So many choices: What are the tangible steps

So many choices as to me learning needs and goals.

I might want to choose to develop the capacity to:

1. Cloudsource ideas and improvements to health promotion resources that I have been involved in developing such as The Connecting with Kids cards, SEEDS (Social and Emotional Early Development Strategy) and the Healthy Bodies Health Minds comprehensive framework.


2. Run a Community of Practice around using these resources/programs/approaches.


3. Using wikis to get comment on project plans and grant submissions and to register community. support for grant ideas. I think Google docs might be the tool for this.


4. Weaving together Youtube and Facebook, blogging and my email contacts to explain the strategic directions in my mental health promotion work and to engage people in a conversations about how we could work together in pursuit of common goals.


5. Organizing launches of health promotion resources/programs and do online familiarization sessions. Use social bookmarking for evidence brokering.


6. Deliver more inclusive online and interactive training particularly to rural and remote partners.


7. Use email list managers, Facebook, Twitter and SMS to organize F2F or virtual events.

So many options and decisions.

• But it is much clearer to me what I need to being doing now .




• Practice, Play, Explore, Trial, Checkout, Evaluate, Put aside, Adopt, Reflect.


• Master the software.


• Take reasonable and wise risks.


• Understand and manage the risks of these technologies. Understand identify, monitor, avoid, live with.


• Bring along my managers, peers and partners.


• Feed this into my professional association.


• Be enriched by the perspective and professional conversations about these tools and the emergent Health Promotion 2.0 paradigms.


• Share and discuss my learning with line managers and worm teams and key partners. Invite colleagues to my blog.


• Find allies and partners for new projects.


• Understand what resources are needed. (Time and money and IT resources are needed or these types of projects.).


• Work towards a project plan for small online project as a practice event. This is my sand pit -a safe play space for learning and development.


• Work towards a “Session Plan-Lesson Plan” with-in such a project. I need to set up accounts and manage all the passwords and log ins securely.

Do I need to find a buddy with someone who has mastered what I'm still to master about online facilitation?

Zooming In-What do you want to learn to facilitate?

What do you want to learn to facilitate?

What would I like to achieve, change or do more of?

I’ve been unable to separate these two focus questions for this Facilitating Online Communities 2010.

Give my role in Health Promotion, I’m asking myself what do I need to be able to do with Web 2.0 tools and online communities.

• Find, organize and spread evidence based practice, useful data and ideas.
  
• Find people who might be interested in health promotion.
  
• Understand my partners and their needs and beware of opportunities to offer advice and collaboration.
  
• Interest people in becoming involved in health promotion projects and strategies. Link them up with other with a similar interests and complementary abilities.
  
• Improve readiness of others to engage in health promotion and build their capacity to do the work.
• A Find innovators and early adopters and support them and raise their profile with others as pat of a larger change strategies.
  
• Advise others and provide expert support with my specialist skills and knowledge to undertake programs and projects that will improve population health outcomes.
  
• Manage projects and collaborate with other on projects.
  
• Evaluate projects and programs.
  
• Set up and facilitate online Communities of Practice LINK
  
• Set and facilitate wiki based events to capture practice wisdom around specific topics.
  
• Produce and publish digital everything from podcasts to small videos to
  ElluminateLive sessions.

*****

I want to know what these new web 2.0 tools can do? – What types of problems they can be applied to?

I want to know how to use them well-both strategically and tactically.

I suspect there might be foundational skills and advanced skills that build on the foundational skills.

I suspect I also ready have some skills from my 13 years of participation in online communities. I suspect it is a case of building on F2F skills as used for collaborations, project management, event organizations, communications, and meeting facilitation.

I want to learn how to modify my F2F skills to the new online environments. I’m interested in many things.

How can I use web 2.0 tools to collaboratively:

• focus collective attention on hot topics, issues and possibilities,
• define problems and map there dimensions and dynamics,
• brainstorm possible solutions ,
• identify and draw in resources,
• choose priorities,
• consider evidence of what strategies are most likely to work in local contexts
• write and agree on collaborative action plans,
• implement and evaluate the impacts of these action plans.

I'm also interested in building online Communities of Practice. The Australian Government has published some useful definitions and guidelines.

Related to this I am yet to master:

• Using online tools to further community engagement and mobilization.
• Using Facebook and other social network media (Linkedin) and traditional strategies to interest people in working on the problems and solutions I value.
• Online advocacy and marketing of ideas and interesting people in problems, heuristics and paradigms.
• Using Web 2.0 surveys such as Surveymonkey and polls
  

There are many tools to play with Delicious, Digg, Slideshare, Youtube ect.


So many more options. How do I choose?

I read today at http://mashable.com/2010/07/28/social-media-productivity/

Map out the various social media apps and tools that you use in your daily work life and rank them in order of importance to you. If you could only keep one of them, which would it be and why? Ask yourself which tool helps you accomplish the widest variety of tasks on a regular basis. Is that the same tool as the one you couldn’t live without?

Good Questions but oh I wish that I was at that stage now.

Leaning Outcomes

At the end of this course the students will be able to:

1. describe the features of online communities and networks; (4/10)

2. describe the elements of skillful online facilitation; (5/10)

3. demonstrate an understanding of how online communication tools can be used to facilitate online; (4/10)

4. plan, facilitate and evaluate an online event. (7/10)

The danger of this self-rating is I don’t know what I don’t know I need to know yet but I think I’m seeing the new Health Promotion 2.0 paradigm at least in outline.

I’ve made a detailed list of my relevant skills but I’m not putting it up on the web. I’m not sure I understand the risks or the benefits.

I can see advantages about being very open but I’m also aware of some risks.

What will this course mean for my future work practices?

This weeks learning task:

Make a plan for what you want to learn and explore, and write it up (or present in another way eg mindmap, video recording) on your blog.

In my recent blog entry I didn’t really, go into detail about what I want to learn in FO2010 and beyond. It was the big picture view.

This post is much more specific.

I’ve kinda been conducting my own Training Needs Analysis.

Part of this has been a stocktake of my own pre-existing skills relevant to the task of mastering Health Promotion 2.0.

I think my personal tool bag is pretty good.

I work as a Health Promotion Officer and I’ve had that job title over 13 years.
Before that mainly worked in NGOs and had fabulous opportunities to learn new skills, many of which I still draw up heavily.

Before 13 years there does not seem to be have been many people in the world who had a job title of Mental Health Promotion Officer. Such is modern life.

My work is in a specialist area of health promotion. Many people have no idea or wrong ideas what Health Promotion is. Health education is a small part of health promotion work. I am not involved in publicity for health services in ant meaningful sense.

A foundational document in health promotion is the Ottawa Charter from the World Health Organisation. I read it years before I was ever involved in health promotion at it stuck with me as a great document.

It reads very well. Few professional groups have such an inspiring and insightful document as a foundation.

My professional association, the Australian Health Promotion Australia LINK is conducted a long process to produce a statement of the core competencies of my profession.

Other bodies in various states and some international organization have also been producing lists of competencies. Notable is the Galway Conference Declaration

What strikes me about the all these lists, is that they will all need an extensive rework because of Web 2.0. I suspect this is the same for the competencies for many other professions.

The Health Promotion Australia Competency List in summary are:

The major competencies required include:
1. Program planning, implementation and evaluation competencies
1.1 Needs (or situational) assessment competencies
1.2 Program planning competencies
1.3 Competencies for planning evidenced-based strategies
1.4 Evaluation and research competencies

2. Partnership building competencies

3. Communication and report writing competencies

4. Technology competencies

5. Knowledge competencies

What strikes me is that new collaborative Web 2.0 technologies are changing our work very fast. The above competencies list will be out of date in few years.

The core technology competencies are pretty basic.

It says:
An entry level health promotion practitioner is able to:
4.1 operate a computer, word processing and email systems;
4.2 use software for footnotes, endnotes, and other report layout requirements;
4.3 manage database and spreadsheet applications;
4.4 use the internet as a work tool;
4.5 use technology based systems to identify and review the literature; and
4.6 operate audiovisual and multimedia equipment

As for the Galway Conference List, I like it much more.

