![[object Object],[object Object],“ Using New Media to Improve Learning: Multimedia Connect for HIV/AIDS Risk Reduction and the Triangle Initiative ,” by Frank Moretti and Susan Witte in Toward Equity in Health: A New Global Approach to Health Disparities edited by Barbara Wallace, Springer Publishing Co. 2007](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)
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- 1. Harnessing the Power of New Media for Community, Education and Research: Columbia’s Triangle Initiative Jennifer Spiegler and Jessica Rowe November 9, 2007
- 14. Coda/Q&A
Editor's Notes
- Good Morning. I’m Jennifer Spiegler and this is my colleague Jessica Rowe. We’re from the Center for New Media Teaching and Learning at Columbia University. We’re very pleased today to have the chance to talk for a little bit today about a new initiative that our group launched in 2006 called the Triangle Initiative. Jess will demonstrate some of the projects that she’s leading within that initiative. I’ll set the stage with a prelude about who we are, what the Triangle Initiative is, and how we got there. Since we are here to talk about things that matter, I’ll tell you that I’ve been at The Center for less than a year, but one of the things that attracted me to this position of “Assistant Director for Strategic Initiatives” was not for the long and flowery title, but for the chance to become part of what seemed to be an extraordinary experiment and speaks directly to our topic today. When I applied for the job around this time last year, I was given many things to read - right, you’re applying for a job in academia and you go away from the first interview with homework. Some of these had to do with new media - Yochai Benckler, Lawrence Lessig, Chris Anderson. But among them was an article by the Center’s director, Frank Moretti, and one of our faculty partners, Susan Witte. The article was then in the final stages of preparation for inclusion in a book. In that article is this quote:
- Here was an organization that seemed to be putting a stake in the ground. Obviously, the Center had always engaged in redressing the imbalances between technology for profit and technology to benefit the human condition - we are, after all talking about education, not twinkies. Consistent with being a service enterprise within an elite institution of higher learning, it did that - and does that every day - by focusing its energies squarely on its educational mandate. Something else, though, was clearly brewing with these Strategic Initiatives. We’ll come back to that.
- So here it is, the mothership (we could easily/better drive this part of the presentation off the Web site) The mission of the Center for New Media Teaching and Learning is to advance the purposeful use of new media technology within the educational programs of Columbia University. The Center was created in 1999 - in its eight years it has helped approximately 3,000 faculty members with everything from help with the course management system to partnering on large scale projects. We have done over 150 of these to date.
- Many of these projects have reflected the social values of the Center and its commitments to human rights and social justice. We have attracted partners with similar values. Among these projects are: the Malcolm X Multimedia Study Environment - a site which annotates the full text of the Autobiography of Malcolm X and contextualizes it by supplying audio and video of Malcolm X speeches as well as archival images, texts and video; Social Justice Wiki, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and many others. Today we are working on a economics-based simulation of the challenges of life in an African Village for the Earth Institute and a site meant to enhance the mentorship process for minority HIV investigators.
- When we work with faculty, our approach is as educators first and technologists second. We have a strong bias toward constructivist learning - always pushing to find ways to engage students in the active construction of their own knowledge. We follow a defined process of design research, which compels us first and foremost to develop a deep understanding of a faculty member’s pedagogical goals. A simple service request, can issue major projects. For instance, several years ago, a professor of cognitive psychology at Teachers College came to us with an overly worn collection of vhs tapes that he had been showing in classes on the development of mathematical thinking in children - some of the footage dating back to the early 70s. Instead of simply digitizing the collection, we asked first, “what do you do with the tapes in your class?”
- The discussions and investigations around that question have produced a tool we call VITAL - Video Interactions in Teaching and Learning - where students can watch digitized video online in a secure environment, then clip them, annotate their clips and then embed those clips in multimedia essays. Class time can be used for more fruitful discussion, videos can be studied in-depth and student reflections captured in the same space. Another of our flagship projects, Brownfield Action, started with a request for a database. That resulted in the eventual development of an immersive interactive environment where students engage with a fictional community as environmental consultants conducting a site analysis for a mall developer. Or one of the projects that Jess will demonstrate Collateral Consequences, where the professor identified his need as a web site upgrade…more on that later. Until recently, most the projects that CCNMTL embarked on - save a few forays into free online seminars - stayed pretty much within the walls of the University. But as you all know, the tendency of technology is to break those walls down. Sometimes in radical ways, sometimes in subtle ways.
