UPDATE: Hi folks! We’ve changed the name of our company to AthenaBridge and you can visit our blog here. The software is still free for teachers in grades 6-12; pricing for others is posted here. Please feel free to drop us a note!
The ongoing Open Government Dialogue is breaking new ground in public participation at the highest levels of our government. The technologies that they’ve used up to this point (online brainstorming and blog comments at the Office of Science and Technology Policy) aren’t revolutionary, but the evolving process shows great potential.
If you have feedback about how to improve the process, one place where it’s piling up is on the Intellitics Blog by Tim Bonnemann.
We were invited to speak at Georgetown University’s Teaching, Learning, and Innovation Summer Institute. With about 350 participants, this was the Institute’s largest year ever.
The topic of our session was peer-to-peer learning and how DeepDebate can significantly increase the bandwidth of communication in a classroom. The following diagram shows the difference between the standard broadcast model of education and peer to peer learning; the two can be used together in a very powerful combination.
These peer-to-peer conversations can occur anytime:
There are some things that one simply shouldn’t learn from their friends (like how to become a surgeon), but in others fields (philosophy, history, civics, etc) learning from fellow students is essential. In some fields, learning occurs best by listening and in other fields learning occurs best by expressing ideas and receiving feedback.
With the structure that DeepDebate provides, students can provide constructive feedback on each other’s ideas and turn disagreement into opportunities for learning.
Dialogue and debate!
I think it’s helpful to think of news as part of our continuing education after formal schooling has ended. By reading and watching the news we learn about what’s going on in the world. Learning is central to why we need news.
So here’s the analogy. Similar to how we can learn more math by working on a math problem than by reading one, we can learn far more about the news when we engage in conversation about it. Dialogue and debate about the news allows us to challenge our assumptions and learn at a deeper level.
It’s a simple thought, but it helps us realize that merely absorbing TV news does not fulfil our obligations as citizens.
Here is the conversation map about the President’s first 100 days in office. We’ve been experimenting with embedding YouTube videos directly into the conversation maps and have found that it’s a great way to improve the user experience.
With this conversation map of YouTube videos from a protest in front of the White House, we found the embedded videos were an effective way of making the conversation map far more personal and engaging than it would have been with only text.
“The search for truth is more precious than its possession.”- Albert Einstein
“The object of the superior man is truth.” – Confucius
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” – Arthur Schopenhauer
“It takes two to speak truth, one to speak and another to hear.”- Henry David Thoreau
“Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth.” – Mahatma Gandhi
“In the spider-web of facts, many a truth is strangled.” – Paul Eldridge
“Truth is the property of no individual but is the treasure of all men.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
“And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” -John 8:32
This video was taken during the TEA party protest in front of the White House on April 15, 2009. These videos are part of a project by DeepDebate.Org to start a dialogue about the most important issues facing Americans. We are a non-partisan website, and we hope that these personal stories we can spark an in-depth conversation that transcends party lines.
NOTE: The best way to comment on these videos is by using this conversation map on DeepDebate.Org.
You can join the conversation about these videos and President Obama’s economic policy here on DeepDebate.Org.
Thesis and antithesis are the building blocks of synthesis (image from Wikipedia)
The three words that best summarize the theoretical foundation of DeepDebate are thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. These tools have been used for thousands of years in powerful combination. From Wikipedia:
- The thesis is an intellectual proposition.
- The antithesis is simply the negation of the thesis, a reaction to the proposition.
- The synthesis solves the conflict between the thesis and antithesis by reconciling their common truths, and forming a new proposition.
For a deeper discussion, this article on the Dialectic is worth a long read. Here’s an excerpt:
Dialectic (also called dialectics or the dialectical method) is a method of argument, which has been central to both Eastern and Western philosophy since ancient times. The word “dialectic” originates in Ancient Greece, and was made popular by Plato’s Socratic dialogues. Dialectic is rooted in the ordinary practice of a dialogue between two people who hold different ideas and wish to persuade each other. The presupposition of a dialectical argument is that the participants, even if they do not agree, share at least some meanings and principles of inference. Different forms of dialectical reason have emerged in the East and in the West, as well as during different eras of history.
Dialectics is based around three (or four) basic metaphysical concepts:
- Everything is transient and finite, existing in the medium of time (this idea is not accepted by some dialecticians).
- Everything is made out of opposing forces/opposing sides (contradictions).
- Gradual changes lead to turning points, where one force overcomes the other (quantitative change leads to qualitative change).
