Resolving Digital Conflicts - Suggesting a New Way of Conflict Resolution Education & Practice in the Digital Era.

This workshop will present new knowledge and skills of conflict resolution in the digital era. Based on the Uri and Fisher Mediation model, we’ve developed a digital education technology that reveals a new realm of conflict resolution: Digital conflicts. Understanding the digital space impact from conflict resolution perspective is crucial for our future and relevance. We will present digital conflict characteristics and practice a digital way out of them, based on the community wisdom of the Z-generation. Digital conflicts are a natural phenomenon of daily digital life. These conflicts take place on WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat and on every social app in use. Digital conflicts underline some of the problematic behaviors in the digital space. Yet, both adults and the young population don’t deal with it effectively. Accordingly, sufficient knowledge is needed for resolving them and for preventing escalation. "Agree Online" is a digital platform that educates kids to resolve digital conflicts peacefully, encourages them to become digital citizens who hold both social and emotional skills: communication skills, emotional management skills, and creative thinking skills to find solutions in diverse situations. Between the years 2017-2019, the platform was successfully implemented in 20 Israeli schools. The implementation model combined the digital platform with in-class workshops. During those workshops, nearly 2,000 participants ages 10-14 were able to use the digital platform discussing digital conflicts, based on conflict resolution education terms. Via participants experience, we’ve explored valuable knowledge to ADR arena: the digital conflicts characteristics, and a repetitive pattern of Nine solutions categories.