On the Development of Web-Based Argumentative Collaboration Support Systems Manolis Tzagarakis1, Nikos Karousos1, and Nikos Karacapilidis1,2 1
Research Academic Computer Technology Institute 26504 Patras, Greece {tzagara,karousos,karacap}@cti.gr 2 IMIS Lab, MEAD, University of Patras 26504 Patras, Greece
[email protected]
Abstract. Advanced argumentative collaboration support systems can rarely be found in today’s World Wide Web. This can be partially justified by the fact that the current Web environment - its users and available data - differs significantly from the environments in which these systems were traditionally developed and used. Efforts to bring such systems to the Web must carefully consider how these need to change in order to be effective in the new environment. In this paper, we present how such concerns have been addressed in CoPe_it!, a tool that supports argumentative collaboration on the Web. Preliminary evaluation results show that the tool succeeds in meeting the challenges of today’s Web environment without compromising its effectiveness. Keywords: argumentative collaboration, incremental formalization, Web-based systems, CoPe_it!
1 Introduction Argumentative collaboration support systems have a long history. Generally speaking, they offer sophisticated support for sense- and/or decision-making, and have been proven effective in addressing a wide range of concerns in various domains, such as engineering, law and medicine. The ability of argumentative collaboration support systems to explicate, share and evaluate knowledge makes them an important infrastructure component in the knowledge society. In most cases, argumentative collaboration support systems have largely remained within the communities in which they originated, thus failing to reach a wider audience. When investigating how the advent of the World Wide Web affected them, the results are rather disappointing: only Web-based discussion forums, offering rather primitive support when compared to argumentative collaboration support systems, have successfully migrated to the Web. One key factor contributing to the wide adoption of these forums is their emphasis on simplicity. On the other hand, the formal nature of sophisticated argumentative collaboration support systems has been pointed out as an important barrier to their wide adoption, and as one factor that hinders them to make the step towards the World Wide Web. The new landscape of the Web, as M.D. Lytras et al. (Eds.): WSKS 2009, LNAI 5736, pp. 306–315, 2009. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009
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shaped by the so called Web 2.0 move, is considered as a rather hostile environment for traditional argumentative collaboration support systems. In this new environment, users are moving away from formal systems that prescribe their interactions, and favor applications that place the control of the formalization process in their hands. Nevertheless, attempts to bring advanced argumentative collaboration support systems into the new Web environment have already begun to appear [1]. In this paper, we use the Walker’s concepts of domesticated and feral technology [2] to describe the current contradicting environments in which applications must operate, and present how CoPe_it! (http://copeit.cti.gr/), an innovative tool that supports argumentative collaboration on the Web, attempts to bridge the abovementioned gap. Our long term aim is to equip the Web with more powerful discussion tools, with which the complex problems of our society can be better addressed.
2 The Domestic Nature of Traditional Argumentative Collaboration Support Systems Technologies have a long history in being repurposed, i.e. to be useful in ways they were not developed or evolved for. Aerosol was not designed to be used in graffiti or street art, the internet was designed for military and academic use and not to create today’s social communication networks, the purpose of computers never included individual, everyday use [2]. In order to analyze, discuss and understand such evolutionary paths of technology in the context of hypertext, Walker coined the terms of domesticated and feral technologies [2]. The term domesticated technology refers to technology that is tamed, farmed and cultivated in carefully controlled environments and intended to be used in specific ways. Early hypertext systems, for instance, were developed to run on mainframe computers in research institutions, and provided the necessary means to address the problem of information organization in specific application domains. Such domestication shaped the form of these hypertext tools, which made distinctions between author and reader, provided fixed types of links and, generally speaking, enforced rules for guiding the process of creating hypertexts. They were intended to be used in carefully controlled environments. The rapid spread of personal computers and the advent of the Web created a new environment in which hypertext existed in. The result was hypertext to become feral: to overcome the boundaries and constraints that guided its creation and use, giving birth to new forms of information organization paradigms. Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/) and the folksonomy of Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/) are characteristic examples of feral hypertext. The above discussion may provide useful insights with respect to how technologies and applications change when their ecosystem changes and relocate to the Web. In general, while changes to their functionality are a rather expected implication, one alteration is common to all applications that are subject to such relocation: they give greater control to the user, attempting to minimize the constraints and rules that control the user’s actions. The applications are characterized by greater flexibility compared to their domesticated counterparts.
