Argumentative knowledge construction in higher education

This thesis investigates the potential of Social Technologies to enhance argumentative knowledge construction processes. In particular, it focuses on the use of wikis, a major technology in the current Web 2.0 landscape. The importance of argumentative knowledge construction for both Higher Education and Life Long Learning lies in its very nature: in order to engage in academic discussions, learners need to be able to argue rationally, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of other people’s standpoints, and supporting their own positions with adequate grounds. The aim of this study is twofold: on one hand, to evaluate the effectiveness of the use of wikis in collaborative processes of argumentative knowledge construction; on the other hand, to define a conceptual architecture for wiki based learning processes in the area of argumentation. The experimental outcomes confirm the potential of wikis to effectively favor the creation of a rich argumentative network and the quality of the individual argumentative acts. The experimental data also contributed to tune-up the proposed conceptual architecture (WikiDiA).