Newsletter Supercourse - May/2/2002
-----------------------------------
Dear Friends,
May day has come and gone, welcome to May 2 day.
We Did It, Happy Birthday to Ron:
John F. Kennedy thanks you, and Ron LaPorte thanks you. On Mar.15 we
asked for 53 lectures on the May 29th birthday. At that time we had
640 lectures sent to us. Amazingly, on May 1, we had received 718, we
EASILY cracked the 53 lecture barrier. Fifty eight lectures in only
45 days. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
It seemed like an unreasonable idea, getting 53 lectures in less than
50 days. But we did it. The lectures have been flowing in like the
Allegheny River to the Ohio in Pittsburgh in Spring. What a Glorious
birthday! There will be 53 candles in the cake not for the years, but
for the lectures. Amazing.
If we keep up the same pace, then by Jan. 1, 2003 we will have col-
lected another 316 lectures for a total of 1,034!!!
Wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to ship world wide over 1,000
lectures from our global group of prevention friends. We think we can
do it. We were so pleased that last year we could send out 500 lec-
tures, here we can give a gift of prevention to the world of twice
that.
We smashed through the 700 lecture barrier, and are heading towards
1,000. It would be wonderful if you could join us this Friday, as we
will be celebrating once again with Indian food. If you came and
visit us we would treat you to a wonderful lunch.
Socrates WINS again!!
NYTimes article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/02/technology/circuits/02DIST.html
There is a great article in the NYTimes today by Katie Hafner. She
points out that in the rush to establish online universities, the
roof has caved in. The traditional on-line universities have been a
bust, and many universities are getting out of the business. Many of
us do not like the traditional talking head teaching. For one reason,
Socrates was the biggest gun in IT, in that he helped to create our
modern classroom teaching methods of face contact. In 2000 years this
method fought back technology such as the printing press, movie
teaching, Saturday morning universities, and correspondence courses.
Yet still >95% of teaching is in the classroom. Many of us as faculty
think that the reports of the death of classroom teaching were highly
exaggerated. We ask our University administrations: What is so good
about talking head distance education? There is no evidence that it
is as good as classroom teaching, and it is a lot more work. More-
over, there is the "then there were none phenomena", where now in
epidemiology world wide, there are probably 10,000 of us teaching.
Wouldn't universities think it would be great to outsource teaching
to one epidemiologist in Cambridge by 2005, what an enormous savings
of salary. But then, in 2006, they could even get rid of the teacher
from Cambridge, and then there are no live teachers of epidemiology.
The problem with the traditional talking head teaching system is that
it tries to go around and replace faculty. The goal of the Super-
course is rather to enhance faculty, rather "downsize" faculty. We
must applaud the efforts of Socrates and his global health network of
2000 years ago!
WHO and Global Distribution:
We very much would like to work with WHO to distribute our CDs and to
the libraries of the world. Last year we made excellent contact with
Dr. Brandling Bennett from PAHO who was very helpful. He directed us
to several people involved with library distribution at WHO. However,
for the past 6 months disappointingly they stopped writing back. If
you have any contacts at WHO, could you please send them an E-mail to
see what we could do to use their distribution system. We the faculty
will, of course provide the 1,000s of lectures for free, all we ask
is that they distribute these so you can get your lectures in the li-
braries of the world. Thanks so much.
The Supercourse Team Goes on a Date:
Dr. Chandrakant Pandav from All India Medical Institute visited our
center last week. Dr. Pandav is the Regional Co-ordinator of the
South Asian International Council for Control of Iodine Deficiency
Disorders. He is not only brilliant, but a really nice person.
He had a wonderful suggestion, and we would love to obtain your feed-
back. The supercourse has been very powerful in obtaining content
that can be used by the teachers of the world. However, we have not
taped into very much the most valuable asset of the Supercourse for
Global Health, you. We have over 9,000 faculty from 120 countries who
have joined. You are some of the leading academic experts in preven-
tion, yet few of us are using our talents internationally.
Chandra suggest that we think about setting up a global Internet ad-
visory council whereby you the experts can answer questions over the
Internet for people around the world on areas where you have knowl-
edge. We have enormous international prevention social capital, which
can be applied.
WHO, CDC, or PAHO do not have the expertise that we have, nor do they
have an Internet advisory system as we can have.
We were thinking that a fascinating model would be the "internet
blind date model". On the Internet especially in the US now there are
hundreds of sites where you can find a date for Saturday night. In
the web page are pictures of people, and a short biographical sketch
to which you can contact. Some specialize, for example, there is one
site where there are only people who earn >$250,000 per year (funny,
there are no epidemiologists on this site!!). They verify this by
checking tax returns.
This model is interesting as we might think about a site where the
global advisors have at least a master's degree in public health, are
on an academic faculty as an associate professor or above, and have a
certain number of publications. These individuals will rapidly become
global experts. We could have a page for those involved with cancer
prevention, HIV, Arab health, etc.
If you are interested in helping to develop a model for this, please
send a note to <ronlaporte@aol.com>. If you know of other models for
this, please let us know. It is time for the Supercourse team to be
beautiful and handsome dates.
Reaching Science:
We plan to start in October of next year to reach the 350,000 scien-
tists worldwide to see if we can start a global supercourse. We were
also thinking that over 90% of our Supercourse faculty are at Univer-
sities. We could contact our friends in science at our own university
to make them aware of the Supercourse model. It should be great fun
to see if this model can evolve outside of the success we have had in
prevention.
Best Regards from Pittsburgh:
You are all invited to the 1,000th lecture dinner on Dec. 15, 2002 at
our India Restaurant on Forbes Avenue. We are thinking of having
"lecture readings" like "poetry readings" where we read to each other
our favorite lectures.
Ron, Akira, Faina, Eun Ryoung, Eugene, Mita, Luciza, Fan, Beatriz,
Julia, Raina, Abed, Fred, Karin
mailto:super2+@pitt.edu
--
To send a message to AFRO-NETS, write to: afro-nets@usa.healthnet.org
To subscribe or unsubscribe, write to: majordomo@usa.healthnet.org
in the body of the message type: subscribe afro-nets OR unsubscribe afro-nets
To contact a person, send a message to: afro-nets-help@usa.healthnet.org
Information and archives: http://www.afronets.org