ICONS User Manual: Overview

Introduction

Introduction
Rationale for the Approach
How ICONS Works
Role of the Facilitator
Connecting to ICONS

The ICONS Project is an interdisciplinary effort that uses simulation techniques to teach international negotiation and intercultural communication skills to college and high school students. Housed at the University of Maryland, the project implements a world-wide, multi-institution, computer-assisted simulation network that thrusts students into the world of high-powered international negotiations.

ICONS lets students:

Create and test negotiation strategies
Understand the interdependence of international issues
Appreciate cultural differences and approaches to world problems
Work in teams to solve problems
Use computers for multinational communication.

Created by Jonathan Wilkenfeld and Richard D. Brecht of the University of Maryland, College Park, ICONS began as a tool for helping students gain a better grasp of the complexity of international issues. Each year, ICONS runs simulations involving more than 100 colleges, universities, and secondary schools in the United States and throughout the world. Its main purpose is to broaden students’ perspectives and make them aware of what it is like to negotiate interconnected global problems from the perspectives of various nations.

Participants learn not only what is involved in governmental decision-making, but more importantly, what it feels like to be a decision-maker for a foreign government with a very different set of cultural constraints. As they attempt to implement policy initiatives and resolve international disputes, students confront foreign policy issues in a context that provides an authenticity of experience unobtainable in other educational settings.

Each simulation lasts three to five weeks, and is set in the contemporary world projected forward about 6 months to allow an original simulated world to develop. A scenario, which launches the exercise, outlines the state of the world based on present-day facts.

The simulation offers students the opportunity to explore such foreign policy issues as international debt, nuclear proliferation, human rights, trade, and the global environment, and regional conflict areas such as the Middle East and Europe.

Finally, the ICONS Project meets the broadly acknowledged need to bring technology in to the social science and humanities classroom. Through their participation in the simulation, students learn to use the computer in a concrete way, as a work instrument. Moreover, the application of information technology in the simulation resembles its use in the real world of international relations. It is the interaction of these substance and skill areas that makes the simulation an especially effective instructional tool.