Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
large groups are not closed but characterized
by variable degrees of participation and high
rate of participants turnover; one further
advantage of turnover is that it helps keep the
discussion vital and less likely to get locked
into a rut, e.g. someone new may come a
login that opens up a new line of inquiry.
given issue and its adversary claim can be closely
co-located and are much more difficult to overlook
than in traditional blogs and wikis which typically
are focused, by self-selection, on just a subset of
the possible perspectives.
ACknoWledgment
5.
parallelism:
with large-scale social soft-
ware, people can make contributions in
parallel, so there is little opportunity for a
single individual or ideology to dominate the
debate, unlike contexts with serial, limited
bandwidth, interactions, like forums.
The authors wish to gratefully acknowledge the
Naples City Science Museum (Città della Scienza)
sponsorship for the test implementation and the
support in the dissemination of the first research
results. The authors also wish to thank Livio
Ferraro, Fabiana Ippolito, Samantha Lamberti
and Vincenzo Leone for their valuable help as
community moderators and research assistantship
during the field test.
To our knowledge, however, there is no em-
pirical evidence to prove that large scale, internet
mediated interaction and greater information
availability will lower social pressure and improve
collective deliberation. On the contrary, some
kinds of on-line communities and platforms (e.g.
blogs) appear to suffer from polarization, and oth-
ers (such as wikipedia and forums) often flounder
with controversial issues (Sunstein, 2006). We
expect that on-line, large-scale argumentation
can at least partly avoid these shortcomings: i)
by inducing critical thinking and evidence-based
reasoning; ii) by encouraging users to look for
additional information to support their claims and
become more informed about a topic as well as
aware of possible different and even contrasting
perspectives, iii) by contributing to greater infor-
mation disclosure since, in order to be convincing,
an argument has to be supported by convincing
explicit premises; iv) by improving the quality
of arguments, since the weaker, more fallacious
schemes will be uncovered and easily defeated
by a large audience. Finally, critical evaluation of
alternative/conflicting solutions should help the
community be less inclined to balkanization. In
a logically-organized argument map, contrasting
perspectives may better coexist that in other col-
laborative tools like wikies and forums, in which
the presence of conflict usually brings about
editorial wars. In an argument map, moreover, a
reFerenCes
Buckingham Shum, S. 2006. Hypermedia Support
for Argumentation-Based Rationale: 15 Years on
from gIBIS and QOC. In A. Dutoit (ed.).
Rationale
Management in Software Engineering
, 111-132.
Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
Carter, L.M. 2000.
Arguments in Hypertext: a Rhe-
torical approach
. Proceedings of the Hypertext
2000 Conference, San Antonio (TX), 85-91.
Chesnevar, C., McGinnis, J., Modgil, S., Rahwan,
I., Reed, C., Simari, G., South, M., Vreeswijk,
G., Willmott, S. 2006. Towards an argument
interchange format.
The knowledge Engineering
Review
, 21(4), 293-316.
Conklin, J. 2003.
The IBIS Manual: A Short Course
in IBIS Methodology
, http://cognexus.org/id26.
htm#the_ibis_manual.
Conklin, J. 2006.
Dialogue Mapping: Building
Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems.
Chichester (UK): Wiley.
Search WWH ::
Custom Search