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Virtual
Diplomacy Homepage >> Virtual
Diplomacy Publications >> SHALOM/SALAAM 
SHALOM/SALAAM by Barb Stuart, M.P.C.D. and Gedaliahu Harel, Ph. D. and Corrina Perrone Computationalism, to its great credit, is interested in
any and all ways in which information is organized and used....Culturalism,
on the other hand, concentrates exclusively on how human beings in cultural
communities create and transform things. (Bruner, 1996) Information technology (IT) is under attack! Some experts
believe that IT generates more data with less relevance for management
problems at hand. Managers get reports measured in stack-feet per month.
No one can read or digest all the reports. No one knows what is in all
this data, what is really important, or how to get to it. Equipment
is hard to choose, install, maintain and operate. No two systems are
alike, and almost all systems are arcane and complex. This describes
large corporate IT systems; the situation with personal computers is
even worse. The reliance on traditional design and engineering models
is insufficient for tools for the intellectual work of today. Tom Landauer,
former director of Cognitive Science Research at Bellcore and Professor
of Psychology at the University of Colorado says that computers do things
that are irrelevant or even detrimental to true productivity. While
psychological science provides some advances in understanding human
behavior, they are in limited domains, attached to narrow problems and
studied in the laboratory. Significantly, Landauer asserts that technological
advances most often come from accumulated practical wisdom. (Landauer,
1995) If this is the case in straight forward computational applications,
what hope is there for information processing software and technology
to support "wicked" problem solving? "Wicked" problems are ambiguous,
emergent and frequently shaped by the unspoken values, beliefs and assumptions
of stakeholders and their cultures. These cultural definitions are shaping
the issues of international competition, economics and politics. Francis
Fukayama, scholar, analyst and author, suggests that it is vital to
attain a deeper understanding of cultural distinctions and especially
an ability to maintain what Nietzsche called a shared "language of good
and evil." A shared, or common language is critical to the creation
of trust, and the social capital that rests on cultural roots. (Fukayama,
1995) SHALOM/SALAAM: Interactive Conflict Resolution In A Community
Of Practice, seeks to create a common language and shared understanding
about conflicted situations in the Middle East. It is a collaboration
among faculty, students, scientists and business colleagues from around
the globe, concerned about conflict, concerned about violence and concerned
about sustainable culture. This interactive workspace will collect the
common metaphors, stories and top-of-the-mind analogies of participants,
the "language of good and evil". It is an effort to foster that deeper
understanding of cultures in conflict, using much of what we know and
what we learn from stories as narrative mental models. "Socially elaborated
and sanctioned stories constitute the cognitive structures that hold
a culture together", according to Kintsch et al, in Principles of
Learning in Multimedia Educational Systems. Douglas Engelbart, the inventor of the mouse, groupware
and hypertext, describes the next frontier as "how to improve mankind's
ability to deal collectively with complex problems". He identifies communities
as necessary elements: Projects and task forces aren't enough, and all the tools and technology in the world won't help if people aren't around to extract their lessons and convert them into better ways of getting better. For that you need to talk about communities. (Stewart, 1996) Engelbart describes increasing the effectiveness of knowledge
transfer, developing effective pilot projects and prototypes, getting
them up faster and replicating them better. MIT Media Lab scientists
also study communities and ways to weave information technology into
a community's social fabric, create communities of interest and enhance
community introspection (http://isj.www.media.mit.edu/projects/isj/SectionB/367.htm). In his book Collective Intelligence in Computer Based
Collaboration, J.B. Smith draws heavily on research from cognitive
and computer science. He shows that "cognitive processes are often closely,
even fundamentally entwined with social processes...and require integrating
other disciplines including anthropology, ethnography, management science,
organizational theory, economics, sociology, social psychology, speech
communication and the study of small groups." He suggests that the increasing
tendency of organizations encouraging more flexible combinations and
teams is driving collaboration to become the predominant form of intellectual
work. (Smith, 1994 pp. xii) SHALOM/SALAAM: Interactive Conflict Resolution In A Community
Of Practice is being designed as a collaborative "knowledge-building
community" where the knowledge building activities of the group, as
a collective (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1991, p. 38) define a Zone
of Proximal Development or ZPD. Russian educator and psychologist, Lev
Vygotsky describes ZPD as the difference between individual problem
solving and potential development through problem solving with guidance
