Using computer technology for health education.

Abstract

The Internet has been growing tremendously since 1988 becoming extremely useful for health education specialists. Some services available on the Internet are: electronic mail (E-mail) mail lists/discussion groups (listservs) electronic bulletin boards (BBS) newsgroups (Usenet) and internet relay chat (IRC). The World Wide Web (WWW) makes it possible to exchange text pictures and sound. A computer modem communications software phone line and Internet Service Provider (ISP) are needed to connect to the Internet. Mailing lists or listservs have also been developed to send messages to a collection of E-mail addresses for information exchange and discussion. In health education and promotion the following mailing lists are important: HPRIN (Health Promotion Research Internet Network) operated by the Karolinska Institute in Sweden; HEDIR (International Electronic Mail Directory for Health Educators) operated by Southern Illinois University at Carbondale US; HLTHPROM a health promotion discussion list operated by the University of Wisconsin-Madison US. The North American Regional Office (NARO) of the International Union for Health Promotion and Education also established a mailing list for its members in cooperation with New York University to facilitate communication about international health education (conference announcements jobs internships resources news funding sources and discussion). The WWW provides access to enormous amounts of information and pictures using a browser program such as Netscape. Hypertext provides a link to other data or to a service. Some of the services connected to the Web are anonymous FTP (file copying) gopher (finding data through menus) and telnet (connecting to another computer). Users can create their own information on web pages by means of hypertext markup language or HTML to create a web page. A unique address called URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is needed for locating a resource on the Web. At New York University computer training has been part of health education specialist training.