Wiskunde en ICT: Een discussiebijdrage

status: publishe

Using Tools in Computer Supported Collaborative Argumentation

The relationship between collaboration processes, task strategies and the use of the tools and resources that the computer environment offers, may be crucial for the effects of computer supported collaborative learning. We are interested to find out how, within a computer environment, students collaborate, how they use the different tools we offer and how this influences the quality of the final product. A custom-made computer-supported environment (TC3) was implemented that enables pairs of high school students to collaborate in writing an argumentative essay. The essay had to be convincing and based on authentic information sources. TC3, a groupware program, offers the students as task related and communicative tools: a shared text editor, a chat facility, access to relevant sources of information and a private notepad. Furthermore, some facilities or tools were offered that might promote collaboration on the task: access to the chat history, adaptability of the display layout, marking and searching in information sources and counting the number of words in the shared text. From our analyses we may conclude that the tools and resources the students use during collaborative writing seem to reflect the writing strategies they adhere to and that the use of these tools and resources in the different phases of the collaborative writing process is related to the argumentative quality of the final product. Future research will focus on the effects of adding tools for text planning and linearization to the TC3 environment on the coordination processes of collaborative writing

An exploration of tool support for categorical coding

In this paper we explore tool support for categorical coding of verbal and chat data. We consider tool support for manual coding, automatic coding by learning algorithms, and derive at a socio-technical approach in which human coders and learning algorithms together address the coding task. Given that a literature study suggests researchers devise, adapt and refine a wide variety of coding schemes, a categorization support system should handle and accommodate user defined coding schemes. Based on these ideas a prototype of the ChatIC tool was developed and evaluated with three coding schemes. For two coding schemes a sufficient inter-rater agreement between a human coder and the learning algorithms was reached