When a few of us on staff and faculty at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding (CJP) came together last year to begin discussing the possibility of doing an online course – something we had never done before – we were met with some resistance, not the least of which came from Howard Zehr, Professor of Restorative Justice at CJP and a pioneer in the field.

Fast-forward one year: Howard and Brenda Waugh () are now three weeks into teaching the class, “Recovering the Vision: Conversations on Restorative Justice,” which is being carried out completely online. The students – all practitioners – hail from diverse locales in North America, Europe, and Australia. First-year MA student, Jenn Bricker, and I have had the pleasure of helping Howard and Brenda facilitate this course. And from deep skepticism, Howard has now become a strong advocate of the possibilities of CJP doing more online. What happened in the course of that year?

Relationality

Perhaps the strongest hesitation to implement an online course came out of CJP’s emphasis on embodied relationships. Restorative justice, in particular, is keen on the importance of encounter; of victims and offenders, but also of teachers and students. Circle processes, something practiced and taught heavily at CJP, are also predicated on there being a relational connection in the process. As we surveyed online educational practices at ˛ÝÝ®ÉçÇř, we noted their asynchronous (out-of-time) nature, usually following a message board model where teachers would assign students postings by a certain date to which others would then respond and discuss in the comments.  What’s lost here, though, is people’s faces, voices, and gestures, a whole cluster of non-textual expressions that help establish and nurture relationships. We simply couldn’t imagine doing a course in a text-only, asynchronous medium and have it maintain any semblance of the “CJP feel.”

Co-creative learning

Another hallmark of the CJP that was difficult to imagine happening in an online space was CJP’s elicitive pedagogical practices. The traditional Western approach to education has been variously described as a “banking” or “transfer” model by Freire and Lederach, respectively[1]. This view sees students as empty receptacles awaiting knowledge-as-information and teachers as the purveyors of such knowledge. This view limits the horizon of education, shutting off possibilities that open up in a more holistic, relational, co-creative approach to education, what Lederach calls “elicitive.”

One characteristic of how elicitive education gets done at CJP is through small group activities and projects that engage different learning styles, including artistic expression. The very nature of a text-only online environment privileges the banking model and limits modes of expression and different learning styles. So again we were not enamored with the idea of carrying out a CJP course in this fashion.

So what did we do?

To address these challenges, we investigated emerging edges of online communications technology. Software platforms are emerging which facilitate synchronous (within time), mixed-mode (audio/visual and textual) interaction within a virtual meeting space, in our case a classroom. So we strung together a curriculum that makes use of both synchronous and asynchronous technologies.

Every other week the whole class meets together for two hours in a virtual classroom using platform. Within that space we’ve found ways to simulate circle processes, host special guests, and let students interview and discuss. You can even “raise your hand” to ask questions. A text chat conversation is going on the whole time, which then gets saved and posted with other class materials to , a widely-used open-source course management system. After the first class session, small groups were formed based on sub-interests within restorative justice. These groups will stick together through the remainder of the course. On weeks alternate to the large-group meeting, these small groups meet in software. Then, before the next week’s full-class meeting, each small group is to post something to their group’s blog, using platform.

Both Connect and Hangout have the ability to be used by mobile devices such as the iPhone or iPad. So one student a few weeks ago joined her small group via her iPhone during a break in jury duty, something she was afraid would require her to miss her group’s meeting. Jenn and I would periodically drop in on the various Hangout sessions underway to see if things were proceeding well, and here was this student hovering over her iPhone in a courthouse, talking about restorative justice!