It reads:

The competencies required to engage in health promotion practice fall into eight
domains:

1. Catalyzing change – Enabling change and empowering individuals and communities to improve their health.

2. Leadership – Providing strategic direction and opportunities for participation in developing healthy public policy, mobilizing and managing resources for health promotion, and building capacity.

3. Assessment – Conducting assessment of needs and assets in communities and systems that leads to the identification and analysis of the behavioral, cultural, social, environmental and organizational determinants that promote or compromise health.

4. Planning – Developing measurable goals and objectives in response to assessment of needs and assets, and identifying strategies that are based on knowledge derived from theory, evidence, and practice.

5. Implementation – Carrying out effective and efficient, culturally-sensitive, and ethical strategies to ensure the greatest possible improvements in health, including management of human and material resources.

6. Evaluation – Determining the reach, effectiveness, and impact of health promotion programs and policies. This includes utilizing appropriate evaluation and research methods to support program improvements, sustainability, and dissemination.

7. Advocacy – Advocating with and on behalf of individuals and communities to improve their health and well-being and building their capacity for undertaking actions that can both improve health and strengthen community assets.

8. Partnerships – Working collaboratively across disciplines, sectors, and partners to enhance the impact and sustainability of health promotion programs and policies.

It takes a bit of thinking about to work out what all this means for Health Promotion 2.0.

I can see real power in social network media tools to do all these things. But which tools, and how to use them to what ends.


My head is full of questions about what is the potential and now every use of the Web 2.0 as a work tool in Health Promotion.

Robyn Kalda from Canada has put up a powerpoint on this topic in past few weeks that covers some of the things I want to learn.

Innovative Use of Information Technology for Health Promotion:
Making your Work more Effective, Easier and Possibly Even More Fun

She is linked with the Health Promotion Clearinghouse is one of the best examples of how Web 2.0 might be used.

There is also the empty web site healthpromotion2.org/

I think this clearinghouse are seeing what can be done but not quite yet pulling it off. Bring along your partners to be able to use Web 2.0 seems to be a key challenge.

It takes time to learn these new tools and imagination is a barrier.

I remember when everybody was pretty pleased with the IMB Electric Typewritter then along came this thing call the dedicated word processor in the early 1970s.

With a word processing machine the stored text could be edited. Editing functions was basic including Insert, Delete, Skip (character, line), and so on.

Someone once trained me how to use them just as they were all sent to the dump and replaced by PC based word-processing software.

The labor and cost savings of word processing machines over typing were immediate, and remarkable.

The typing pools were disrupted to say the least. Pages of typing no longer had to be retyped to correct the most basic errors. Projects could be retrieved and worked on or modified.

Next came a wave of change - PC based spreadsheets, databases and then desktop publishing.

With these tools my productively leaped.

The next wave was email and then the World Wide Web.

I've found the internet pretty boring since the arrival of Web 1.0.

While I was involved in spreading email and the www to others, generally I could not have been much bothered with most new internet based technology

But I now find this web 2.0 stuff is really exciting.

As exciting as spreadsheets, databases and then desktop publishing, emails and web pages.

I predict that this Web 2.0 stuff feels like its going to change the way we do things.

Part of the problem is going to be bring along my peers, partners and stakeholders sooner rather than latter.

The Blogging are you serious attitude

I love this post on the blog The Bamboo Project because I feel that blogging in mental health promotion is not seen as respectable.

From http://www.michelemmartin.com/thebambooprojectblog/2010/07/how-to-blog-when-your-industry-or-occupation-isnt-into-it.html

A search of http://technorati.com found 4 blogs that mentioned “health promotion” although many many blogs mention health promotion topics.

My weekly Google Alerts on ‘mental health promotion” gives me a few blog hits every week.

Last week I stumbled upon a health promotion wiki

http://technologyinprevention.wikispaces.com/

I’m still working my way into it but it may be useful to many in this course.

I also found last week a mental health promotion blog Using technology to improve youth mental health http://techmentalhealth.blogspot.com/ which part of Phd study.

I guess I'm saying that one of the learning needs is strategies to draw others into these news methods. Some of this will involve helping them over come barriers and punch in their facilitators.