Collaborative argumentation on the web - a dialogue game approach

This paper reports our work in developing a suitable application to engage groups of students in a debate with the aim of fostering their debating skills and level of critical awareness, and making them more aware of the substantive issues involved. A new dialogue model is proposed for group argumentation. A web application that realizes the proposed model has been iteratively constructed. A user-based evaluation has been carried out. The user evaluation reveals that users are generally satisfied with the proposed dialogue model and the education value of the application in facilitating collaborative argumentation.