AFRO-NETS> Supercourse Newsletter, January 30, 2002

[Ron Laporte <super1+@pitt.edu>]

Supercourse Newsletter, January 30, 2002
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http://www.pitt.edu/~super1/

Dear Friends,

600 what a buzz!!

On Monday we had the opportunity to celebrate our 600th lecture. We 
wanted you all to be there, the Indian Food was great. We took a pic-
ture of this wonderful celebration. We are called the UN Supercourse 
of Pittsburgh. We waited as Eugene Shubnikov, who many of you know, 
our friend and collaborator in Siberia came to visit. 

Our group has expanded to over 11 different countries. These are the 
people who are recruiting and processing lectures. It is a great 
group to work with, and we hope that you will join us in the future. 
Please come to our party for the 700th lecture, it will be even bet-
ter.

Global Lecture Club:

We have decided to start the global lecture club that Rania suggested 
a few weeks ago. We would very much appreciate your advise. Please 
send your suggestions to <ronlaporte@aol.com>. The concept is simple, 
we will select 1 lecture. The starting lecture will be the one that 
Ron Laporte wrote on the Epidemiologic tradition. This was chosen as 
the Epidemiologic Transition is one of the most important concepts in 
epidemiology and global health, but not too many people have heard 
about it. It was a wonderful concept developed by Dr. Omran. When one 
reviews the lecture, and examines the articles, one will never view 
global health the same, as Omran created beautiful elegant principles 
which could be extremely important for developed and developing coun-
tries, with broad applications for infectious and NCDs. It is a won-
derful lecture to interact as the implications for public health 
worldwide are so profound.

We therefor will begin a global lecture club, based upon the princi-
ple of a journal club, but with some differences. The author of the 
lecture (REL) will be in the club. However, part of the problem of 
trying to do this on the web is that often there are "lurkers" who do 
not say anything, or talkers who consume all the discussion. So the 
Global Lecture Club will have a Russian Director, Euegene Shubnikov 
who will guide and or prod the discussions.

We plan to have the lecture club up for only 3 days. Also, we will 
only have 30 people as part of the discussion, then we will close it 
down. Anything beyond this gets unmanageable, and will clog up our e-
mail. However, the ongoing discussions will be available for all of 
us to see.

We will not set this up on list servers, as many of us have gotten 
away from list servers, and a meanless form of information exchange. 
Rather we will use e-mail, that are posted, to a web page, or dis-
tributed outward.

At the end of the 3 days the global lecture club will be torn down. 
Eugene will then take the discussions and put additional slides at 
the end of the lecture, as we will have global experts talking with 
each other, and this new information will be available for the world. 
In addition, we will collect information in order to evaluate the 
session.

Before we start, we very much want your input. We see this as sitting 
around a table in a conference room discussing an article, but here 
it will be sitting around the world discussing a lecture.

This is just the beginning, as we want to learn as to how to set up a 
global discussion to educate. In the future we could have multiple 
discussions going at once with Eugene guiding each discussion. We 
have wonderful materials now, therefore a global dialogue on the ma-
terial will benefit everyone.

Many of us have been on internet based chat rooms, or global lec-
tures, or poster sessions, and most of these are abject failures. 
This will succeed, and will be a powerful tool for training if the 
future, but we need feedback from you.


Steelers:
It is a sad, sad week, in Pittsburgh Steeler town. Our American foot-
ball team got bumped off by the Patriots. It was not fair, the 
Steelers were better then them, we should have gone to the Super-
bowl...Sigh...there is always next year


Onward to 10000 lectures!

For all of us from 11 countries, thanks, you all have been wonderful. 
We are getting a lecture every 1.5 days. Isn't that amazing?

Ron Laporte
mailto:super1+@pitt.edu

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