Based intelligent tool for Supporting Collaborative Argumentation and Learning). This tool allows argumentative interactions across internet that can be used in ...
DREW : A DIALOGICAL REASONING WEB TOOL ANNIE CORBEL, JEAN-JACQUES GIRARDOT, PHILIPPE JAILLON Ecole des Mines, 158 Cours Fauriel, 42023 Saint-Etienne Cédex, France E-mail : {Corbel,Girardot,Jaillon}@emse.fr This paper presents the tool developed and used during the first year of the European IST project SCALE1 (InternetBased intelligent tool for Supporting Collaborative Argumentation and Learning). This tool allows argumentative interactions across internet that can be used in pedagogical situations. In adjunction to regular collaborative tools (chat, white board and text editor), a specific collaborative graph editor was designed according to Toulmin’s representation of argumentative debate. All the interactions are recorded in structured trace files that can be further studied by the cogniticians and educationalist partners of the project and can be used as examples for teacher training in argumentation. The whole architecture of the system relies on a client-server architecture and uses open Internet protocol technology (XML and Java language). The tool is used via a regular browser, doesn’t need any software installation on the client side and has a multi language interface. This modular architecture also enables easy integration of new interactive modules.
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Introduction
DREW ("Dialogical Reasoning Educational Web tool") is a collaborative Java environment for teaching argumentation through the Internet. It allows its users to communicate in real time over Internet, using a set of tools such as chat windows, shared text editors, whiteboards and graphers. Drew provides separate virtual rooms, where groups of users can work together. Behind the development of new technologies in classrooms, the objective is grounded by the necessity for learning to elaborate concepts through argumentative discussions. DREW has been developed for the SCALE IST-1999 project and all the interfaces of the software are localized in the 6 languages of the partners : English, French, Dutch, Hungarian, Finish and Portuguese. DREW is capable of keeping track of simultaneously occurring interactions in different virtual rooms. This is quite practical from an experimental point of view where a researcher may want to record different groups discussing the same subject within one class period. The replay module allows the researcher or teacher to replay the students' interaction in order to analyse it, from their respective perspectives. In order to understand how the replay module operates, one could compare it to a VCR. It is possible to play back an interaction, to pause, to stop, to rewind, and to fast forward. These functions allow an analysis of the whole students' interaction, from the beginning to the end. It is thus possible to focus on significant events, in the context in which they occurred, in order to understand their place within the entire co-constructed interaction. The interaction trace and its replay module are indispensable materials for the researcher. DREW consists of a server that can be installed on any computer accepting Java, and clients, that can be started from any Web browser. Since the DREW client is written as a Java applet, using DREW implies no specific installation on the client computer. All this software comes with a GPL or LGPL like licence [8]. The current version is still an experimental version but was however used for some experiments. The argumentation grapher provides a framework for working on argumentation with graphical representation of the objects of discourse, whereas the text editor is a convenient interface for producing collaboratively argumentative texts. Drew is available from its Web site [1]. The reference manual is in [3]. 1
The research reported here is being carried out within the SCALE project (Internet-based intelligent tool to Support Collaborative Argumentation-based LEarning in secondary schools, March 2001 – February 2004) funded by the European Community under the 'Information Societies Technology' (IST) Programme. Information on the project can be found at: http://www.euroscale.net/
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Student’s Interfaces
The student’s interface of the system is managed by an applet that is dynamically downloaded by the browser when the student enters a session. In DREW the different tools are implemented with applet-like technologies that are named “Drewlets”. There is one Drewlet for each tool existing in DREW (chat, whiteboard, text editor, grapher, etc…) ; each tool displays in a dedicated frame. At the moment these frames can be either displayed in separated windows or grouped together in a single window (this function is called “multi” in the actual implementation). The following collaborative functionalities exist in the current prototype : Chat The message typed by a student appears in the group chat window (visible by each logged in participant). Each contribution is preceded by the author's nickname. The messages appear in the group chat window in the order they were sent. This sometimes causes confusion, especially when there is more than one conversation going on between many different participants. DREW provides a solution for this by defining different virtual "rooms". For example, two students can isolate themselves in a room where they can have a conversation without being disturbed by the others.
Whiteboard The Whiteboard is a standard module that allows free hand drawing and annotations. DREW's Whiteboard particularity is that all of the actions produced by the students on the whiteboard are recorded into a trace file, like all others interactions. The whiteboard uses two displaying frames : one to display the available drawing tools, one for the drawing space.
Text editor This is a collaborative text editor which allows students (debating on the same subject in the same room) to write up a common text. At the moment no exclusive access is provided and it is the student’s responsibility to take a turn before writing to avoid confusion in the result.
Graph editor This module allows to "draw" argumentation by putting each argument item (thesis, refutation, counter argument, etc) into a box, colouring the frame of the box according to the author, having a different shape of the box depending on whether people agree or disagree on that item and connecting these items by specific arrows (pro or against). A complete description of this module is provided in [5] and [7] (form of the graph, types of arguments, etc). The Toulmin’s approach is describe in [4] and comparison with other systems is developed in [2].
ALEX This module is a kind of structured chat that provides the student with a set of partial sentences. The student will select a sentence and fill in any blank areas of the sentence as a means of making their arguments.
(See a snapshot of the screen at the end of this paper) 3
Teacher’s Interfaces
This part of the software allows a teacher to : 3.1
Replay a previous session
At the moment, the software displays the list of the current registered subjects. By selecting one of them, one can ask to “replay” the session. The tools used during the session are displayed in the same shape as they were used. The teacher can then see what happened in real time, as fast as possible or step by step. The interface looks like a tape recorder’ one. There is one interaction trace file associated with each subject, so a discussion can be interrupted and resumed an other day without loosing the past. Trace files can also be analyzed with software using Excel sheets for input, like Mepa.
3.2
Define a new subject
The teacher enters : his name, the title of the subject (as it has to be visualised in the subject list), a text describing the work to be done (with possibility to include hyper-links to related Web pages in this text), the tools he wants the students use during the session (chat, grapher*, all of them..), if he/she allows the students to select/suppress tools, the initial room where the session is going to take place, if the students are allowed to change rooms during the session, the student’s interface localisation (language). The need of a more complex interface has to be discussed from the synthesis of the experiments of the first year of the SCALE project. After the first analysis appears the need of a way to describe a sequence of pedagogical activities. It means that not only the subject has to be described but also what is asked to the student before and after the debate and if material has to be recorded from one activity to an other (texts at their different stages for example). 4 4.1
System Features Protocols
DREW tools are downloaded into the client browser using the HTTP protocol. The Applet is downloaded as one single archive file Communication between client part (applet) and the server uses a specific raw connected protocol directly on TCP/IP. This could be a problem when client and server are not on the same side of a security mechanism like firewalls. Notice that this problem doesn’t come from DREW but from the fact that there is very often a loss of end to end connectivity in the Internet due to the use of local security mechanisms. Most of the schools where experiments were done during the first year only provided a HTTP connection to the Web, and not a true Internet connection. The communication protocol uses UTF8 coding to solve the problem of coding special characters. Java uses natively Unicode for character strings representation. 4.2
Context of a session
The tool provides the concept of rooms where private discussions can take place. The use of this feature can also be to ask each group of students to debate in different rooms (one room per group). This concept of room needs a precise definition of the context of the debate within a session : for example, does the content of the whiteboard changes when one changes of room, does each room has a dedicated whiteboard ? The answer is not the same for the different possible usage of the concept of rooms. This is a “To Be Defined” point that only the teachers and researchers that use the tool can give. 4.3
Server Part
On the server side (typically, an Apache HTTP server), there are some HTML pages, that contain links that can start the DREW interface for the session associated to this page. The server can handle simultaneous sessions, that do not interfere with one others ; during a session, different rooms are available which interact with the drewlets. However, on the client side, only one session can be opened at a time. The server is modular. The main part is a communication multiplexer with XSLT capabilities [10]. Modules can be plugged to the server like trace storage manager, proxy, ALEX analyser… An internal module of the server can receive and send messages just like applet client modules (same protocol) The server receives a message each time an interaction takes place on a client window, and server modules can also generate messages.
