An Online Deliberation Facilitators' Dashboard:

Visualizations and Text analysis to support quality dialogues

Wing, L., Murray, T., Woolf, B., Katsh, E. The Twelfth International Online Dispute Resolution Forum,

Montreal, June 2013

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“The Fourth Party: Improving Computer-Mediated Deliberation through Cognitive, Social and Emotional

Support”

• 3-Year NSF Social Computing grant, started Fall 2010

• Description at www.socialdeliberativeskills.com

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Project collaborators

• Beverly Woolf: CompSci, PI (intelligent and collaborative educational systems)

• Tom Murray: CompSci; project manager/co-PI, principal visionary and instigator (ed-tech, cog-psych & D&D)

• Ethan Katsh (ODR), Legal Studies, co-PI• Leah Wing (social justice and ODR), Legal Studies, co-PI• Linda Tropp, Psychology of Peace and Violence, advisor (intergroup

relations/conflict) • Zan Goncalves, New England Center for Civic Life (teaching,

practice and study of deliberative democracy)• Idealogue Inc.; iCohere. Inc. software platforms(Advanced

dialogue)

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Thanks for consultation and/or data from:

• DemarsAssociates.com/PayPal/ebay (e-commerce)• Juripax.com (online workplace and divorce

settlements)• National Mediation Board (transportation

management/labor disputes)• Modria.com (e-commerce plus)• Idealogue.com (depth-oriented online dialogue

platform)• iCohere.com (online communities and work groups)• Mass Dept. of Dispute Resolution (civic engagement)• New England Center for Civic Life (teaching, practice

and study of deliberative democracy)

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Social Deliberative Skills:Social/Emotional/Reflective

Perspective taking & cognitive empathy

Perspective seeking (curiosity/inquiry)

Self-reflection: on one's biases, intentions, emotional state

Meta-dialog: Reflect on the quality of the dialog

Epistemic skill: e.g. treating facts/data differently from opinions/hypotheses

Tolerance for uncertainty, ambiguity, disagreement, paradox

…

Support/Scaffolding vs. “Education”

FacilitatedOnline

DELIBERATION

Outcomes:- Agreements/solutions

- Relationship, Trust (social capital), understanding

- SKILL USE (and practice)

ExistingSkills

Adaptive Support(4th party)

Interface Support

FacilitatorSupport

(Dashboard)

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Example: Topics Chosen by Students—set context in Spring ’12

• Week 1: Discuss the pros and cons of legalizing marijuana

• Week 2: Sex – what's the big deal? What values are most important in making sexual choices?

• Week 3: Discus the pros and cons of the death penalty (capital punishment)

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Mediem

Opinion Sliders

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Experimental ConditionsExp Group N Gender Grade

Vanilla 8 (5 Female, 3 Male)

4 soph, 4 juniors, 0 seniors

Reflective Tools 8 (5 Female, 3 Male)

4 soph, 2 juniors, 2 seniors

(Sliders) 8 (Group omitted due to interaction issues)

• V&R groups: 241 posts and 516 segments (average of 15.06 (SD = 7.45) posts/student)

• Mean words/post = 54 (SD = 42); mean characters/post = 299 (SD = 242)

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Text Coding

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Main Effect Exp. Group Total_

SD_SkillIntersubjectivespeech acts

Vanilla (N = 8) 0.29 (0.07) 0.20 (0.09)

Reflective Tools (N = 8) 0.40 (0.08) 0.30 (0.08)

• A significant difference and main effect between Total-SD-Score and grouping, F(1, 14) = 6.89, p = 0.02*, d = 1.46 (a large effect) in favor of the Reflective Tools group

• A significant relationship between Intersub and grouping, F(1, 14) = 4.81, p = 0.05*, d = 1.05 (a large effect) in favor of the Reflective Tools group

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Facilitator’s Dashboard

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Dashboard Text Tagging

Advice Screen

Applicability and Use

Facilitators• To identify individual and group participation levels

for assessing useful interventions(ie: to stimulate more involvement, moreconstructive engagement, etc.)