Limitations, as always

While the experience of helping conduct this online course has been one of the highlights of my career as a technology worker (and fledgling teacher), it has not been without its hiccups. Using a string of cutting edge technologies raised the bar in terms of tech requirements, for students and instructors alike. Streaming video over the internet takes a lot of horsepower on the student’s machine and a lot of network capacity across “the cloud.” Actively seeking international student-practitioners for this course was difficult, partly for that reason since high-speed internet is far from a given in many countries and not everyone has a fancy new computer or iPad. Also, it took extensive training efforts for students and instructors both since so few people have used software like this.  Finally, cutting edge technologies have a tendency of not playing well with other cutting edge technologies. The number of “moving parts” in this course is somewhat dizzying, making troubleshooting inevitable technology issues  a challenge, as I try to keep the “frame” as invisible to the students as possible, so we’re focused on restorative justice and not the tech and its limitations. We’ve had a few glitches small and large but so far nothing that has completely derailed the course.

But as I noted at the beginning, even our strongest skeptic, Howard Zehr, is feeling energized about what we’ve been able to accomplish so far in this course. I’m confident that as these technologies become mainstreamed, their glitches will be ironed out and a smoother experience will be possible. I’m proud to be a part of this team that has basically taken CJP’s teaching into the 21st century. Despite all the legitimate concerns we had at the outset, a creative solution was envisioned and implemented, and so far it’s showing tremendous promise for the future.[2]

Notes:

1. Cf. Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th Anniversary ed. New York: Continuum, 2006; and Lederach, John Paul. Preparing for Peace: Conflict Transformation Across Cultures. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996.
2. While also signaling toward all the warning signs on over-use of tech and social media, and its impact on the very embodied relationships we value at CJP. For instance, this popped up in my twitter feed as I was writing: via Al-Jazeera.

[Brian Gumm, , is the Web and Information Systems Coordinator for the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. Brian is also in his final semester of Mdiv studies at Eastern Mennonite Seminary. After  – and currently teaching it at a nearby college – Brian has been on a pedagogy kick and is thrilled to be mixing that up with his tech nerd skills at CJP.]

Not too long ago, I met up with a friend of mine who used to be an analyst for the State Department.  One of the hot topics of our dialogue included the subject of peacebuilding efforts in Africa.  During the conversation, he recounted a story about a project he was involved with where he was tasked with helping evaluate a peacebuilding project in Northern Uganda.  The project involved building a peace center and culminated in hosting two peace conferences where the opposing parties were both brought to the table.  The recipients of the money were very proud of their achievement, however when my friend asked them this question: “What difference have these conferences made to decrease conflict in the area,” they didn’t know the answer.  This vignette highlights the difference between outputs (hosting a peace conference) and outcomes (a decrease in violence) and the particular complexities of trying to monitor and evaluate conflict.

and its novel approach to monitoring conflict through the combination of SMS, Twitter and geo-mapping.  At the center of the Ushahidi methodology for crisis monitoring is crowdsourcing: the use of the general public’s knowledge or opinion to provide information.  Most of us benefit from crowdsourcing every day.  When we shop on Amazon, we look at an item’s reviews.  When we rent a movie on iTunes and Netflix, we look at its ratings.  These both use crowdsourcing methods.

Contrast this use of the general public to provide information about conflict in an area with the idea of using experts in different fields to provide us with more informed opinions and observations founded in a deeper knowledge base of experience.  We benefit from this approach, for instance, when we want to buy a large appliance and go to Consumer Reports, whose expert staff has information on thousands of items.

Weaknesses of a Ushahidi: Limits to Access
While there is great innovation in harnessing the general public’s information through crowdsourcing via SMS and Twitter, these methods have their drawbacks.  First, Ushahidi utilizes a small army of volunteer computer programmers to implement a specific version of the map when a new crisis arises.  The code is “open source” meaning that anyone can have access to it, but unless you are a programmer or know programmers, this is really of no use.  Having the code open sourced also allows anyone to create their own customized version of the crisis map.  In the recent uprising in Egypt, there were of crisis maps created by several different factions.