or in collaboration with more competent "others." In SHALOM/SALAAM,
cross cultural data reflected on the World Wide Web (WWW), computational
tools and artifacts, collaborating peers and experts may all be used
as more competent "others," to inform and support conflict resolution. The Middle East offers cultural and historic conflict for
study and reflection. Both novices and experts will use the site, some
as novices to the facts of Middle East conflict, but subject matter
experts in the fields of conflict resolution, activity theory, management
science and cognitive science. Designed as an information space without
threshold or ceiling, for experts and novices alike, it offers an opportunity
for co-construction of knowledge. Users will come to know each other's
minds. Users may practice conflict resolution skills like reframing
(Dunford & Palmer, 1995), reflection, taking multiple perspectives,
generative and systems thinking. (Senge, 1994) SHALOM/SALAAM is being designed to recognize the relationship
between constructing artifacts and constructing shared understanding
among people. Like the two hands drawing each other in M.C. Escher's
work "Drawing Hands", building artifacts and building shared understanding
each seem to give rise to the other and at the same time, can be the
product of the other (Ostwald, 1996). A WebQuest software environment
combines a simulation construction environment based on the Agentsheets
authoring substrate with the research resources of the World Wide Web.
It was designed at the University of Colorado - Boulder to use information
found on the web to inform the process of creating, exploring and changing
programmable simulations. It is an artifact for reflection, revision
extension or sharing or data. Several groups of middle school students
use WebQuest, and it is being adapted for SHALOM/SALAAM. Some educational theorists say that tools - including cognitive
artifacts - are created at a particular moment in the history of a culture,
in response to the demands of the activity in which they are used, and
continue to be modified, in use, by those who continue the activity.
According to Gordon Wells, "ZPD is created at the interaction between
the students and the co-participants in an activity, including available
tools and the selected practices, and depends on the nature and quality
of that interaction as much as the upper limits of the learner's capability"
(Wells, p. 4). Leont'ev said "higher psychological processes unique
to humans can be acquired only through interaction with others, that
is, through interpsychological processes that only later will begin
to be carried out later in the individual." (Leont'ev, 1981, p. 56) This focus on collaboration and community is in stark contrast
to many of the approaches of cognitive science with its emphasis on
individual cognition, controlled experiments, algorithms and quantification.
Yasmin Kafai (1995) in Minds in Play, describes the convergence
of learning and design of information processing as a context for building
knowledge structures. She describes design as making, building or programming
something. Theorists interested in design frequently consider a final
product all important, while a learning theorist may focus on the process
that leads to the final product. Their common interest in information
processing moves design and learning theory closer together. Both designers
and learners "construct meaning" when they build, design or understand
something and both learning and designing are conceptualized as processes
of problem solving. (Kafai, 1995 pp.15) Management scientists at MIT's Sloan School of Management,
at the Center of Organizational Learning, also study the making of meaning
and the process of making thinking public. They describe mental models
as the images, assumptions and stories carried in our minds of ourselves,
other people, institutions and everyday life. These mental maps are
the navigational tools for humans - tacit, existing below the surface,
and require reflection and inquiry. The techniques advocated evolved
from theorists and educators like Chris Argyris and Donald Schon and
explore the reasoning and attitudes that underlie human action. (Senge,
et al, 1994 pp. 246) To enhance group learning, Peter Senge (Senge, 1994 p. 6) suggests a focus on reflection, clarifying and improving mental models, developing shared images, transforming individual thinking to collective conversation and thinking, and developing a language to describe the interrelatedness of aspects of a system. "Making thinking public" is a common phrase in management, educational and psychological literature. Bruner (1996) describes the human capacity for intersubjectivity [how humans come to know each other's minds] as a crucial cultural adaptation. (p. 184) In this same vein, Bereiter and Scardamalia describe the
constructivist notion that knowledge is produced within the mind through
the mental activities of the learner. They suggest that sociocultural
theories offer a conception of knowledge that inheres in cultural practice
and artifact that cannot be reduced to either the contents or the capabilities
of individual minds. Their research in computer-aided classrooms and
database construction, surfaces critical issues in the differences between
learning, which is directed toward changes in one's own world and knowledge
building, or developing a principle or theory that makes sense of observations.