- So one day, in about 2004, a group of Social Work researchers came to CCNMTL wondering if we could help them think about how technology might help them support the dissemination of an HIV prevention program called Project Connect. They had developed and tested this program, the first-ever targeting couples, through a major grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. Now that they had proved that the approach work, they faced the question of how to package it so that it could be widely disseminated. They needed a way to streamline the intervention. And Connect was complicated. It took place over 6 sessions, it had many parts and pieces - the box: flash cards, videos - it’s HIV prevention, so use your imaginations. And what we discovered in our discovery process with the team was that there were many elements of the intervention that could also be used in transforming the preparation for professional practice taking place in Social Work classrooms. Jess will describe how this intervention looks and works now, but the process led to an Ah-HA moment for the team.
- The team could see that a single new media object, in large part because of its modularity, could simultaneously serve the interests of and provide benefits to education, research and the community. It was exciting. It was a new way of addressing, indeed, harmonizing the mostly disparate efforts of the university with regard to these constituencies. And, with growing interest across the university in reaching out to new communities both locally and globally, the team embraced the idea that the content could be customized - modules customized for language and culjture could be swapped into the system as needed. For the Center, it now meant that we could advance our educational vision of transforming the curriculum while also producing work that had the potential to extend applied research and to begin to address real social issues - in this instance the disparities of health - HIV/AIDS disproportionately affects poor people and people of color - that plague our country and the world. So that Ah-Ha of the Connect team led to this - the Triangle Initiative. We formalized the Triangle initiative in 2006 around the idea that a single media object could benefit each of these three vectors: education, research and community - the three evergreen interests of academic research institutions that are mostly disparate efforts. The University has funded this endeavor for five years, and so far it’s getting traction. We have this year established criteria for these projects and initiated a separate project application process for potential partners. We currently have three projects working in this arena and several new ones on deck.
- Multimedia Connect - the project issuing from Project Connect that Jennifer described, is the first of what we think will be a series of multimedia health interventions for CCNMTL and its partners in Social Work and Public Health, and we think we have a strong contribution to bring to these important projects. * When the SIG team started looking at an HIV prevention intervention for couples, it was in response to a rising rate of HIV infection among women in the U.S. as a result of sexual contact with men. * Multimedia Connect uses a digital environment to support facilitators of this HIV prevention intervention for couples. It helps them to execute the intervention with greater standardization and with less need for training than in the paper-based version. * Our aim is to make the intervention accessible to a wider population. In addition, because of the modular nature of this technology, we can create custom versions of the tool for different languages and cultures.
- The success of Multimedia Connect - and it’s not even built yet - has attracted another partner working on HIV. We are working with researchers from the HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies at the New York State Psychiatric Institute who have received a two-year grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. This study will adapt and pilot test a multimedia version of a proven HIV treatment adherence program in South Africa, where AIDS prevalence is the highest in the world and antiretroviral medications have only recently been made widely available. The addition of technology is intended to support lay counselors in HIV/AIDS clinics to implement the program with limited training and supervision while ensuring greater standardization. These would be critical issues to bring the program to scale. For the classrooms in Columbia’s school of public health, one possibility now being considered is the creation of a new course in technology-supported behavioral intervention design. That makes sense given the level of enthusiasm for technology we’ve seen at funding agencies like the national institute of mental health.
- The program targets education and social support as drivers of adherence, so part of the project will be to translate the social support network map that you have just seen in Multimedia Connect to South Africa. In early sessions of the intervention, study participants and their counselors are expected to use the tool to map the participant's social support network in order to help them identify individuals who they can rely on -- relatives, friends, community members -- to participate with them in the program. In later sessions, the map will also be used to help participants increase family and community support and help them overcome barriers to adherence, including addressing HIV status disclosure, mental health needs, and sustained long term adherence to HIV care. Here you see a comp of how that kind of translation might work. We developed this with input from researchers in New York and South Africa, but we will be going to South Africa soon to begin this work. There we will add the voices of the users to the mix, working not only with the research team but with community members in Cape Town as well. The methodology is formally known as CBPR for Community Based Participatory Research - known to most of you as user input. One of the interesting things here was that our South African colleagues felt that the concept of self was very different from how it was depicted in the version you just saw. That, in fact, the person’s social network defines the person - so here you can see that we have left out the projection of self and reoriented the circle to the center of the page. Instead of abstract shapes representing people, we have actually populated the map with figures to choose from. Once the person chooses a figure, they can attach various attributes to that, such as what kind of support could be taken or must be given to that person.
- Here is another version of map we will be testing. In this version, you see that we have created a scoring system, with the idea of helping the facilitor and their client assess the potential for various family members or friends to participate with the patient in the intervention.