It is a well-known fact that the health of a person depends on where he/she lives. Access to health care services for poor individuals living in disadvantaged communities is a global problem spanning both developing and developed nations. Be it the slums of Nairobi, the densely populated low income communities of East Los Angeles or the remote tribal villages of…
Smartphones and parenting
Yu-cheung Wong from the Chinese University of Hong Kong introduces the paper he will be discussing at husITa16. The rise of the permanently connected smartphone has made parental supervision of children’s Internet use almost impossible. In Hong Kong, a city where ICT infrastructure is well-developed and smartphone use very affordable, almost all (98%) school children aged 14-17 have a smartphone. Ownership among…
Nextdoor: A new type of community building tool needing research.
Community organizing is typically taught in human service programs, especially in social work courses. Social work in the US is rooted in the work of Jane Addams who, in the late 1800s, organized and served a neighborhood community in Chicago. Google “Jane Adams Hull House Chicago maps” to see some of the geographic maps of the neighborhoods she served. Today, with information technology’s embrace of…
Thoughts on the Grand Challenges paper: “Practice Innovation through Technology in the Digital Age: A Grand Challenge for Social Work”
This blog post briefly reviews the concept of Grand Challenges in Social Work and summarizes the working paper, “Practice Innovation through Technology in the Digital Age: A Grand Challenge for Social Work,” which is one of two papers that explore the Grand Challenge, “Harnessing Technology for Social Good.” In 2014 the American Academy of Social Work & Social Welfare (AASWSW)…
Social work education twitter chat
To help social work students and educators learn about Twitter and develop the skills to participate in a live chat, Jimmy Young of the California State University San Marcos and Laurel Hitchcock of University of Alabama at Birmingham have designed an assignment for social work students that involves joining a live Twitter chat with other social work students, educators and practitioners…
husITa history: CUSSN archive released.
We are delighted to announce the release of our digitized archive of the newsletters of the Computer Use in Social Services Network (CUSSN). CUSSN was formed by a group of US human service technology specialists meeting at a Council of Social Work Education conference in Louisville Kentucky in 1981. The contents of the CUSSN newsletters reveal the preoccupations of human service technologists…
Human service technology pioneers project
To mark thirty years of the Journal of Technology in Human Services we decided to organise a husITa pioneers project. Over the coming weeks and months we will post short audio or video tracks interviewing key people who have, for many years, championed the cause of technology in human services.
The challenge of behavior change digital games
The 75 billion digital game industry is comparable in revenue to the combined television/film industry and is growing at approximately 33% each year (1) (2) (3). Anyone who has visited and probably lost money at a gaming establishment like Las Vegas knows that well designed games are so powerful they can even separate most people from their hard earned money.…
husITa16 to be held in Seoul, South Korea as part of SWSD2016
Our next international conference husITa16 will be in held in Seoul, South Korea as part of the Joint World Conference on Social Work, Education and Social Development. husITa will be reviewing and coordinating all symposia, workshops and papers submitted on the subtheme human service technology. Submissions are now open for symposia, workshops and abstracts and a conference discount is available to all member of the husITa mailing…
Digital divide challenges of children in low-income families: The case of Shanghai
In this blog post,Yu-cheung Wong describes the paper he presented at #husita14. The paper was selected for inclusion in the special husITa14 issue of the Journal of Technology in Human Services. This research paper explored the issue of the digital divide in Shanghai with particular attention to children from low-income families. It examined whether a difference in the Internet access of…