Volume
1, Number 3 August/September 2000
Harnessing the Power of the World Wide Web for Conflict
Studies Courses
by Bill
Warters
The
World Wide Web is rapidly becoming an essential part of
academic life. Email has become virtually unavoidable,
campus libraries are serving up electronic full-text resources
like never before, and first year students are routinely
being provided with computers for use in their rooms.
At the same time, faculty members are being encouraged
to put at least some portion of their materials online
and to make use of courseware tools like Blackboard, WebCT,
or TopClass to manage their courses and connect with students.
Our
new information technology is exciting and rich with potential,
but at the same time it often feels a bit overwhelming
and unfathomable. To help address these concerns, this
article presents a range of ways that relevant information
from the web can be located quickly and used to good advantage
by faculty teaching conflict studies courses or workshops.
Course
Development Tasks
Given
the rapid emergence of conflict resolution related courses
and programs (see Warters,
2000 and Polkinghorn
and Chenail, 2000), many faculty now find themselves
faced with the responsibility of preparing new conflict
studies courses. While faculty vary in their course design
methods, this process typically involves a number of discrete
steps such as
 Clarifying
course goals & objectives and its
place within the broader campus curriculum, |
|
Locating
examples of similar courses, |
| Identifying
relevant course texts and then choosing among
them, |
| Identifying
relevant journal articles and web-based
info to supplement the texts, |
| Developing
a coherent set of in-class and out-of-class learning
activities, |
| Developing
a grading and assessment strategy. |
In
this article, I will point readers toward web-based materials
or tools that can help them accomplish each of these tasks
quickly and resourcefully. Be forewarned, however, that
this article also invites you to do a good bit of surfing,
so it may take some time to get through if you're a curious
type.
Clarifying
Course Goals and Objective
Course
planning efforts can be greatly enhanced (and wasted effort
minimized) if one gets clear early on about the basic
goals and objectives of the course. It is helpful to think
about how your course relates to other conflict resolution
courses available on campus, and to talk with faculty
teaching these other courses to avoid covering the same
material in courses that may have overlapping students.
I have found the Visioning Your Course outline from UC
Irvine to be a particularly succinct guide for clarifying
the task you have before you. Consider printing a copy
and using it to think through your basic course plan.
For a somewhat more theoretical discussion of the instructional
design process and current concepts of active and higher
learning you might wish to view the materials provided
by the University of Oklahoma Instructional Development
Program.
Looking
for Examples of Other Courses
While
we don't yet have a fully centralized web depository for
conflict studies course syllabi, a number of online collections
are now available that can provide useful insight into
how people are structuring their courses and what materials
they are finding most pertinent. The following links lead
to groupings of relevant course outlines for possible
review.
Course
Web Pages for conflict and communication classes
from the EMPATHY project
Directory
of College and University Peace Studies Programs
(Includes Links to Online Syllabi)
International
Peacekeeping Syllabi collection from courses on
various aspects of UN-sanctioned peace operations
Law
School ADR Course Outlines from FindLaw
If
you don't mind browsing a bit (and perhaps getting distracted
by interesting side trips), you can also try searching
for the term "syllabus" combined with some of
your core topic words (try "conflict resolution"
or "mediation" for example) using a search engine
limited to the educational (.edu) domain. SearchEdu.com
is one site that does this for you automatically. You
can also use domain limiting search options built into
existing engines. For example, at AltaVista.com,
adding the search term "domain:edu" (without
the quotes) to your basic query limits all your hits to
those found at educational servers.
If
you're not in a hurry or you wish to plan ahead for next
term (what a concept!), the web can also facilitate the
ordering of bound syllabi collections. A prime example
is the Conflict
Management Syllabi Collection from George Mason's
Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution. The George
Mason University program is one of the most well-established
conflict studies programs in the country, and the first
to offer a Ph.D. specifically in the field. You might
also want to check on the availability of the excellent
1998 Conflict Resolution Syllabi Sampler published by
NIDR/CREnet, or the ASA's Teaching
Peace and War collection mentioned in this issue.
Locating
Appropriate Textbooks
As
the conflict management field matures the number of relevant
books is growing rapidly. The field is also by nature
interdisciplinary. This combination makes keeping track
of key books somewhat challenging, as useful books may
be published in areas that are outside your "home"
discipline. A 1995 delphi study (see Warters,
1999) addressed this question by asking a mixed group
of conflict studies faculty to identify and rank key works
in the field. This produced a list of core
texts that while remarkably diverse, helped map out
the field. Catherine Morris, former director of the UVic
Institute for Dispute Resolution has developed a great
resource (see Readings
in Dispute Resolution: A Select Bibliography) that
incorporates these readings and that is regularly updated
and nicely categorized. Definitely worth a visit.
If
you are interested in more descriptive or critical annotations
of the books, you may wish to scan the reviews of dispute
resolution literature produced by the late James Boskey
in his Alternative Newsletter. Six issues of his
reviews (March,
1999 - November,
1998 - July,
1998 - March,
1998 - November,
1997 - July,
1997) are posted online. To avoid having to scroll
through the whole long text, in issues that don't provide
a table of contents, you might want to use the "find
in page" feature of your browser to search for authors
or titles you are interested in.
A
number of publishers are also now specializing in conflict
studies. For example, check out the growing list of offerings
at Jossey-Bass;
Sage Publications
(search on the word "conflict"); Syracuse
University Press (go "books in print" --->
"series listing" --->"Syracuse Studies
on Peace and Conflict Resolution"); or Harvard's
Program on Negotiation. To search a varied group of
university presses all at once, you can access the Association
of American University Presses Online Catalog. I recommend
searching on keywords for this one.
Deciding
who to give your money to when you purchase a book is
really a personal decision. If you don't want to or cannot
order directly from a press or a local bookstore, you
can use a variety of online stores to make your purchase.
In addition to using individual stores like Amazon.com
or Borders.com or Barnes and Noble (bn.com), if you know
the title or ISBN of a book you are interested in, you
can easily do comparison price shopping using tools like
MySimon.com
that check all the major online book dealers. Or you might
wish to purchase from one of the bookstores hosted by
organizations specializing in conflict resolution, such
as the Academy of Family Mediators or the Network:
Interaction for Conflict Resolution (a Canadian organization).
Locating
Journals and Journal Articles
Most
campus libraries now provide access to electronic reference
services (FirstSearch, UnCover, WorldCat etc.) that can
be used to help you track down articles pertinent to your
work across a broad range of publications. Because libraries
access these services by subscription, you usually have
to be using a campus computer on the right network or
have a password to gain access to them. Many of these
tools can be accessed remotely (i.e., from home) if you
have the password and correct dial-up number or web address,
so you may want to check into it. FindArticles.com
is a newly launched commercial service that provides free
full-text articles from a range of journals and magazines.
A number of free federally-sponsored databases are also
available for searching via the web, most notably ERIC
(providing broad coverage of the education field, including
higher education) and the Library
of Congress (not designed to locate articles, but
good for books, manuscripts, films, etc.).
In
addition to articles appearing in the traditional discipline-based
journals in sociology, psychology, political science,
management, etc., there is a growing number of specialized
journals specifically supporting the conflict studies
field. The list of dispute resolution journals maintained
by Nova Southeastern University's Department of Dispute
Resolution reveals the growing range of publications now
available. This list also provides links to the actual
publications or to their publishers. Some of these journal
sites will let you search their archives as well.
While
it is not a journal per se, you may also wish to visit
Mediate.com's Resolution
Magazine and check out their growing list of brief
full-text articles on conflict resolution related topics.
You can now search by topic to get quickly to the articles
of interest to you.
To
assist your research, library support staff sometimes
produce specialized subject guides that point the way
to relevant library resources. You may want to check locally
to see if your library has developed anything on conflict
resolution or peace studies. For a rather extensive example,
check out the George
Mason University Library subject guide on conflict management,
which while designed to serve GMU faculty and students,
includes links to non-password dependent materials as
well.
Personally,
I have found the use of citation and reference management
software to be extremely helpful for keeping track of
and appropriately using references that I have located.
The latest versions of many of these permit you to hook
up to library databases and directly search and then import
references into your local computer. They also greatly
facilitate the formatting for references in different
styles depending on the publication you are writing for.
My personal and longtime favorite is EndNotes
from ISI ResearchSoft. Reviews
of the full range of bibliographic programs is available
from the UC Berkeley Writing Program if you want to shop
for a program that meets your specific needs. Most of
these programs also have a special educational discount
price, so you may want to check with your campus bookstore
or sites like StudentDiscounts
before purchasing.
A
number of free searchable reference collections focusing
specifically on conflict studies are available online.
These collections vary with respect to the amount of information
provided, and some of them return information on articles
or working papers that can be quite hard to put your hands
on.
Conflict
Research Consortium (large,
built using reference lists from various Hewlett Theory-building
Centers, resulting in sometimes inconsistent levels
of information)
Conflict
Resolution Center International (particularly helpful
for identifying items that were not published in mainstream
sources)
Restorative
Justice Online (nice collection of articles and
abstracts on Victim Offender Mediation related topics)
Indiana
Conflict Resolution Institute (emphasizes empirical
field studies and program evaluations on conflict resolution)
Law.com
(while not exclusively focused on conflict issues, the
site does provides access to full-text law-related ADR
articles)
Readings
in Dispute Resolution: A Select Bibliography
(a subject oriented bibliography maintained
by Catherine Morris as noted above)
