AFRO-NETS> Supercourse Newsletter, April 13 2003

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

Supercourse Newsletter, April 13 2003
-------------------------------------

http://www.pitt.edu/~super1

The Golden Lecture is getting brighter:
159 days and counting
 
The golden lecture is beginning to look like a rising sun. It is get-
ting bigger and brighter to illuminate the world about prevention. 
The new mantra of the Supercourse is "Teach a million". We now have 
over 20 countries participating, and we look for those of you who 
might want to take the lead in your country.

Faina is now working on her third draft of the golden lecture of pre-
vention. It is really good, with authors from many countries from 
across the world, including a Nobel Prize winner, leaders in epidemi-
ology and the Internet and people who just write great lectures. It 
will be about 25 slides long. It will be "light" so that everyone can 
receive it. 

We want to set the stage for distribution of other lectures. Wouldn't 
it have been great if we would have had this in place so we could 
distribute Just In Time Lectures about SARS, so this could be taught 
in our classroom as there just is not much good science in our news-
paper.

Fred Muwanga has been substantial progress in identifying distribu-
tion channels in Swaziland and all of Africa. He has identified NGOs 
that distribute free educational materials throughout Africa. In ad-
dition, he has been in contact with WHO in Swaziland who are most in-
terested in joining the golden lecture. Great work Fred. Please send 
to us any approaches that you plan to use so that we can send your 
ideas to others on our list.

Next week we will send the lecture to the 60 or so people who wanted 
to be main distributors of the lecture in their country. (We would 
love to have you be a Golden Lecture Sower of Prevention). Hippo-
craties is smiling. It is time to consider changes to his oath - Do 
no harm, and spread the Golden Lecture.

Hippocraties last night decided to become a full member of the Super-
course team. We decided, however, not to allow a dead man to vote.

Internet2:

We are having wonderful discussions with the Internet2 people. Vint 
Cerf, the father of the Internet has been very instrumental in bring-
ing us in contact with them. Internet2 represents the next generation 
internet. It has 1000s of times more bandwidth than the current 
Internet. Currently only 202 universities world wide are connected, 
but now there is a major international push. It was originally funded 
by the National Science Foundation in the US. We have been talking 
with Mary Kratz, and Heather Boyles who have been extremely helpful. 
We see an Internet2-Supercourse faculty partnership. One aspect of 
this is to have on Hippocraties day not only the distribution of the 
lecture world wide, but also a global "meta conference". Wouldn't 
that be fantastic? We need to think about what to do in the meta con-
ference, but doing this in parallel would be pushing Supercourse, and 
also distance education to new limits. We would love to have your 
thoughts about this, please send a note to <ronlaporte@aol.com>
 
USAID:
We talked with Kevin Hayes and others at USAID. It was a most inter-
esting discussion which enlightened us as to how USAID works. In up-
coming newsletters we will discuss this with you. We are also talking 
with the great people at USAID to see if we can generate a Super-
course Lecture on USAID so that a better working knowledge of USAID 
can be made available.
 
It is exciting times, thinking about Hippocraties on the Internet and 
Internet2! The Golden Lecture the "Hippocraties beneficial worm" is 
gearing up.
 
Please give us your thoughts.
 
Spring is the time for Sowing Pittsburgh, and world wide. We need to 
seed prevention.
 

Best regards:
 
Ron, Faina, Mita, Eugene, EunRyoung, Hippocrates, Akira, Julia, Soni, 
Abed, Rania, Beatriz, Tom, Deb
mailto:super1+@pitt.edu
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