$$ Weekly Report & Reflection blog post #4

Reader Article
This week, one of the articles from the Science section of my feedly reader stood out for me. The article is called: 

"To Get Parents To Vaccinate Their Kids, Don't Ask. Just Tell"

    Fan, L. (CC) 2015.  Click the screenshot above to visit the permalink.

It is very interesting to see that when doctors allow for discussion about vaccinating children, for the parents, the parents tend to not vaccinate their children if they were on the fence. Coming from a public health background, I feel that freedom of choice can be dangerous for population that does not have the knowledge or experience to make the best choice. Vaccination is not meant only to protect the person who gets it, but to act as a crowding effect that prevents disease transmitting within a population. The more people that vaccinates against a disease, then the less able that disease will be to travel to other vaccinated population. Therefore, the more people that are vaccinated, then the more protected the un-vaccinated population will be. I believe that like universal health insurance, vaccination need to be integrated at the system level for the entire population in order to protect the entire population, and lower the overall risk. This is the basic principle of the universal insurance coverage. This should also be the principle in using systematic vaccination in a population to reduce risk of disease in the entire population.

Reflection

In my exploration of bookmarking tools and the use of tagging, i realize that bookmarking only goes so far when using the browser. Having a cloud sync bookmarking tool allows me to retrieve and use bookmarks I add at home when I am away from home. This increase both convenience and access. From now on, I am able to add resources I find anywhere into my feedly reader, an online bookmarking service, or my snoop.it, if it is something that I feel I could use in one of my school projects. In the future, I can also revisit these bookmarks in looking back at the information that is used to inform my learning and projects. The curation tool is a great way to sum together different online information to share with others. However, I envision using the curation tools to sum together topics related to each one of the projects I have for class or work for myself to view and analyze. I can envision using these summary curated resources to locate, identify, and make sense of different social media information. I can also envision myself using the custom formatting tools to present this information to a group of people in a presentation. 

I would place these tools under the category of Organization or Curation tools. This is a new category I am making within my PLE diagram. My PLE is now changing dramatically! It seems that becoming a digital citizen and gaining digital literacy is a changing process. The tools we use to navigate the internet can change as much as the ways we perceive how we can interact with information online. It is no longer just about searching and using information. Now I have the tools to organize the information I find! I am so very happy! I do wonder how digital information could be best used as a tool to inform parents about vaccination during an implementation of a systematic vaccination program for the population. Instead of having paper cards for immunization records, perhaps the population needs a tool that organizes the vaccination information.

For example, each province has its own health insurance card. The health insurance card could be modified into a tool to collect and organize an individual's lifelong vaccination information that can be accessed with the card, or remotely like a cloud bookmarking service. Now wouldn't that be great! People will never have to spend time and money to "find" their vaccination information when they need it!