Mark and Maria will be joined by Professors Margaret Crocco, William Gaudelli, and James Lap, who will describe their own experiences incorporating Project Vietnam into their curricula.

Dr. Levy uses the simulation to challenge his students to contend directly with the separation between theory (text) and practice (real-world events). Students are asked to leverage information from readings, class discussions, and case studies to make informed decisions that directly impact a simulated country that is progressing through different stages of conflict. Students work in teams to complete activities that mirror those undertaken by mid-level managers dealing with the environment and recovery in post-conflict countries. Levy will present his simulation, discuss classroom implementation, and describe the potential for simulations like this to be useful outside of Columbia, along with CCNMTL Educational Technologist Maria Janelli.

Increasingly, health practitioners are using technology-enabled interventions to promote positive life changes. During the past two years Dr. Remien and CCNMTL have been funded by the National Institute of Health to develop and pilot Masivukeni ("Let's Wake Up!" in Xhosa) an HIV treatment adherence intervention for lay counselors and patients in South Africa. Dr. Gilbert and CCNMTL partnered on the development and testing of a multimedia version of the WORTH intervention, an HIV prevention intervention designed for drug-involved women who are on probation or parole, or enrolled in an alternative-to-incarceration program. Dr. Gilbert is the co-investigater on Multimedia WORTH, which is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and under the direction of principal investigator Dr. Nabila El-Bassel of SIG. Dr. Remien and Dr. Gilbert will present their projects, discuss initial findings, and talk about plans for the expansion of both interventions.

MySmileBuddy is a mobile application developed by CCNMTL and Dr. Edelstein that guides health workers in assessing a child's risk for early severe tooth decay and counseling that child's family on preventative lifestyle changes. Health workers and families using MySmileBuddy will supplement their face-to-face interaction with the use of MySmileBuddy's mobile application on a tablet computer that calculates risk and assists health workers in providing educational and motivational activities about oral health. The application features assessment questions, interactive day/diet planner, videos and animation, as well as researcher tools including an online equation weighting tool for developing appropriate risk scores and an administrative area for viewing family data. MySmileBuddy represents a novel approach to improving dental health through emphasizing prevention rather than repair, exploring ways to move dental education and care into a community health worker context, and helping dentists learn to deliver counseling messages about behavior change. Dr. Edelstein will be conducting a pilot of MySmileBuddy in 2011 with at-risk families in Morningside Heights. This project is funded by the National Institutes of Health and is a CCNMTL Triangle Initiative project. Jessica Rowe, Senior Program Specialist for CCNMTL's Triangle Initiative, and June Levine, Project Manager, will co-present with Dr. Edelstein.

Dr. Albert will present Tobacco Cessation, an educational website that provides students in the Columbia College of Dental Medicine with multimedia learning modules on pharmacotherapy regimens for tobacco cessation. The site offers self-study lessons and activities, including immediate-response quizzes, treatment activities, four virtual patients, and demonstrative videos, which students are assigned to review before attending a required tobacco cessation seminar. Once students complete the online modules independently, learning content and working through specific scenarios virtually, they are then asked to act out potential encounters in the seminar and write reflections on their experience. The Tobacco Cessation website aims to support Columbia dental students' understanding of the available tobacco cessation pharmacotherapies and to empower students to effectively encourage tobacco cessation in their future dental practice. Cindy Smalletz, CCNMTL Educational Technologist, will co-present with Dr. Albert.

Moving back and forth between "deep dives" into footage of the Project Rebirth archive and a wide range of Web-based video, data mining, and visualization projects, students in Professor Bass’ course explored how participatory digital environments might serve as sites for informal learning and social meaning. Professor Bass will describe how the implicit theoretical underpinnings of his course found expression through a range of student projects that explored such issues as the relationship between structure and serendipity, the potential of tagging and metadata to provoke meaning and cultivate community, and narrative therapy in the age of YouTube.

The Project Rebirth archive is a part of the larger Project Rebirth educational initiative which aims to help students better understand the many dimensions of trauma and recovery following September 11, 2001. The initiative provides faculty partners from Columbia University and Georgetown University with access to hundreds of hours of footage from Project Rebirth, a documentary by filmmaker Jim Whitaker that chronicles the stories of 10 people deeply affected by the attacks on the World Trade Center, including extensive footage of interviews as well as the rebuilding of the site.

Read about Ushahidi in the Columbia News article, From Thousands of Miles Away, Students Use Crisis Mapping Tool to Aid Chile's Relief Efforts.

About the speaker:
Patrick Philippe Meier is an international networker and connector. He co-founded the Program on Crisis Mapping and Early Warning at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative (HHI) and the International Network of Crisis Mappers (CM*Net). He has extensive professional experience in the fields of conflict early warning and humanitarian technology, having consulted for major international organizations in Africa, Asia and Europe. Patrick is also a PhD candidate at The Fletcher School, where his dissertation focuses on digital activism in repressive regimes. Patrick graduated with an MA in International Affairs from Columbia University’s School of International & Public Affairs (SIPA). He was born in Abidjan and raised in Kenya. Patrick blogs at iRevolution and EarlyWarning.

Event recap:

Dr. Dhadialla directs the Program for Health Systems Development and Research at the Earth Institute and is the community health worker/health systems adviser to the Millennium Villages Project. He will present a framework for examining and supporting community and clinic-based health service delivery and outreach. Dr. Mechael, who is the director of strategic application of mobile technology for public health and development at the Center for Global Health and Economic Development at the Earth Institute, will discuss the current state of mHealth implementation, policy, and research as it pertains to developing countries. The two will also present ChildCount+: a case study which uses a mobile phone-based events registry and alert system to facilitate and coordinate the activities of community health workers.

Faculty panelists Katherine Shear of the Columbia School of Social Work and George Bonanno of Teachers College will discuss how they have designed Web-based assignments that lead students to engage in a close viewing of the archive and analyze effects of trauma and methods of coping. Georgetown University faculty from American Studies (Bernard Cook) and English (Randall Bass) will discuss how they have used the same archive in film and English courses.

Read more about CCNMTL's work with Project Rebirth in the press release, With Project Rebirth Columbia and Georgetown Offer Students a Closer Look at Post 9-11 Recovery or visit the Project Rebirth website.

Bass, who is also an associate professor in the Department of English at Georgetown, has been working at the intersection of new media technologies and the scholarship of teaching and learning since the late 1980s. Most recently, he edited, along with collaborator Bret Eynon, a synthesis and digital volume of case studies on learning and new media, published through the online journal, Academic Commons.

Warren Sack, associate professor in Film & Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz, will outline “discourse architecture,” an approach to designing software for community and then focus on one example of discourse architecture, Metavid.org, currently under development by Michael Dale and Aphid Stern at the Social Computing Lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Metavid.org is a Web 2.0 site that hosts an archive of video footage of U.S. House and Senate floor proceedings.

This seminar will extend discussions began at the CHRDR's public conference last month, "Human Rights Archives and Documentation: Meeting the Needs of Research, Teaching, Advocacy and Social Justice," a seminal international gathering of over 240 activists, scholars, and librarians.

Professor Greenberg is professor of history and executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education at the University of Southern California.