A look at Students' works in ODR

Welcome to the ODR Student Showcase forum. This year we are inviting students to share their creative and scholarly works related to Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) broadly defined. University students are invited to post or embed links to slideshows, presentations, video clips, working papers, journal articles, or other creative works that they have authored and have permission to share. The submissions should be related in some way to conflict and/or conflict resolution and networked communication technologies or online social spaces. 

 

When posting the work, please introduce yourself, let us know what college or university you are associated with and include some information on the context within which the work was created (ie was it created as a class project, as part of a research initiative, as a thesis, as part of an internship, as a contest submission, etc.). If it is a work in progress and you are looking for specific feedback on aspects of the project please let us know that as well. 

 

I'm looking forward to seeing what our up and coming scholars and creative artists have been working on, so I do hope you'll decide to share. 


Moderated by:

 

Bill Warters, Ph.D. is a faculty member in the Master of Arts in Dispute Resolution Program offered by Wayne State University's Department of Communication. This semester he is teaching an online course entitled Dispute Resolution and Communication Technology that explores many aspects of ODR. He is author of Mediation in the Campus Community: Designing and Managing Effective Programs (Jossey-Bass, 2000) and a member of the Editorial Board of Conflict Resolution Quarterly. He developed and maintains two major web clearinghouses, campus-adr.org (for Higher Ed ADR) and creducation.org (for K-12 Conflict Resolution Education). He is a former chair of the ACR Education Section and a past President of ACR's Michigan SE Chapter.  He is a member of the international Conflict Resolution Day planning committee that organizes the yearly October event promoting CR. Bill received the William J. Kreidler Award from the Association for Conflict Resolution (ACR) in 2008 for distinguished service in the Education sector.

 

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To get the ball rolling, I'm posting this publicly available video produced as a student class project by Carla Cross, Karen Hamilton and Debbie Plested at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. They used a free tool called MovieStorm (moviestorm.co.uk) to animate the characters involved in a mock mediation conducted using avatars. I don't know how to reach them for comment, but I'd have to say I personally think it was a pretty nice student group project.

Very cool -- reminds me of the peer mediation in second life experiment from 2006:

rah


Thanks Colin. Good connection. At risk of moving us away from strictly student produced work, your post reminded me of the EU-based project known as Avatar@School   http://www.avataratschool.eu In this project, roleplay scripts are created to explore issues of bullying and mistreatment online, which are then played out in a secure OpenSim environment.  There is a briefing paper about the project over at Slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/Links-up/case-study-avatarschool

This was a great video to walk someone through a dispute resolution scenario. I wonder if there is any merit in creating an avatar based followup to an actual face to face resolution as if it was a set of meeting minutes to be reviewed by both parties.

Bill Warters said:

To get the ball rolling, I'm posting this publicly available video produced as a student class project by Carla Cross, Karen Hamilton and Debbie Plested at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. They used a free tool called MovieStorm (moviestorm.co.uk) to animate the characters involved in a mock mediation conducted using avatars. I don't know how to reach them for comment, but I'd have to say I personally think it was a pretty nice student group project.

 

Interesting and extremely well done- I did find it a bit ironic that what students are doing in this clip is utilizing really cool technology and avatars to walk through a face to face dispute resolution scenario. Of course, the stages of dispute resolution may be the same whether the dispute resolution process is done face to face or online.   But I do think it is important to keep the distinction in mind - what are we using technology for in the dispute resolution setting?   Is it to facilitate existing processes with new tools?  Or, are we looking for ways to tranform the dispute resolution process itself?  Just one final thought at this early stage in the conversation:  doesn't technology give us the chance to reinvent the role that 'communications' plays to maintain relationships, avoid disputes all together?  Is that what we should be teaching? 

 

 

Hi everyone! This is the first year that I have decided to actively participate in ODR week, so I hope my contribution makes sense to someone. 

To add my thoughts on the conflict mediation project to what Jeff said above, maybe another question we should be asking is where the conflict originated. Is it an online-based interaction (ie e-commerce, e-learning, etc.) that uses online tools to mediate a dispute, or is it a face-to-face conflict that uses ODR? If technology is used to facilitate online-based relationships, then the communication process itself doesn't change, does it? It seems to me that the avatars diversify the technological representation of human interaction (just like emoticons), which could help or deter problem-solving, but in the end, if the people that started the interaction did so in front of computers, then during the dispute and the dispute resolution they will still be people using computers to communicate. If the problem started with a face-to-face dispute, then technology would be the new parameter to the interaction. Or even more interesting, if people use both in their interaction, then ... any thoughts?

Interesting idea there Kevin. In a sense, using avatars to ritually enact or memorialize an agreement made perhaps only in text. For some reason it reminded me of the woven wampum belts that the Iroquois Confederacy used to memorialize a largely oral agreement so that it could be bought back to memory later and passed along. Hmm...what is the modern digital equivalent of a wampum belt?