Another significant weakness to the method is that you do not know who is providing the information.  Because of this, there could be disinformation sent.  Ushahidi attempts to guard against this through .  Perhaps Ushahidi’s greatest weakness is its dependence upon the general public’s access to cell phones and internet.  Countries in Africa with the highest cell phone penetration include South Africa (85%), Egypt (70%), and Kenya (50%).  The people who live in poverty typically are most susceptible to violent acts and marginalization and can rarely afford a cell phone.

An alternative to Ushahidi: Experts and SMS
A less expensive, lower-tech alternative to Ushahidi is using experts to relay information using SMS texting.  This is what my company did in the election to monitor the post-election violence.  In Burundi, primary schools function as community centers where information is exchanged and where networking occurs.  Because of this, primary school teachers were used as “experts” and were sent questions through SMS, asking about any election-related violence they saw or heard about from credible sources in their networks.  The results of this surveillance indicated a low level of violence related to the election, which was validated through various media reports coming out of the country.  This approach avoided many of the weaknesses of Ushahidi, especially given Burundi’s low cell phone penetration rate of only 10%.

Despite the challenges of monitoring and evaluating peacebuilding efforts, practitioners in the field have increasing access to a variety of tools that can strengthen the capacity to better evaluate their work and leverage their impact.  As these monitoring and evaluation tools begin to be used more effectively, stories like the one in Uganda will hopefully occur less frequently.

[ (MA, ’11) is the Director of Conflict Recovery at .  This is the second post in two-part series on the use of technology in monitoring conflict (see ). Acknowledgements: David Roberts, who oversaw the technical details of the 2010 Burundi election violence surveillance, contributed to this article.]

Reports were trickling in from our friend and coworker living in Kenya that the situation was rapidly deteriorating. After what appeared to be a stolen presidential election on December 27, 2007, the resulting violence seemed to be drawn along tribal lines. The 100 year-old mission compound where Esau and his family lived seemed to always be insulated from national crises like this. But on January 9, my husband got the email. A flyer, causing mass fear as it flew over the base declared the following threats: “We swear by the sacred Mugumo tree that when we descend upon Kijabe, we shall not leave any Luo alive …” Afraid for their safety, Esau (a Luo) and his family moved to a friend’s house away from Kijabe to live in hiding for several weeks. At the end of the 59-day political crisis, the sobering death totals throughout the country were approximately 1,500 dead, 3,000 innocent women raped, and 300,000 people internally displaced.

Patrick Meier had grown up in Kenya and happened to be back visiting his parents during the crisis. Articles with headlines like: “Kenya Is Not Burning,” were surfacing from the Kenyan government media outlets, who were trying to manage the national and international opinion through disinformation practices. He read these and wanted to do something to improve the ability to report human rights abuses resulting from the conflict. He enlisted the help of some Kenyan nationals to assist in realizing his idea. They called it (pronounced OO sha hēdē), which means “testimony” in Swahili. The system was simple, but novel in that it integrated Google Maps with Short Message Service (SMS) otherwise known as text messaging. It employed the idea of crowdsourcing, which harnesses eyewitness accounts of acts of violence from the general public. Ushahidi allowed people to send an SMS to a free, local number with their location and a description of what they saw.

The results of the experiment were extremely successful: several hundred texts were received with first hand reports of riots, death, property loss, sexual assaults as well as peace efforts throughout the country. Ushahidi had provided a method for creating real-time mapping that documented acts of violence and peacbuilding using common people. The system also provided a warning system, where people could automatically receive a text message if an alert was posted geographically close to a self-selected location.

This prototype system was modified to monitor election violence during the presidential election in Burundi in July of 2010, as well as Kenya’s constitutional referendum in August, 2010. In both of these cases, the system produced reports of little to no violence resulting from the elections.

Ushahidi was used most recently during the Arab Spring protests in Egypt and is currently monitoring the conflict in Libya. With the high penetration of the internet in cities like Cairo and Alexandria, the deployment in Egypt provided the opportunity to also incorporate Twitter tweets (in addition to SMS) into the conflict map.

