Partner Tour - Pages to Visit

The CR Connection welcomes our partners and advisors. Thank you for your interest and support of our initial efforts.

Now that we have started to roll out the live website we hope we might engage your support in other ways that may include various forms of active involvement with the site.

To that end, this set of links is intended to point out some of the key features of the site and to indicate some of the ways that people can get involved.

Front Page

Things to note at the front of our site (links open in new window) include our efforts to reach out to various key audiences by way of a set of doors that they can come through on their way into the materials. These key audiences include Teachers, Administrators/Policy makers, Researchers. and Global CRE Practitioners and Projects. You’ll also want to click on the tabs in the folders to see featured news and to see more about our sponsors.

Our Catalog of Locally Held Materials

We are also proud of our growing collection of quality resources (pdfs, word documents, powerpoint slides, learning objects, etc.) that have been cataloged in preparation for sharing widely. (Link to Our Catalog) While at our catalog, try browsing our records by category, or doing a search using the the advanced search link.

The toolkit we are using will expose the materials to a global network of Open Archives Initiative repositories that can visit our site and “harvest” our records to be shared via other catalogs around the world. Perhaps the best example of a shared collections in action is the OAIster initiative at the University of Michigan. If you do a search (try “conflict resolution”), you’ll see a listing on the sidebar of where various items came from. Our toolkit will help us integrate seamlessly with projects like this one.

Portable Learning Modules

One of our longer-term goals is to produce a series of high-quality learning modules that can be used via the web or downloaded and installed in course management programs like Moodle or Blackboard being used at schools and universities around the world. We have a few demonstration modules online now. Note that they were created quickly and don’t reflect the full potential that we can surely accomplish. Partners interested in creating Learning Modules of their own may want to get a copy of the free learning modules creation tool called eXe being developed with support from the Tertiary Education Commission of New Zealand. Here’s a page with links to two recently created modules on Soft vs Firm Limits and the Communication of Respect.

CRE Practice Area Descriptions Linked to Related Resources

As the field of CRE grows and expands and as we make connections between various strands of work in the field, it becomes useful to provide “maps of the territory” that help people see the big picture and locate their place in it. One way we are approaching this is by posting short overviews of key practice areas that are then linked to related materials from our catalog. These can be seen in the sidebar of the Teachers section of the site. As an example, consider the section on Social and Emotional Learning or the one on Restorative Practices. We hope to extend these sections with short video clips, commentary from experts, and targeted links to external resources.

Discussion Forums and Group Editing Tools

A big advantage of the web is the opportunity it provides for people to make connections across great distances. We hope to become an important destination on the web for people who are actively thinking about and working on issues related to Conflict Resolution Education. We will be mounting a series of forums and collaborative writing tools called wikis to serve the field. Ideally, we will find partners willing to moderate or help energize forums on topics they care about. The initial example of these tools is in the Global CRE section, where we are providing support for the International Network for Conflict Resolution Education and Peace Education (INCREPE). You can view the forum homepage without being an INCREPE participant, but can’t view the posts or contribute. We will have to make some decisions about what kind of forums to leave open and which to require membership access to.

Glossary of CRE-related Terms

Another useful aspect of the site that is developing nicely is the glossary of terms related to conflict resolution education. A link to it can be found in the blue menu bar found at the top of most pages in the site.

CRE Blogs by our Panel of Experts

A set of 4 blogs have been created that we hope can serve as an outlet for commentary, reviews, expert advice and more. We will be seeking partners who are willing to learn the blogging interface (not hard!) and perhaps make occasional contributions to our shared knowledgebase. The categories that have been created for organizing posts include Expert Advice, Field Reports, New Developments, Requests for Assistance, Resource Reviews, and Social Commentary. Ideally we will have several bloggers posting in each of the Teacher, CRE Researcher Blog, CRE Policymaker/Administrator Blog, and Global CRE Blog blogs so that no one person will have to carry the ball and no single voice will dominate the discourse. A benefit of blogs like this is that they can be syndicated using something known as RSS feeds. Our site already provides some RSS content, and the blogs help to extend the list as they develop.

World Networking

Another example of our desire to connect broadly is the effort we are putting into the Global aspects of our site. An interesting example of our start in this area are the Regional Summaries we are creating by combing the various bit of information we have on international activities, country profiles and organizations in our still small database of programs. By clicking on a region of the world you can see more information on what is happening there.

Policies Related to Content Contribution and Reuse

As we move forward, it is important that we develop some shared understandings with respect to the kinds of content that is appropriate for our site and that we do a good job in recognizing the rights of content creators while maintaining our focus on broad sharing of resources. To that end, partners are encouraged to review our draft set of Site Policies and our initial questions what will be asked of people who wish to contribute content.