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Argumentative collaboration support systems are one particular class of applications that have recently begun to appear on the Web. Nevertheless, these systems have a long standing tradition in being developed and used in tightly controlled communities and environments, hence constituting examples of domesticated technologies. When argumentative collaboration support systems go feral on the Web, the question of how they need to change in order to successfully address the conditions of their new habitat is critical. Argumentative collaboration support systems have offered advanced computational services to diverse types of groups and application areas. In general, these services are enabled through the prescribed semantics and methods of interaction that the respective systems impose to their users. One reason why these systems deploy such prescribed methods is because of their efforts to closely match their argumentation model to the vocabulary and needs of the groups and application areas in which they are used. These prescribed methods place control over the argumentative collaboration process on the system’s side and make it impossible for users to escape it. Therefore, these systems exhibit a high degree of formality. Considering the provided prescribed methods as mechanisms to constrain the argumentation model, existing argumentative collaboration support systems can be considered as domesticated technology. They attempt to ‘tame’ the argumentative collaboration process by being designed, developed and used in carefully controlled environments. In our context, this implies control over a number of factors, such as the type of user that is foreseen to use these tools and participate in argumentative collaboration, the structure of the community or group entering into argumentative collaboration, the type of the problem at hand, as well as the type of the media formats that the information must have in order to be admissible for a particular discussion.
3 The Untamed Nature of Today’s World Wide Web For argumentative collaboration support systems, which require carefully controlled environments for their proper use, the current form of the World Wide Web proves to be a rather hostile habitat. In general, the prescribed methods of argumentative collaboration support systems have received much criticism. The formal structures were the reason these systems were difficult to use, requiring great efforts from individuals [3, 4], and proved to be barriers rather than catalysts for collaboration, as they slow down the users’ activities [5]. The formal structure imposed has been the leading cause for the failure of these systems with respect to their widespread adoption [6]. On the other hand, simpler online discussion tools, such as Web-based forums, gained exceptional adoption precisely because of their lack of sophisticated formal structures, and their emphasis on “naturalness of interactions” [6]. Towards their move to the Web, such observations are of great concern as today’s so-called Web 2.0 environment – its users and available data – differs substantially from the controlled environments that traditional argumentative collaboration support systems were initially developed and used. Web users are moving away from applications that impose semantics and tightly control the formalization process, favoring applications that place such control into their hands. In today’s successful Web applications, semantics is an emergent and not a predefined property of the system. Folksonomies and Wikis are prominent examples in this
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regard. Users expect simple but powerful Web applications that provide easy-to-use and engaging collaboration environments. Social and awareness services are nowadays considered required functionalities. Moreover, users are familiar in re-using information and interlinking a wide range of media formats, from text to images and videos, which are available on the Web and not always under their control. Finally, they favor applications that are easy to use but at the same time provide powerful and advanced collaboration services. Moving argumentative collaboration support systems to today’s Web environments requires careful consideration with respect to how they need to change in order to keep their effectiveness but at the same time address the concerns of their new environment. CoPe_it! is a tool supporting argumentative collaboration aiming to be used in today’s Web environment. In the next sections, we present some key aspects of this tool.
4 Argumentative Collaboration in CoPe_it! CoPe_it! is a tool to support synchronous and asynchronous argumentative collaboration in today’s Web environment. The tool aims at supporting the level of control that current Web users expect, while also providing advanced services that are traditionally associated with strongly formalized argumentation and decision making systems. CoPe_it! achieves this by opening up the semantics layer and introducing the notion of incremental formalization of argumentative collaboration. The tool permits a stepwise evolution of the collaboration space, through which formalization is not imposed by the system; instead, it is at the user’s control. By permitting the users to formalize the discussion as the collaboration proceeds, more advanced services can be made available. Once the collaboration has been formalized to a certain point, CoPe_it! can exhibit an active behavior facilitating the decision making process. Our overall approach is the result of action research studies [7] concerning the improvement of practices, strategies and knowledge in diverse cognitively-complex collaborative environments. The research method adopted for the development of CoPe_it! has followed the design science paradigm [8]. 4.1 Incremental Formalization of Discussions In CoPe_it!, formality and the level of knowledge structuring is not considered as a predefined and rigid property, but rather as an adaptable aspect that can be modified to meet the needs of the tasks at hand. By the term formality, we refer to the rules enforced by the system, with which all user actions must comply. Allowing formality to vary within the collaboration space, incremental formalization, i.e. a stepwise and controlled evolution from a mere collection of individual ideas and resources to the production of highly contextualized and interrelated knowledge artifacts, can be achieved [9]. In our approach, projections constitute the ‘vehicle’ that permits incremental formalization of argumentative collaboration. A projection can be defined as a particular representation of the collaboration space, in which a consistent set of abstractions able to solve a particular organizational problem during argumentative collaboration is available. With the term abstraction, we refer to the particular data and knowledge items, relationships and actions that are supported through a particular projection, and with which a particular problem can be represented, elaborated and be solved. CoPe_it!
