For my project for this course, I would like to embark on the following:
One of my areas of focus in my work at the DOHMh is to monitor the management of services to transitional age youth (16-24 years) who have serious emotional disturbance/serious mental illness (SED/SMI). Presently, the youth that we serve are receiving remedial education and vocational readiness services. While our work has merit, I find that it is lacking as we do not requrie our contractors to assess, coordinate, or serve the youths’ health needs. In fact, literatue suggests that not only are these youth more likely to engage in unhealthy behaviors (smoking, etc), they are far less likely to receive the needed attention than are their peers who do not have SED/SMI.
I recently surveyed the youth that we serve and learned that they are interested in receiving information about and linkage to various health services. For this project I would like to create a forum that will inform and link the youth to available services.
At this point, I am not certain what format/forum I might employ; I remain very open to learning about the variety of approaches, forums, and tools that I might explore. I would be very interested in collaborating with my peers for this project, so I look forward to our discussions about how we might bring that possibility to life.
On a completley different note, I also hope to learn enough to creat a blog page for the students of one of the two classes that I teach at Hunter. During last semester I shared with my then students that we were blogging in Core I and I seemed to turn on their interest in such a forum for communication for our class together. I am convinced that a class blog would enhance our discussions and learning opportunities. Finally, for the either of the classes that I teach at Hunter, I would love to be able to learn about how to introduce and incorporate gaming. I was thoroughly intrigued by our discussion of this platform for learning.
Looking forward-
Janice
Two thoughts:
1. I would suggest doing some research on what a “forum” might look like. You could approach this from the tech perspective, and look at the various *tools* that are available to allow conversation (one way or two way) to take place. You could approach this from the perspective of your discipline/profession and try to look into what other orgs have created that address youth (at risk, or otherwise) or that try to disseminate get mental health info. Don’t reinvent the wheel, and learn from other peoples mistakes.
2. Re: blog you should jump ahead and take a look at the reading on Student Blogging week. A lot of this covers best practices for using blogs and wikis in classes.
Thanks for thinking about this some, Amy
I would love to hear more about your project and how I might build this one out
Look forward to chatting (live)
Hey Janice! So reading this made me think of a project I worked on in my pre-DPH life, helping to develop/implement a Harlem-based health information and social networking website. The end product was part traditional information dissemination (we posted articles about health and information about health services in the neighborhood), and the other (main) part was that people could create profiles, and add services that they knew about, or post a blog, comment on others, start a discussion, etc. Not sure if that would work for your population, but just a thought …