For them, Popper articulately summarizes their point: What I suggest is that we can grasp a theory only by trying to reinvent it or to reconstruct it and by trying it out, with the help of our imagination, all the consequences of the theory which seem to us to be interesting and important... These authors cite Drucker's concern that education will
have a crucial role in determining how successful societies are when
negotiating a shift from manufacturing-based to knowledge-based economies.
They suggest that successful societies will be those whose citizens
are most adept at creating and elaborating the uses of new knowledge.
(Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1996) A community of practice, originating with the Institute
for Research on Learning (IRL), is especially well suited for new, complex
and/or implicit knowledge. One learns by becoming a member of the community
and collaborative problem solving. The IRL, founded in 1987 as a spin-off
of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center, has a mission of studying how
people learn. Their fundamental finding is that learning is social and
happens in groups. One definition of a community of practice is a group
of people who are informally bound to one another by exposure to a common
class of problem, and by the learning they do over time. The IRL believes:
At Nynex, James Euchner, Vice President in Research &
Development, wondered why some groups adopted new technologies quickly
and others did not. He hired an anthropologist who found that some departments
did not communicate informally and, as a result did not understand one
another's roles and needs or solve problems together. When placed in
the same room, they created an environment around various tasks, which
evolved into a community of practice. (Stewart, 1996) The SHALOM/SALAAM community of practice is being designed
as an electronic learning organization, using Bohm's theories of a dialogue
as a foundation, and email technology to archive and distribute discourse.
David Bohm, a physicist and colleague of Einstein, described mental
processes as "unbroken wholeness." He proposed the use of dialogue to
explore this wholeness, and to make shared meaning or to construct knowledge.
With dialogue, he said, there is a stream of meaning flowing among us and through us and between us. This will make possible a flow of meaning in the whole group, out of which will emerge some new understanding. It's something new, which may not have been in the starting point at all. It's something creative. And this shared meaning is the "glue" or "cement" that holds people and societies together (Bohm & Edwards, 1991, p. 35)
TECHNICAL APPROACH A Webquest and Agentsheets prototypical model was used
to construct a dynamic map of the Middle East, capable of changing to
show the consequences of various user suggestions. In the simulation,
a SHALOM/SALAAM Board will review suggested WWW sites, format and construction,
with a goal of developing a balanced information space. The Board will
invite a team of development consultants (users) to assess peacemaking
in the Middle East. Each consultant will complete a brief, on-line interview
about current knowledge of Middle East conflict and peacemaking and
to suggest a top-of-the-mind metaphor, story or analogy. One supposition
is that the myths, stories and metaphors of cultures are handed down
generation after generation without reflection. These mental models
inform and direct decision making, problem solving and conflict resolution. A map will be displayed of stakeholders in the region,
including Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, Egypt and occupied, formerly
Palestinian territories. Each consultant will review stakeholder files
by a click-and-point dialogue box listing bullet points of socioeconomic
and demographic data. They may research hypertext links included in
each file and ask for additional data. Each consultant's work, metaphors,
questions and suppositions will be emailed to a central information
space, compiled, coded and then redistributed to all participants. Special attention will be paid to the metaphors and analogies
collected, as, in the words of Lakoff, (1993, p. 208) metaphors are
"not just a matter of language, but of thought and reason". Although
the study of metaphor is continuously under attack as lacking in scientific
rigor, humans continually learn, reevaluate and modify metaphors. In
