Web-based Learning Solutions for Communities of Practice

it into the discussion. This means that resources
may at a later point be obsolete or characterized as
unimportant by the group. Furthermore, resources
may even change their role in the progress of the
discussion and can be transformed from ideas
to positions and vice versa. As the collaboration
proceeds, more resources are available to the
collaborating group.
Yet, as the number of resources increases, the
complexity of the collaboration space becomes a
serious problem. This complexity is characterized
by the efforts required to keep track and follow
all the events of the collaboration in order to
understand the available resources and relate
them to the issue being discussed. In such situations,
users adopt practices similar to those of
experienced analysts: they must understand how
the resources add up, explore alternative explanations
and interpretations, engaging in the process
of “information triage” (Marshall & Shipman,
1997). The term “information triage” refers to the
process of sorting the available resources, interact
with them on the space in an attempt to interpret,
recast, interrelate and organize them into larger
structures to facilitate understanding and meet the
needs of the task at hand..
The process of reorganizing existing resources
proceeds in an incremental manner. Usually,
each user conducts small changes to the collaboration
space, affecting only a small part of
the resources. While individual interactions have
local consequences, they have a global impact
on the understanding of the collaboration space
as they accumulate over time. This results in
transforming individual resources to something
that is consequential for the task at hand and is
referred to as sense-making (Cox & Greenberg,
2000). Hence, in argumentative collaboration
sense-making does not happen automatically but
rather emerges naturally as a consequence of the
anticipated users interactions and modifications of
the resources available in the collaborative space.
In this context, the term emergence is used to
denote the way semantics arises and forms from
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From ‘Collecting’ to ‘Deciding’
relatively simple interactions such as changing
the type and role of individual resources, relating
and grouping the resources of the collaboration
space. Research in CSCW has already outlined
criteria with which collaborative environments
can be characterized with respect to their ability
to support emergence. These include (Edmonds
et al., 1998): (a) arranging and spatial reasoning,
(b) implicit structuring and (c) sketching.
As the shared collaboration space emerges
towards sense-making, the entire collaboration
emerges towards the decision to be made. Hence,
a second level of emergence is in action. This
form of emergence occurs only if the collaboration
activity reached a state where sense-making
has been achieved. The recognition of this kind
of emergence gives the ability to reconsider the
outcomes of the sense-making process in new
contexts, such as the formal exploitation of collaboration
items patterns, and the deployment of
appropriate formal argumentation and reasoning
mechanisms.
EXISTING SYSTEMS
Background Work
All existing argumentative collaboration systems
provide means to support the kind of emergence
outlined previously. Yet, they differ in the degree
they support emergence and in particular whether
they succeed in making the emergent semantics
explicitly within the system (and thus system
understandable) or not.
E-mail, chat and Web based forums are representatives
of the most basic argumentative
collaboration environments as they support only
a limited form of emergent structures. In these
systems, the processing of resources, such as
their interrelation, grouping, summarization and
interpretation with which emergence towards
sense-making is achieved, occurs mainly in the
mind of each individual and is not being able to