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enables switching from a projection to another, during which abstractions of a certain formality level are transformed to the appropriate abstractions of another formality level. This transformation is rule-based; such rules can be defined by users and/or the facilitator of the collaboration and reflect the evolution of a community’s collaboration needs. It is up to the community to exploit one or more projections of a collaboration space (upon users’ needs and expertise, as well as the overall collaboration context).
Fig. 1. Informal projection: a data-intensive collaboration instance
Each projection of the collaboration space provides the necessary mechanisms to support a particular level of formality. The more informal a projection is, the more easiness-of-use is implied; at the same time, the actions that users may perform are intuitive and not time consuming (e.g. drag-and-drop a document to a shared collaboration space). Informality is associated with generic types of actions and resources, as well as implicit relationships between them. However, the overall context is more human (and less system) interpretable. As derives from the above, the aim of an informal projection of the collaboration space is to provide users the means to structure and organize data and knowledge items easily, and in a way that conveys semantics to them. Generally speaking, informal projections may support an unbound number of data and knowledge item types. Moreover, users may create any relationship among these items; hence, relationship types may express agreement, disagreement, support, request for refinement, contradiction etc. (Figure 1)1. 1
The collaboration instances illustrated in Figures 1, 2 and 3 correspond to a detailed example of use of CoPe_it!, which can be found in [10].
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Fig. 2. Formal projection: a collaboration instance
While such a way of dealing with data and knowledge resources is conceptually close to practices that humans use in their everyday environment, it is inconvenient in situations where support for advanced decision making processes must be provided. Such capabilities require resources and structuring facilities with fixed semantics, which should be understandable and interpretable not only by the users but also by the tool. Hence, decision making processes can be better supported in environments that exhibit a high level of formality. The more formal projections of a collaboration space come to serve such needs. The more formal a projection is, easiness-of-use is reduced; actions permitted are less intuitive and more time consuming. Formality is associated with fixed types of actions, as well as explicit relationships between them. However, a switch to a more formal projection is highly desirable when (some members of) a community need to further elaborate the data and knowledge items considered so far. Such functionalities are provided by projections that may enable the formal exploitation of collaboration items patterns and the deployment of appropriate formal argumentation and reasoning mechanisms. A switch to a projection of a higher level of formality disregards less meaningful data and knowledge items, resulting to a more compact and tangible representation of the collaboration space (Figure 2). This effect is highly desirable in data-intensive situations. 4.2 Information Triage Our solution builds extensively on the information triage process [11], i.e. the process of sorting and organizing through numerous relevant materials and organizing them to
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meet the task at hand. During such a process, users must effortlessly scan, locate, browse, update and structure knowledge resources that may be incomplete, while the resulting structures may be subject to rapid and numerous changes. Information triage related functionalities enable users to meaningfully organize the big volumes of data and knowledge items in a collaborative setting. The informal projection of a collaborative workspace in CoPe_it! is fully in line with the above. Drawing upon successful technologies coming from the area of spatial hypertext [11], the informal projection of CoPe_it! adopts a spatial metaphor to depict collaboration in a 2-dimensional space (Figure 3).
Fig. 3. Spatial metaphor of the collaboration space in CoPe_it!
