Designing interaction as a dialogue game: Linking social and conceptual dimensions of the learning process

Designing and supporting learning interactions that are genuinely engaging, meaningful and conceptually stimulating within online learning contexts remains a significant challenge in contemporary education. One currently popular approach which aims to address some key aspects of this problem, and motivational issues in particular, involves articulating interaction as a game. This Chapter, whilst in support of this approach, will argue that we need to carefully consider digital gaming approaches in terms of the degree to which they both fit with our learning landscape and define how they actually support the development of social or conceptual processes that are involved in learning. We will then describe a ‘dialogue game’ approach to online dialogue and interaction that integrates with existing, or nearfuture, pedagogical and technological practices, and explicitly links the social and cognitive dimensions of learning. This is realised through articulating game-playing activity in terms of the development of dialogical and reasoning skills that lead to improved conceptual understanding and collaborative knowledge refinement. This Chapter will present: the justification, background and theoretical foundations for this approach; summarise computational and empirical studies that support it; describe a socio-cognitive tool called InterLoc (that mediates, structures and manages educational dialogue games); and, provide an exemplar interaction from user trials of this approach. Finally, some key implications this work holds for designing gaming and related types of educational interaction are then discussed.