Overall, this system, which simply combined multiple existing technologies, yielded a powerful conflict monitoring tool. This tool, however, is not void of weaknesses. In my next entry, I will discuss some of these weaknesses as well as a simple alternative system for monitoring election violence.

[Mara J. Roberts (MA, ’11) is Director of Conflict Recovery at .  This is the first of a two-part series on the use of technology in monitoring conflict (see ).]

Take long-term repressive governments; mix in a populace frustrated by economic stagnation, a youth bulge, knowledge of nonviolent strategies, and access to the internet. Voila! You’ve got yourself a nonviolent democratic revolution.

This oversimplified analysis of Tunisia and Egypt has been tempered by the events in Libya and Bahrain. Nevertheless, there is still a lot of popular hype about the leveling power of the internet and the potential use of social networking sites to promote nonviolent revolutions.

Because I have been traveling to Myanmar (called Burma by many who do not live there) since 2008, I have been asked, “Is Burma next? Can what happened in Egypt be accomplished in Burma?” For many reasons, I think Myanmar is not next. Furthermore, I believe that a similar uprising in that country would be disastrous. But that is another issue for another posting. Right now I want to focus on Myanmar/Burma as an illustration of the way the internet can actually work against developing more participatory governing systems.

In the past few decades the planet has been enveloped in increasingly dense networks of communication technology we call the internet. A map of the internet is quite beautiful, and the power of the internet to connect individuals at great distances and to assist in the formation of like-minded groups of individuals for the purpose of advocacy is well documented. Tech savvy members of the Burma exile community were pioneers in using the internet – starting with e-mail and listserv – to organize advocacy campaigns. They now run one of the most sophisticated networks of internet-based advocacy organizations in the world.

While there are elements of dissent and disagreement in that network, by and large they uphold a simple narrative: Aung San Suu Kyi (who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991) and the National League for Democracy (NLD) have heroically resisted the domination of a military government that they describe as one of the most brutal and repressive in the world. It is a classic good versus evil narrative.

And it has worked. Using this narrative and their access to the internet the Burma exile community has managed to capture the policy apparatus in the United States, the United Kingdom, most of Europe and Australia. The resulting imposition of a very tight sanctions on the regime has further isolated the 55 million people living inside the country, which was renamed Myanmar. The people with the greatest knowledge of what is happening inside the country they call Myanmar occupy one of the identified “black holes” of the internet. Consequently, their stories are largely unknown, and outsiders typically see the story of Burma/Myanmar through the frame narrative promoted by the Burma exile community.

At this point the two largest threats to the internet in Myanmar are those elements in the government (note: not the whole government) that fear the outside world and hackers associated with the exile community. When you live in the country it feels as though the fearful elements of the government and the exile community take turns bringing down the internet. In their shared fear of change, these “enemies” are actually cooperating to silence 55 million people so that the world cannot hear their stories directly.

But things are changing. The country is now loosely tethered to the internet. Current estimates are that 400,000 residents of Myanmar have regular access to the internet and demand for access is outstripping capacity. Furthermore, the growing business community interested in connecting to the global economy is pressing for more reliable and robust connection to the internet. When the internet is brought down either by elements of the government or the exile community, both exploiting lack of redundancy in the system, the business community and the activists trying to bring greater citizen involvement to the governance process are equally frustrated.

Many people inside the country do see change. Many of them are working hard to develop a home-grown form of government capable of handling the very complex issues that face their country. Change is coming. The news of that change may or may not reach the outside world thanks to the domination of the internet story of Burma/Myanmar by exiles and their allies.

Read more: – by Jim Della-Giacoma, GlobalPost

[Jayne Seminare Docherty, PhD, is Professor of Leadership and Public Policy at ˛ÝÝ®ÉçÇř’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. In the spring 2011 semester, she is teaching and . At the upcoming 2011 , she will be teaching .]