In an informal projection, users are incrementally processing information and are not forced to predefined structural commitments. The related features and functionalities of CoPe_it! enable users to create and organize information by making use of spatial relationships and structures, giving them the freedom to express relationships among information items through spatial proximity and visual cues. Such cues are related to the linking of collaboration items (e.g. coloring and thickness of the respective links) and the drawing of colored rectangles to cluster related items. As highlighted above, the informal projection of a collaborative workspace in CoPe_it! permits an ordinary and unconditioned evolution of data and knowledge structures. This projection also provides abstraction mechanisms that allow the creation of new abstractions out of existing ones. Abstraction mechanisms include: (i) annotation and metadata (i.e. the ability to annotate instances of various knowledge items and add or modify metadata); (ii) aggregation (i.e. the ability to group a set of
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data and knowledge items so as to be handled as a single conceptual entity); (iii) generalization/specialization (i.e. the ability to create semantically coarse or more detailed knowledge items in order to help users manage information pollution of the collaboration space); (iv) patterns (i.e. the ability to specify instances of interconnections between knowledge items of the same or a different type, and accordingly define collaboration templates). Information triage related activities can be conducted in CoPe_it! either collaboratively (a moderator may be required in some cases) or individually.
5 Evaluation Issues CoPe_it! has been already introduced in diverse collaborative settings (from the management, engineering and learning domains) for a series of pilot applications. The results of the first evaluation phase were very encouraging. So far, the tool has been evaluated by 67 users. The above evaluation was conducted through questionnaires that contained: (i) two sets of closed-ended questions, aiming at evaluating the tool’s ‘perceived usefulness’ and ‘perceived ease-of-use’, and (ii) a number of openended questions, through which users were asked to comment on the tool’s advantages, disadvantages and/or limitations, as well as to suggest areas of improvement. A typical five-level Likert item (strongly disagree, disagree, neither agree nor disagree, agree, strongly agree) was used for the closed-ended questions. With respect to the questions related to the tool’s perceived usefulness, the percentage of the positive answers (sum of the ‘strongly agree’ and ‘agree’ percentages) in the majority of the questions was very promising. More specifically, 66.1% of the users confirmed that the tool helped them organize the collaboration efficiently, 73.6% that the tool was easy to learn, 71.1% that it was easy to use, 72.5% enjoyed its use, while 66.1% admitted that it was worth the effort. Furthermore, users have admitted that it stimulates interaction (63%), makes them more accountable for their contributions (64.3%), while it aids them to conceive, document and analyze the overall collaboration context in a holistic manner, by facilitating a shift from divergence to convergence (59.4%). However, users were skeptical about whether they will definitely consider the tool as their first choice for supporting their future collaboration (37.3%). Having further elaborated their answers to this last issue, we concluded that this was due to the change of the way they were accustomed to work. Similar results were obtained for the questions concerning the tool’s perceived ease-of-use. 82.6% of the users answered positively that were able to easily understand the tool’s features and functionalities, 79.3% found it easy to use all available options, while 75% agreed that the achieved results (after a user’s action) were clear. Nevertheless, only 52.3% could easily understand the contents of a workspace (we identified that this happens in data-intensive situations; efforts to provide more intuitive workspace icons are underway). The open-ended questions revealed that users considered the ability of the tool to represent and manipulate the structure of an argumentative collaboration, along with its various visualization options, as its strongest features, setting it apart from Web-based forums. Respondents also commented positively on the tool’s ability to provide multiple views of a particular collaborative session. When asked for the tool’s
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disadvantages, respondents mentioned the cluttering of the workspace (basically due to the numerous arrows that appear in some workspaces), and the inability to make references from a workspace to another. With respect to improvements, most comments were around the need of providing awareness mechanisms that can inform on changes that happen within a workspace, the ability to reuse items between workspaces (by copy-pasting), and the integration of video/audio conference tools in order to enhance real time collaboration.
6 Conclusions In this paper, we have presented how CoPe_it! provides advanced argumentative collaboration support on the Web. Drawing upon the understandings of how domesticated technologies mutate when they go feral on the Web, CoPe_it! opens up the semantics layer giving control of the formalization process to users participating in the collaboration. In CoPe_it! semantics are emergent and not predefined. By incrementally formalizing the discussion via projections, CoPe_it! is able to provide not only emergent semantics but also advanced decision making services. These aspects make the tool suitable for being deployed in today’s challenging Web environment. Future work directions include the extensive evaluation of CoPe_it! in diverse contexts in order to shape our minds towards the development of additional means that are useful when such systems are deployed on the Web. Acknowledgments. Research carried out in the context of this paper has been partially funded by the EU PALETTE (Pedagogically Sustained Adaptive Learning through the Exploitation of Tacit and Explicit Knowledge) Integrated Project (IST FP6-2004, Contract No. 028038).
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