Welcome to the Web site of the Dialog Dashboard™ Open Source Community.
The Dialog Dashboard is a feature-rich, effective, fun and proven social networking and communications console for interactive courses and role-play simulations.
The United States Institute of Peace and Dialoggers, Inc. have agreed to collaborate in the further development of the Dialog Dashboard under a GL Open Source License.
We invite programmers, instructional designers, authors and instructors to join us to:
- Further develop Dialogger's PHP, MySQL, AJAX, and HTML source code;
- Design and develop an authoring wizard;
- Develop an integrated set of components for an Experiential Learning Suite for authoring and using role-play simulations and interactive courseware, and
- Post a list of available experiential learning courses and simulations.
Development of the Dialog Dashboard began in 2000 with the design of a communications console for a group of twenty players enrolled in a semester-long conflict simulation. To encourage "out of the box" thinking and experimentation, the Dashboard enables players to maintain personal anonymity. So that players own the behavior of their characters and the outcome of their decisions, players are free to improvise their roles and negotiate with each other in all the ways they think best to resolve the conflict. Player-instructors participate "in-character" as editors of the Conflict Chronicle, a news publication with editorials and reports. Instructors may use the news reports to keep the players grounded and advance the plot.
In 2005, the simulation was offered in a Communication & Conflict course at Hope College in Holland, Michigan. It was a big success. During the next seven semesters, we continued developing the Dashboard and added interactive course materials. We use the "Getting To Yes" principles developed at Harvard's Program on Negotiation to provide a theoretical framework for the skills students learn in the simulation. The online course proved to be an effective parallel forum to the sim for teaching, debriefing, discussion and reflection.
The course and simulation are available at www.conflictlab.com as the Elysia simulation. At the Demo Site, you will soon be able to browse through all the materials and discussions of an actual course and sim in which we have only changed the names and personal information of the students.
The Dialog Dashboard uses familiar Internet technology – browser, web pages, calendar, surveys, email, chat and discussion forums. The fun and ease of use are achieved through a unified, seamless and coherent user experience.
The integration of an online discussion course with a role-play simulation proved to be a rewarding use of social media for experiential learning. However, this was accomplished in part by a support team working in the background to make a mashup of different technologies work smoothly. After years of constant improvement, we decided in 2008 to build the current software from the ground up, with a single database, a consistent user interface and the many features that have proven themselves with users.
We are now ready to develop a massively scalable, user-configurable Experiential Learning Suite that will make the Dialog Dashboard technology accessible to authors and instructors who do not have teams of dedicated programmers. We are confident that an open source community of programmers, authors and user organizations can significantly improve the technology and make it possible for the benefits to be widely disseminated and enjoyed around the world.
The Dialog Dashboard and its source code are now a public resource that may be used without charge under the terms of a GL Open Source License. However, fees may be charged by organizations, authors and instructors for courses and simulations that use the Dialog Dashboard.
