incentives for biofuel”)
rather than as IBIS entities. Common mistakes
were: difficulties in distinguishing between ideas
and arguments, the tendency to put multiple
arguments into a single argument post, linking
arguments to a logically irrelevant location in the
argument map, questions and ideas proliferating
without any associated pro/con arguments, and
difficulties in selecting the right kind of scheme
for arguments. After a while we observed an
improvement in the use of the platform, as users
developed confidence, profited from moderator
feedback, and learned to use the tool.
The level of direct debate was moderate. Users
did attach many arguments to each other's posts
(72% of all certified posts were arguments, and
70% of these arguments were attached to posts
authored by someone else) but the great majority
of all arguments (again, 70%) were pros rather
than cons. The depth of the argument trees was
relatively small (table 4).
Most arguments (85%) were attached directly
to ideas, with the remainder attached to other
arguments. This relative dearth of debate may
have been an outcome of the student's reluctance
to criticize the contributions of their peers, and
thus may be an artifact of the co-located nature of
the user population. Other possible explanations
Table 3. Most popular argument schemes
Scheme Type
# times used
APPEAL TO AUTHORITY
760
ANALOGY
280
DEDUCTIVE ARGUMENT
204
BY INDUCTION
171
FROM CONSEQUENCES
102
CAUSAL
61
APPEAL TO POPULAR OPINION
49
AD HOMINEM
35
Table 4. Depth of the argument tree
Depth of argument tree
% of all arguments
1
85%
2
12%
3
2%
4
1%
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