an elegant elaboration of Vice President Al Gore's use of metaphor to
describe the information superhighway, Rohrer describes the power of
metaphor to shape policy. Rohrer suggests that metaphorical inferences
produce parallel knowledge structures and describes the transformative
power of the information highway as an agent of social change. (Rohrer,
1997) Thomas Jefferson said I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion. In this age of the information overload and life that races
along at laser-like speed, it is increasingly difficult for the people
to be well informed and to keep up with emergent developments. Global
communications, focused on important and essential matters, can transform
the character of international relations and conflict, strengthen world
peace processes, further cooperation and collaboration. Global communications
can inform the people, teach the people and ultimately, preserve our
knowledge and culture, building sustainable capacity and community for
the future. REFERENCES Bereiter, C. & Scardamalia, M. (1996). "Rethinking
Learning". In D. R. Olson and N. Torrance (Eds.). The Handbook Of
Education And Human Development. Blackwell Publishers. (pp. 485
- 513). Bruner, J. (1996). The Culture Of Education. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press. Dunford, R W. & Palmer, I. C. (1994). "Claims About
Frames: Practitioners Assessment Of The Utility Of Reframing". Journal
of Management Education, 19 (1), 96 -105. Fukuyama, F. (1995). Trust: The Social Virtues And The
Creation Of Prosperity. New York:The Free Press. Harel, G. & Morgan, S. (1994). "SHALOM/SALAAM: A Power
Simulation Of The Middle East Peace Negotiations". Simulations and
Gaming, 25 (2), 285 - 292. Kafai, Y. B. (1995). Minds In Play. Computer design As A Context For Children's Learning. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Kintsch, E., Franzke, M., Haley, P., & Kintsch, W.
"Principles Of Learning In Multimedia Educational Systems". Technical
Report, Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado,
Boulder. The preparation of this report was funded by a Sponsored Research
Agreement No. CS1411212417 from US West Advanced Technologies. Lakoff, G. (1993). "The Contemporary Theory Of Metaphor".
A. Ortony (Ed.). Metaphor and Thought. Second edition. New York:Cambridge
University Press. (pp. 202 - 251). Landauer, T. K. (1995). "User Centered Design Methods".
The Trouble With Computers. Usefulness, Usability And Productivity.
Cambridge: The MIT Press. Leont'ev, A.N. (1981). "The Problem Of Activity In Psychology".
J. V. Wertsch, (Ed.). The Concept Of Activity In Soviet Psychology.
New York: Sharpe. Ostwald, J. (1996). "Knowledge construction in software
development". The Evolving Artifact. Unpublished doctoral dissertation,
University of Colorado, Boulder. Rohrer, T. (1997). "Conceptual Blending On The Information
Highway: How Metaphorical Inferences Work". Proceedings, International
Cognitive Linguistics Conference, v. 2. Amsterdam: Johns Benjamin.
Forthcoming. Senge, P. et al (1994). The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook. Strategies And Tools For Building A Learning Organization. New York: Doubleday. Scardamalia, M. & Bereiter, C. (1991). "Higher Levels
Of Agency For Children In Knowledge Building: A Challenge For The Design
Of New Knowledge Media". The Journal of the Learning Sciences,
1(1), 37 - 68. Smith, J. B. (1994). Collective Intelligence In Computer
Based Collaboration. New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Stewart, T. A. (1996). "Tools That Make Business Better
And Better: A Silicon Valley legend who invented the mouse and pioneered
the Internet now tells us how companies can improve their ability to
cope with problems". Fortune, 134 (12), 237 - 240. Stewart, T. A. (1996). "The Invisible Key To Success: Shadowy
Groups Called Communities Of Practice Are Where Learning And Growth
Happen". Fortune, (9), 173 - 176. Wells, G. (1996). The Zone Of Proximal Development
And Its Implications For Learning And Teaching. Unpublished manuscript. The views expressed in this report do not necessarily reflect views of the United States Institute of Peace, which does not advocate particular policies. This paper was prepared for the Virtual Diplomacyconference hosted by United States Institute of Peacein Washington, D.C. on April 1 and 2, 1997.
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