In response to a number of growing global health challenges, New York University and UNICEF designed a Behavioral Communication Strategies for Global Epidemics course that brings together United ...Nations professionals, government staff, and MPH (Master of Public Health) students to design innovative social behavior change communication (SBCC) strategies that address disease outbreaks and humanitarian challenges around the world. Applying a systems approach, participants in the course work on interdisciplinary teams to design strategies, develop skills, and engage in global learning. At the culmination of the course, all teams present strategies to UNICEF country offices for implementation. This innovative model for disease outbreak, public health education, and humanitarian response provides professionals with an opportunity to develop a wide range of competencies, including systems thinking, behavior change, and human-centered design and equips them with the necessary tools to develop more novel approaches to SBCC. As the number of outbreaks and humanitarian challenges increase each year, this format for learning can serve as a model for how professionals can effectively address these complex crises.
Health information technology (IT) has great potential to transform health care and inform population health goals in clinical research, quality measurement, and public safety. To fully realize the ...benefits of health IT for population health, we must focus on new models that maximize efficiency, encourage rapid learning, and protect patients' privacy. In this paper we explore the advantages of a networked model for analyzing population health information, providing several examples. Although broadening the use of networked models is challenging, the societal benefits of a networked model merit continued exploration and the development of workable solutions.
An examination of our many modes of online identity and how we live on the continuum between the virtual and the real.Hello Avatar! Or, {llSay(0, "Hello, Avatar!"); is a tiny piece of user-friendly ...code that allows us to program our virtual selves. In Hello Avatar, B. Coleman examines a crucial aspect of our cultural shift from analog to digital: the continuum between online and off-, what she calls the "x-reality" that crosses between the virtual and the real. She looks at the emergence of a world that is neither virtual nor real but encompasses a multiplicity of network combinations. And she argues that it is the role of the avatar to help us express our new agency-our new power to customize our networked life.By avatar, Coleman means not just the animated figures that populate our screens but the gestalt of images, text, and multimedia that make up our online identities-in virtual worlds like Second Life and in the form of email, video chat, and other digital artifacts. Exploring such network activities as embodiment, extreme (virtual) violence, and the work in virtual reality labs, and offering sidebar interviews with designers and practitioners, she argues that what is new is real-time collaboration and copresence, the way we make connections using networked media and the cultures we have created around this. The star of this drama of expanded horizons is the networked subject-all of us who represent aspects of ourselves and our work across the mediascape.
One of the biggest obstacles to expanding the use of information technology (IT) in health care may be the current narrow focus on how to stimulate its adoption. The challenge of thinking of IT as a ...tool to improve quality requires serious attention to transforming the U.S. health care system as a whole, rather than simply computerizing the current setup. Proponents of health IT must resist "magical thinking," such as the notion that technology will transform our broken system, absent integrated work on policy or incentives. The alternative route to transforming the system sets all of its sights on the destination.
In "Principles of Humility in Educational Technology," Clay Shirky offers a thoughtful analysis of the uses of educational technology in the higher education environment, basing his argument for ..."humility" on the premise that "Learning results from what the student does and thinks and only from what the student does and thinks. The teacher can advance learning only by influencing what the student does to learn."
Considers how Web services require defining a new meaning for local, in which different kinds of applications operate within different network horizons. Understanding these context horizons, and ...creating the tools and techniques for managing them, are essential to achieving an Internet-scale operating system. The paper discusses three of the most important: trust horizons, semantic horizons, and coordination horizons.
The fragmentation of our health care system, our need to accommodate the diversity of existing health information exchanges, the lack of consistent implementation of clinical information standards, ...and the need to protect patients' privacy and maintain trust are all challenges to overcome in achieving broad-scale interoperable health information exchange. We propose several steps to coordinate information sharing among regional and other networks through universal adherence to a basic framework of policies and standards. The critical policy action is the identification of a "common framework" of standards and policies, maintained by a new Standards and Policy Entity that reflects both public- and private-sector participation.
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