- Change moves in spirals (or helixes), not circles. (Sometimes referred to as “negation of the negation”)
The DeepDebate method is closely related to Dialectic; the purpose of DeepDebate is to open up all ideas to logical challenge. The best of those challenges are in turn opened up to their own set of logical challenges. The process repeats until the participants are ready to move to the next phase.
When finished, the strongest ideas are the ones that best withstood the challenges. Participants advocating for each of the two sides of a proposition will summarize their strongest points. The most credible participants (as measured by local clout) in favor of the proposition will create the thesis; while the most credible of those opposed to the proposition will create the antithesis. This is similar to how the Supreme Court of the United States creates a majority and a minority opinion for each decision. This stage involves the use of collaborative writing tools where many people can edit the same document.
After both of these documents are created, only then it is time to begin the synthesis, where both sides focus on identifying the common ground in each document, and once again use a collaborative writing tool. If there isn’t enough common ground, then both the thesis and the antithesis should be turned into separate deepdebates. The process repeats until the participants identify sufficient common ground.
Typical layout of blog comments, representing the 120 comments to this article
Same 120 blog comments with color added (Same color = agreement.)
A representation of the same 120 blog comments in a DeepDebate conversation map
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This is what the same 120 comments actually look like in a DeepDebate conversation map. This looks complex, but compared to the comment section of this blog, which has the same 120 comments, it only takes up 4% of the vertical space. Most importantly, related comments are displayed right next to each other, to make browsing more efficient.
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Blog comments cannot handle large conversations. The above images make a side-by-side comparison possible to see what the same conversation from the comment section of this blog looks like in a DeepDebate conversation map.
There are several significant advantages to DeepDebate over the format of blog comments:
Case Study: 12 Angry Men
Image from Wikipedia
The conversation that we used in this case study comes from the iconic movie entitled 12 Angry Men (1957). This movie documents a jury’s deliberations in a murder trial. The movie provides a powerful example of what one person with conviction and logic can do to change the course of a life-and-death decision.
(Interestingly, the idea of a completely male jury wouldn’t have raised any eyebrows in 1957. It wasn’t until 1975 that the Supreme Court ruled that women should be allowed to serve on juries.)
The proposition– or topic sentence– in this debate is “The defendant in 12 Angry Men is guilty of murder.” There are eight primary arguments which support this proposition:
In total, there are 120 comments in this conversation and the entire conversation is displayed in the comment section of this blog. You’ll see a few of the comments multiple times because they are applicable in more than one place.
Once you’ve skimmed the comment section, you might want to look at the same 120 comments displayed in this DeepDebate conversation map to experience the difference firsthand.
Wikipedia is the most well-known use of wiki software.
Wikis are tools for creating documents that reflect a consensus position. The defining feature of wiki software is that anyone who has access to a wiki document has the ability to edit it. The most current version is available to everyone at the same time. Wikis have been around for a while, but they have become more popular as businesses, non-profit organizations, and government agencies embrace collaborative tools.
VSAS (the enterprise version of DeepDebate) is a tool that works very well with wikis, because it helps the participants identify the common ground and the points of disagreement before they start to write the consensus document using a wiki.
How Wikis and VSAS are Different: Two Scenarios
VSAS helps organize many ideas in the form of a conversation map; related ideas are displayed near each other. VSAS is different from wikis, because none of the ideas that people publish can be edited by anyone else.
To illustrate why this is important, we’ll create an example scenario where three people are editing a wiki. Person #1 writes the first draft. Person #2 edits the first draft. Person #3 comes along and edits what Person #2 wrote. This situation will work fine as long as each person that comes along is making improvements to the document. If Person #2 makes the document worse, then Person #3 will not be able to see Person #1′s original contribution unless they know to look for it.
If we imagine the same three people using VSAS to accomplish the same task, we will notice some distinct advantages. Person #1 writes the first draft just like before. Next, Person #2 comments on the draft. When Person #3 comes along, she will see both the first draft and Person #2′s comments and will be able to comment on both– not just the most recent version of a wiki.
As additional people come along, they will be able to see the first draft and all the comments. If they were using a wiki, they would only see the most recent version of the document, and they would have to sift through all the previous versions of the document to see the comments of other participants.
Integrating Both Tools into One Workflow
After all the thoughts are captured in a conversation map, then it is time to summarize them in a consensus document like a wiki. In fact, it might be very useful to create to consensus documents– one on the pro side and one on the con side. Because VSAS measures the credibility of each participant, it is possible to grant access to the wiki documents to just the most credible particpants on each side.
Using VSAS in addition to wikis has several significant advantages:
