Making the Most of Your Visit

Greetings! The Campus-adr.org team is really glad you've stopped by. The goal here is to provide a centralized repository of useful information that will support constructive conflict resolution work both within the campus community, and outside it by people trained and educated in conflict studies programs and mediation services. Our project's slogan is:

Working with and Learning from
Conflict in Higher Education

The site was designed and built by Bill Warters, the project's director, to resemble a college campus. Knowing that Bill did his undergraduate degree in Conflict Resolution at the University of California in Santa Cruz might help you understand the look and feel of the site a bit :^) In fact, If you look hard enough you might even find a banana slug -- UCSC's mascot -- hiding somewhere on campus! Folks who locate the slug will receive a free campus-adr.org magnet.

Anyway, we've tried to use the basic structure of a campus as a metaphor as we organized the available information and tools. We assume that many of our visitors have spent some time on college campuses and thus find it familar and helpful. Using this design, you'll find content of particular interest to faculty in the Faculty Club, material aimed specifically at students in the Student Center, materials for staff and administrators in the Staff and Admin Building, and materials supporting Conflict Resolution Service volunteers and staff in the Conflict Resolution Services Center.

We also have a number of buildings that focus less on who the key user groups are, and more on the kind of core content found there. For instance, the Skill Training Complex emphasizes training tools and will house our online conferences and seminars; the Classroom Building provides information of special interest to people teaching or studying conflict issues; the Newsstand serves up hot news; and the Main Library offers tools for researchers and students.

We've tried to make the site navigation tools relatively straightforward and readily available. We provide links to the site map and site search tools across the top along with a drop-down menu for jumping to information by user group. Sidebar building directory buttons are designed help you keep track of what's available in the section you're currently in. "Breadcrumbs" at the top of most pages provide another quick way to figure out where you are within the site's structure, and because the crumb trail links are clickable, you can move quickly to other areas of the site using this as well. For answers to common questions, you can visit our Frequently Asked Questions page.

While we will strive to provide practical and relevant information, we also hope to nuture a bit of a community of likeminded folks interested in this work in it's many manifestations. We have some ideas about how to do this -- such as via special working groups, use of virtual "seminar rooms" and discussion tools, sharing of syllabi, roleplays and powerpoint presentations, publication of each other's work in the Report -- and we are eager to hear from you regarding other ways we might take advantage of this platform our FIPSE grant and Wayne State University and our partners at CRInfo have helped make possible. Visit the Volunteer Office if you are interested in getting more involved. We would also very much appreciate comments and suggestions at any time via the feedback link found on the bottom of all pages.

Thanks again for having a look around. We hope that the information you find proves useful in your work. And please do come again!