Supercourse Newsletter - Dec. 27
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The Supercourse:
http://www.pitt.edu/~super1/
Dear Friends,
As we enter into the year 2001, we have been very excited about the
evolution of the Supercourse. At the beginning of 2000 we had 800
people in the Supercourse from 75 countries. There were 70 lectures.
One year later there are 1700 faculty from 100 countries. In addi-
tion, there is an amazing 295 lectures that have been collected. We
are very pleased with the global interest in this effort. It proves
that we in academia are pleased to share our lectures, which will
benefit everyone. The year 2001 has even greater potential.
We focused very hard on acquiring lectures. We wrote a very large
number of letters, and this year, it was wonderful that so many peo-
ple provided lectures to us. We are becoming known as the lecture re-
pository for the world.
The year 2001 is starting out extremely well as our group have sent
to you CDs of the first 212 lectures. Akira and I thank especially
Eun Ryoung, Benjamin and Geoff Kupfer. We had little knowledge in how
to prepare CDs, but these people found out how to do this.
The CDs are the Supercourse seeds for the 21st century. It is very
gratifying to receive e-mails from people worldwide who have just in-
stalled their CDs and like the material. Clearly the lectures from
all of you will help to improve the teaching of prevention in the
world.
We see that the year 2001 will be targeted to acquiring more lec-
tures. It is likely we will need about 4-500 to cover the main topics
of prevention.
The second component is that the CD, and our Web page is version 1.0.
We want to modify these in relationship to your needs.
The third and most important component is that we want to have the CD
and the Supercourse distributed as widely as possible. The goal is to
have the course on every computer for people involved in prevention,
and perhaps health in general. We want to obtain input from you as to
how you have spread the Supercourse in your country. At CDC we have
suggestions that the CD be downloadable form the CDC front page, and
also that the CD be put on the CDC LAN to maximize exposure.
Nora Oliveri, a long term friend to the Supercourse suggested:
That the Supercourse would be made available throughout Argentina
through Argentine Association of Medical Informatics (AAIM) and the
Fundacion de Informatica Medica-FM. The cost of replication and de-
livery in Argentina potentially could be provided by these two or-
ganizations. She also suggested a similar proposal to the members of
IMIA-WG-9.
These are brilliant ideas as that CDs can be prepared by the national
organizations, and distributed for free through on-going mailings by
the organizations.
As you distribute the CDs in your country, and globally, please let
us know how you are doing this, as others can learn from you. It
would be great to have us all learn from each other concerning the
distribution of the Supercourse.
Her thoughts were brilliant concerning distribution as she tapped
into groups who would benefit from the Supercourse, and we will be
allowing them to distribute the course to all their membership.
It is interesting that WHO in Geneva has 3200 people working for it.
With our 1700 virtual people, we most certainly have the largest or-
ganized group of people in academia interested in prevention and the
Internet. Isn't that fascinating?
We look forward to hearing about when you receive the CD, when it is
installed and experiences in usage and distribution so that we all
can learn from you.
It was a beautiful Christmas Season in Pittsburgh. There was 15 cm of
snow, the temperature was -10C and the sun blazing on the snow. Many
of us do not celebrate Christmas, but other religious days. It is
nice to think about what we are created worldwide as it is in the
spirit of all of our religions. Thank you all for a wonderful 2000.
We look forward to much greater activity with you in the year 2001.
Ron, Akira, Benjamin, Eugene, Eun Roung, Fan, Faina, Deb, Tom,
Beatriz
mailto:super3@imap.pitt.edu
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