The University of Minnesota has produced an online guide designed to assist families prevent and address disputes over estates. Who Gets Grandma’s Yellow Pie Plate offers information and resources to aid families in making tough, emotionally fraught decisions over the inheritance of personal property.

There are free articles available as well on this site, along with some quizzes to assess your estate planning preparedness.

Mediators, however, will come away disappointed. Although this excellent site offers useful material and resources, mediation was somehow omitted from a web site created to assist families prevent, reduce, and address conflicts over estate-related issues.

(Thanks to Joel Schoenmeyer, author of the Death and Taxes Blog, for the link.)

Just in time for 6/06/06, here’s this post on computer gaming armageddon.

Computer games can provide a powerful medium for promoting positive social change, influencing public opinion, and raising cultural awareness, as I have discussed before on this blog (here and here).

While many such games serve beneficial (or at least benign) ends, some teach a very different lesson.

Into the first category fall two games described recently on ICT for Peacebuilding, an intelligently written and intellectually engaging ADR blog and one of my favorite reads on the Internet.

One such game is Third World Farmer which introduces players to the hardships and tragedy faced by farmers in the developing world. The second, from this post on global warming, is Climate Game, created to educate youth about the realities and dangers of climate change.

Promoting a very different kind of social change, however, comes the video game Left Behind: Eternal Forces, a “Christian” game about the end times which pits “believers” (i.e. the forces of Good–that’s capitalized, of course) in an apocalyptic (literally) military battle-to-the-death against the Antichrist (who heads up the “Global Community Peacekeepers”–hey, who knew that peace was a tool of the Devil?) together with armies of nonbelievers and sinners.

(Thanks to Objective Justice for this link.)

The internet, with its endless capacity for facilitating community and collaboration, has increasingly become a place of complex social interactions, where real-world transactions are negotiated through the medium of cyberspace and where virtual worlds emerge complete with laws, social norms, currencies, political structures, and economies.

But virtual worlds are more than just mere entertainment. They can serve as effective teaching tools as well.

Socialstudygames.com reports that the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy has announced finalists in their “Reinventing Public Diplomacy Through Games” Awards. Finalists as reported on the USC web site are:

Exchanging Cultures, a diplomatic game built inside “Second Life,” was created to facilitate the creating virtual communities and relationships based on the exchange of cultural items like: dances, art crafts, food receipts, architectural models, clothing, cultural routes and images of real original places for travelers and explorers.LINK.

Global Kids Island: Fostering Public Diplomacy Through Second Life Global Kids, Inc. envisioned a Public Diplomacy program within Second Life where the youth in the after-school program will spend the month learning about a global issue, experience an interactive and experiential workshop designed to educate about the issue. Their demonstration will be shown at the awards ceremony. For more information on the organization: LINK

Hydro Hijinks is a class project designed to promote discussion about international water issues and to educate players from around the world about sources of international conflict over water rights. Watch the video tour of the game at: LINK

Peacemaker is a cross-cultural political video game simulation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict which can be used to promote a peaceful resolution among Israelis, Palestinians and young adults worldwide. More information, please visit their website: LINK

Winners will be announced at a ceremony on May 8.

USC is currently involved itself in a Public Diplomacy and Virtual Worlds project designed to “explore how virtual worlds can be used as effective tools to bridge cultural gaps, to foster new ways to resolve conflict, and to learn and teach new skills in dealing with each other to build a better world.”

In addition to these projects, the gang at odr.info recently reported on the outstanding efforts of one inventive team of peer mediation educators, Jennifer Nieto and Peggy Ward, to utilize Second Life, a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (a virtual world in which numerous participants can interact simultaneously), as a tool for enabling high school students to role play in mediation simulations and practice mediation skills in a non-threatening virtual environment. (I was totally psyched to discover a link to Online Guide to Mediation on their site, for which I am most grateful.)

Technorati tags: peer mediation, virtual worlds, Culture and Society, Internet, online dispute resolution, conflict resolution

Zapdramatic, the Canadian-based interactive media company, is well known for the online negotiation games and simulations it designs and produces. Its portfolio includes “The Raise” and “The Angry Neighbor”, a mediation game (links to these games and others can be found online here).

Its web site now features a brand new interactive negotiation adventure, “Move or Die,” a film noir animation in which players assume the role of a hitchhiker who has to negotiate his way through perils which include an ethically-challenged brother-and-sister pair, a dead body carrying $10,000 cash, and a trapdoor to man-eating piranhas (all in a day’s work for your typical negotiator).

This negotiation game is currently available for free to visitors to Zapdramatic’s web site. Other interactive dramas can be found here.

If words make up only 7 percent of our communication, as some researchers have claimed, then actions do indeed speak louder than words. Our facial expressions in particular must surely speak volumes.

This means that we must listen closely not only to what is said but to all that is unspoken–to attend closely to facial expressions to gain insight into the deeper meaning that awaits us.

Curious to learn how skillful you are at correctly interpreting facial expressions? Then try your hand (and eye) at the Facial Expressions Test, based on “The Micro Expression Training Tool” developed by Paul Ekman, Ph.D., an expert on nonverbal behavior and for 32 years a professor of psychology at the University of California at San Francisco.

For more nonverbal (and verbal) challenges, visit Exploring Nonverbal Communication, a web site of the University of California at Santa Cruz, which allows visitors to test their understanding of facial expressions, gestures, and much more.

(With many thanks to my friend Geoff Sharp for generously passing the link to the Facial Expressions Test along to me.)

People often discover this blog while searching for online tests and games, particularly those that involve negotiation or conflict resolution.

Mediators like myself in particular are intrigued by tests that probe for hidden biases or reveal subconscious tendencies. This is in large measure due to how integral impartiality is to the role we play: cultivating self-awareness becomes critical to fulfilling that role.

One of the most provocative online tests can be found at the web site for Project Implicit, a collaborative research project undertaken by researchers at Harvard University, the University of Washington, and the University of Virginia. This research project utilizes online tests to gather information about and gain insights into conscious and unconscious preferences on a wide range of topics, including religion, sexuality, gender, race, and even U.S. presidents.

You can view a demonstration here.

By the way, if you’re on the lookout for online negotiation and conflict resolution games, tools, and tests, click on the titles of the following articles that have appeared on this blog in the past:

It’s how you play the game: Online negotiation games provide entertainment and challenge

Cooperation or competition: The prisoner’s dilemma and game theory

Winner take all: Games, game theory, and conflict resolution

It’s starting to add up: Math teams with mediation to resolve disputes online

Test of character: Using instruments to probe conflict styles and moral intuition