Kevin McAlpine said:
This was a great video to walk someone through a dispute resolution scenario. I wonder if there is any merit in creating an avatar based followup to an actual face to face resolution as if it was a set of meeting minutes to be reviewed by both parties.

Bill Warters said:

To get the ball rolling, I'm posting this publicly available video produced as a student class project by Carla Cross, Karen Hamilton and Debbie Plested at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. They used a free tool called MovieStorm (moviestorm.co.uk) to animate the characters involved in a mock mediation conducted using avatars. I don't know how to reach them for comment, but I'd have to say I personally think it was a pretty nice student group project.

 

Hi Diliana. Good to have you involved. Your point about the difference it makes regarding where the original conflict occurred certainly makes sense to me. In the first video example, the hypothetical conflict was one involving students who only know each other from interactions in an online course, not face to face, but now they are using avatars to enact a more familiar scenario of a face to face mediation or problem solving session. Jeff's point, it seems to me, is that we don't want to be driven to just replicate face-to-face models to the detriment of new "born digital" ways of working through conflict. I certainly agree with that as well. I also hear you calling attention to the fact that avatars are a form of representation that can carry with it personal preferences and biases (in terms of how you might represent your "opponent" in an online space if they aren't visually representing themselves), for better or worse. Interesting stuff, that.

Diliana Stoyanova said:

Hi everyone! This is the first year that I have decided to actively participate in ODR week, so I hope my contribution makes sense to someone. 

To add my thoughts on the conflict mediation project to what Jeff said above, maybe another question we should be asking is where the conflict originated. Is it an online-based interaction (ie e-commerce, e-learning, etc.) that uses online tools to mediate a dispute, or is it a face-to-face conflict that uses ODR? If technology is used to facilitate online-based relationships, then the communication process itself doesn't change, does it? It seems to me that the avatars diversify the technological representation of human interaction (just like emoticons), which could help or deter problem-solving, but in the end, if the people that started the interaction did so in front of computers, then during the dispute and the dispute resolution they will still be people using computers to communicate. If the problem started with a face-to-face dispute, then technology would be the new parameter to the interaction. Or even more interesting, if people use both in their interaction, then ... any thoughts?

Okay, time to serve up another student work. I'm going to "pick on" our colleague Colin Rule and share a piece that he developed during his days as an undergraduate at Haverford College working with their peer mediation program. He offered a critique of collegiate peer mediation programs with respect to who controls and manages them and what kind of issues they focus on in this piece - http://www.creducation.org/resources/4thR_1994_v50_Rule.pdf  - I guess it is a stretch to connect this to ODR but perhaps we should be thinking about student "owned" processes for resolving online conflicts and what they might look like or do look like in practice. Do they or might they privilege interpersonal conflicts at the expense of naming and addressing structural conflicts?

Bill (& everyone),

 

While reading the above it reminded me of a paper I wrote (and posted here) about how an University Ombuds office can embrace technology to help its students and faculty involved in conflicts and disputes.  I think using F2F synchronous technology should be an option- like adding another spoke to the conflict resolution wheel of options- not a replacement.

Specifically, on the University level, an ombuds and mediation program that offers services online can be an added benefit.

 

Thoughts?

Hi Jeff. Thanks so much for sharing your paper. So many good pieces of work done while people are students ends up hidden away somewhere and we miss the benefits. I've downloaded it and look forward to a closer review. Seems like with Microsoft having purchased Skype and Apple pushing FaceTime, video access is destined to become widespread. By the way, I'm not sure the web page/link title typo "Omduds" is going to catch on with organizational problem solvers! Maybe we should aim for "Omstuds" instead? That is probably too likely to get censored by filters...

Jeff Thompson said:

Bill (& everyone),

 

While reading the above it reminded me of a paper I wrote (and posted here) about how an University Ombuds office can embrace technology to help its students and faculty involved in conflicts and disputes.  I think using F2F synchronous technology should be an option- like adding another spoke to the conflict resolution wheel of options- not a replacement.

Specifically, on the University level, an ombuds and mediation program that offers services online can be an added benefit.

 

Thoughts?

It would be very helpful to play this during the practicum training.  It is very clear, concise and shows how easily the steps flow together. 

Kevin McAlpine said:
This was a great video to walk someone through a dispute resolution scenario. I wonder if there is any merit in creating an avatar based followup to an actual face to face resolution as if it was a set of meeting minutes to be reviewed by both parties.

Bill Warters said:

To get the ball rolling, I'm posting this publicly available video produced as a student class project by Carla Cross, Karen Hamilton and Debbie Plested at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. They used a free tool called MovieStorm (moviestorm.co.uk) to animate the characters involved in a mock mediation conducted using avatars. I don't know how to reach them for comment, but I'd have to say I personally think it was a pretty nice student group project.

 

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