Educational practice and research both readily acknowledge the challenge of
getting students, in online contexts, to argue in order to think together in reasoned and
intelligent, or ‘scholarly’, ways. In addressing this significant concern we will describe
the pedagogical design and rationale, implementation and evaluation of InterLoc - a
web-based tool supporting collaborative argumentation and other forms of real-time
learning dialogue. InterLoc operationalises a well-attested paradigm of Digital Dialogue
Games (DDGs) and provides re-usable learner generated content – that is a textual
representation of players’ collaborative thinking (or Collaborative Thinking Text) that
can be incorporated into related learning activities and used in various ways. Five case
studies, along with a synthesis of the findings are reported, that were performed in a rich
and varied range of learning contexts with over 350 students and 10 tutors. Inspired by
positive findings from these, we are currently exploring more widespread exploitation
through incorporating the approach and technology with near-future semantic and
mobile technologies, so this ongoing work will also be briefly discussed.
Keywords: Action research, collaborative learning, collaborative tools, deep
learning design, evaluation, games, InterLoc, social software, thinking and
reasoning.
