The Dialogue Academy is a Wellcome Trust supported training scheme that deals with dialogue and debate in science communication. It has been running since September 2009 and provides free training to help professional science communicators to develop ideas, tools, skills, and techniques for using dialogue and debate as a way to engage audiences in contemporary science issues.
The following topics are covered:
- Why engage audiences with dialogue
- Facilitation skills
- A dialogue activity marketplace
- Dialogue with different audiences
- Dialogue and fundraising
- What makes a good dialogue topic
- Planning your own dialogue activity
- Embedding dialogue in everyday practice
The idea is that participants plan a science communication small scale event and use the first two day workshop to learn about dialogue and debate and how to integrate these into their event. They then trial their event and give feedback to the other participants at a final workshop.
The definition of dialogue being used by the dialogue academy is as follows:
“A process of communication in which two or more participants engage in an open exploration of issues and relationships on an equitable basis. Dialogue is the exchange of ideas, opinions, beliefs, and feelings between participants – both speakers and audience. It is listening with respect to others and being able to express one’s own views with confidence. Dialogue is not silence, chaos or one person or faction monopolising the session.”
Which unsurprisingly is pretty much identical to the basic definition that I use in my argumentation and critical thinking classes on dialogue at Dundee University. Although I have to be a little more careful about using more loaded words such as beliefs which have a specific philosophical meaning as used in computer science, the basic idea of multiple speakers exchanging ideas, opinions, and establishing positions is what dialogue is all about. My Ph.D thesis was all about how to formalise these interactions into protocols that computer software, called intelligent agents, can use, the intuition being that real world dialogue enables us to interact with each other in a flexible, efficient, and robust manner and that there are two core benefits to enabling computer software to do the same:
- Firstly, that those same benefits that humans enjoy, flexibility, efficiency, and robustness, should also be core factors in the development of computer communications, and
- Secondly, that computer software should have available to it models of human computer interaction that are closer to those that we use in human to human interaction.
I raised a titter (excuse the pun) at the AISB symposium on Persuasive Technology when I suggested that after the nipple, one of the next most natural interfaces that humans use, and in one sense use quite well, is dialogue and argument. We take positions, argue the toss, and in an everyday sense, we get things done. We might not necessarily argue well, and we might not always manage to resolve those big arguments, but the day to day stuff gets achieved. It is this aspect of argumentative dialogue that is intriguing to me as a model for how people could better interact with computers, and how computers could better interact with each other.
