Collaboration Support in Argumentation Systems for Education via Flexible Architectures

While argumentation is highly important for humans in many different aspects of life, it is hard to teach large groups to argue. Classic face-to-face approaches, which have shown to be effective, are limited by personal and time issues. Thus there were attempts to support the learning of argumentation via collaboration tools and intelligent tutoring systems. A detailed review of about 50 argumentation systems indicated a lack of research on the architectural side as well as on the side of collaboration. This thesis will investigate how a generic, customizable software architecture and configurable flexible collaboration options can be used to support the learning of argumentation in different domains.