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Client part
There is one Java module in charge of each tool existing in DREW (chat, whiteboard, text editor, grapher, etc…). These modules are named ‘Drewlets’. People connected to DREW share their work. If somebody writes in the text editor or on the whiteboard, the interaction is visible by every connected user who shares the same context (for now : same room, same session) Applets are Java classes that derive from the Applet class. The applet should implement a few methods (init, start, stop, destroy). The applet will be loaded by the client, using HTTP protocol. The client receives all the messages sent by the server and filter them depending on the needs of each Drewlet, which only manages the messages it asked for. 4.5
Performance Requirements
For bandwidth and network considerations, it is better to use a local DREW server than one connected through the Internet. This is only to get better interactivity. Drewlet developers should be aware that the current implementation of a DREW client Module is being maintained as small in size as possible, in order to be downloadable. This means that, in order to keep interactivity, the client part has to be as light as possible because of the actual bandwidth of the network. This precludes for the moment the use of fancy Java classes like ‘swing’ classes. 5
Future works
In future developments, it is planned to add a mechanism to put annotation on the trace files. This will be useful for the teachers’ training sessions where analysis of previous experiments will take place. A good direction to explore is the possibility to record the traces of a session in a format that is independent of the DREW tool, so the sessions could be replayed outside the tool. This would ensure a more final permanence of the recorded experiments. A good candidate to do that is to transform the trace files in SMIL format [11], so they can be replayed even if a DREW server is not available. In the future it is planned to move all the DREW protocols to XML format [9]. This will allow to store the traces directly in XML format. This will also allow the clients to send XSLT transformations [10] for specific purpose to be done on the server side (the most sophisticated we can think about is dynamic translation from one language to an other). 6
Conclusion
We have presented a tool for supporting collaborative argumentation in educational situation. This tool is internet based, doesn’t need special software (except a browser) on the client side to be run and create trace files where all interactions are registered in order to be analysed. A demonstration version of the tool can be tested on [1]. This tool was used for the experiments during the first year of the IST SCALE project and other experiments are going to be done and analyzed next year. See the SCALE web site (http://www.euroscale.net/) to get more information on the whole project. 7
Aknowledgements
Many people have participated to the DREW project ; here are some of them, in alphabetical ordre : Annie Corbel, Patrice Garachon, Jean-Jacques Girardot, Laurence Hirsch, Philippe Jaillon, Mathieu Ponsonnet, Matthieu Quignard, Isabelle Sanchez, Xavier Serpaggi, François Tillon, Laszlo Varallyai,
References 1. DREW Web Site. http://drew.emse.fr/, 2001. 2. Giendre Klygite and Teemu Leinonen. Study of functionality and interfaces of existing CSL:CSCW systems, Deliverable 3.1 of itcole ist-200-26249 project, 2000. 3. Jean-Jacques Girardot and Philippe Jaillon. DREW Internals Manual. Technical report, École des Mines, Saint-Étienne, France, 2001. 4. Stephen Toulmin. The Uses of Argument. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1958. 5. Matthieu Quignard. JigaDrew Manual. Technical report, École des Mines, Saint-Étienne, France, 2000. 6. Matthieu Quignard and Michael Baker. Favouring modellable computer-mediated argumentative dialogue in col-laborative problem-solving solutions. In Suzanne Lajoie and Martial Vivet, editors, Proceedings of the 9th World Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education, Le Mans, France, pages 129–136, Ansterdam, 1999. IOS Press. 7. Matthieu Quignard, Michael Baker, and Kristine Lund. Multi-representationnal argumentative interactions : the case of computer-mediated communication in cooperative learning situation. ISSA2002, Amsterdam. 8. GPL (Gnu General Public Licence) and LGPL (Gnu Lesser General Public Licence) at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/ 9. XML (Extensible Markup Language) http://www.w3.org/XML/ 10. XSLT (XSL Transformations) http://www.w3.org/TR/xslt 11. SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language) http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-smil/ Appendix The following picture shows the student interface during a typical experiment in a school (tools such as the chat, the graph editor and ALEX appear in this example) :
