Innovative Thinking and Peace: The Peace Innovation Course at Stanford

Prof. Johan Galtung is fond of giving the example of Mulla and the Eighteen Camels to underline the importance of innovative thinking and compassion in peacebuilding and conflict resolution.

Peace Innovation - a new undergraduate course at Stanford University taught by Prof. B J Fogg (of Computers As Persuasive Technology (CAPT-ology) fame) - aims to "help people use new technology to invent peace". Students work in small groups using Web 2.0 services (Flickr, Google maps, YouTube ....) to explore if they can be used for peacebuilding.

The course is based on the idea that noew technologies such as mobile phones and web 2.0 are great tools of persuading people into believing (belief formation) and behaving in a certain way. Very interesting indeed.

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Some cool web 2.0 links

Image from WikipediaWeb 2.0 is currently the rage and never a day passes without some new and interesting ideas being implemented. Here are a few that have caught my eye today:

1. opensocial.org: Decommoditizing Social Networks By Connecting User Profiles Via OpenSocial
2. Searchme.com: visual search
3. publishing 2.0
4. pdfmenot: embed pdf files as flash (similar to scribd), and of course;
5. zemanta.com: a blogging helper add-on for Firefox that creates neat looking posts for blogger, typepad and wordpress

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