• To identify patterns of ‘silence’ or intensity (ie: to ID topics/relationships to attend to; use as clues to search text analysis forconflicts or breakthroughs)

Applicability and Use

Participants• For self/group assessment of engagement,

topical, and relationship patterns re:

participation, intensity, silence• For clues to search text analysis for

conflicts or breakthroughs

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CohMetrixdiscourse & coherence

LIWClexical categories

Skill vs. text metrics correlations

LIWC/Cohmetrix Correlations with Total-SD-Skill

Cross-Domain Training

Prelim. Machine Learning ResultsFor Predicting Total Skill

Future ApplicationsCommon problems encountered in online facilitation

• Low or no participation of individuals or groups, or silences or lulls on the part of individuals, the entire group, or sub-groups

• Conversation domination by an individual or group • Inappropriate or disrespectful behavior • Off-topic conversation • Tension-filled disagreements, or high emotional content• Too much agreement or politeness • Misunderstanding due to missing communication skills

normally available in face-to-face communication• Violation of rules (e.g. confidentiality, no advertising, etc.)

Thank you

Extra slides

Automated Text Analysis

LIWC (Pennebaker et al.) – Dictionary-based (linguistic inquiry word count)

– 4,500 words/STEMS; 80 word categories– we focus on 19 of them– 80 >> 4 general descriptor categories (word count, words per sentence, % of words captured, and % of words >6 letters),

22 standard linguistic dimensions (e.g., % pronouns, articles, auxiliary verbs, etc.), 32 psychological constructs (e.g., affect, cognition, biological processes), 7 personal concern categories (e.g., work, home, leisure activities), 3 paralinguistic dimensions (assents, fillers, nonfluencies), and 12 punctuation categories (periods, commas, etc).

– Relate the categories to things like aggression, used in theraputic contexts, to ID lying,

• Coh-Metrix (Graesser et al.)– syntax, referential cohesion, semantic cohesion, rhetorical composition…

– 100 measurements categories– We focus on 4 composite measurements (or major factors):

Narrativity, Referential Cohesion, Syntactic Simplicity, and Word Concreteness

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Experimental Groups

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Code Frequencies  Intersub Meta_

DialogueMeta_Topic

Apology Appreciation

Fact_Source

Source_Ref

#students

22 5 15 1 8 1 4

% ofsegs 25% 0.9% 5.5% 0.2% 1.3% 0.3% 1.2%

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Total Skill score adds:

• Appreciation (Gratitude, affirmation of another's idea or situation)

• Apology• Fact--sourced (stating a fact and noting the source in the

same post)• Source Reference (Mentioning a source, with a

reference or description; without a fact)• Intersubjectivity: perspective taking or question asking• Meta-dialogue, discussing the quality of the dialogue• Meta-Topic: Birds eye or systemic view of the topic

Next: Linked Representations• clicking on the name of an individual or group in a chart or network

diagram will focus (or filer or highlight) all tools on that individual or group;

• clicking on a link in the network diagram will show posts between the relevant interlocutors;

• clicking on a word in the word cloud will highlight posts including that word;

• clicking on a location in the time-axis of a trend line will navigate to posts in the Timeline at that time;

• hovering over an agent trigger will show the Advice or Alert associated with that event; and clicking on Advice or Alerts will navigate to the place in the dialogue timeline for the triggering event(s).

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Text Coding

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Social Deliberative Skills:Social/Emotional/Reflective

• 1. Social perspective taking (cognitive empathy, reciprocal role taking...)

• 2. Social perspective seeking (social inquiry, question asking skills...)

• 3. Social perspective monitoring (self-reflection, meta-dialogue...)

• 4. Social perspective weighing (reflective reasoning; comparing and contrasting views...)

Domain statistics and inter-rater agreement

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Codoole—coding toolsCoole – coding tools

Social Deliberative Skill:application of HOSs to me/you/we

Higher Order Skills • argumentation• critical thinking• explanation & clarification• inquiry/curiosity (question asking & investigation)• reflective judgment• meta-cognition• epistemic reasoning

Apply these skills, not to EXTERNAL REALITY (“IT”/problem domain) but to theINTERSUBJECTIVE domain

Higher Order Skills applied to:

SELFgoals; level of certainty; feelings, values, assumptions…

YOU goals, assumptions, feelings, values; perspective taking; "believing" & cognitive empathy…

WEagreements, goals; quality of the discourse/collaboration; differences and similarities in values, beliefs, goals, power, roles…

Survey Questions

29 of the 36 participants took the survey

By Demographic

Settings

Post number vs. size