A Course on Emergency Management and Technology - Readings, Multimedia Content, and Resources of Interest

Syllabus Next!

This article outlines readings, multimedia content, and resources of interest for a course called, “Technology and Disaster.”

In the previous articles attached to this project, I explore the philosophical underpinnings of why this course is necessary. Those articles can be found here:

1. A Course on Emergency Management and Technology: Getting Started.
2. A Course on Emergency Management and Technology: Foundations to Consider.
3. A Course on Emergency Management and Technology: Goals and a Starting on Structure.

Much of the background for this course is related to providing some exposure for EM students to technology and technology students to where and how EM operates.

The goal of this exposure is to:

1. Explore integration in EM in order to provide some tools for new entrants to the field a much needed exposure to alternative ways of seeing the world.
2. Show tech students the reality of tech in the wild in that the history, development, and spread of technology is not always homogeneous, even, or total.

I set out goals and topics related to those items. These goals are meant to provide a way for students and other faculty who are not me to know where they are supposed to end up. This will hopefully provide a useful context for why the course topics are the way that they are.

The goals of the course are:

1. Demonstrate an understanding of designing technologies to be used in low-tech or no-tech environments.
2. Investigate the current technological capabilities of emergency management in comparison with the technological capabilities of the everyday citizen.
3. Identify problems in emergency management through that investigation that could be solved.
4. Formulate potential solutions using appropriate theories, data sources, and methods.
5. Apply an understanding of low-tech / no-tech environments to your solution.
6. Justify those solutions using appropriate theories, data sources, and methods.
7. Demonstrate professional and ethical responsibility by including intended and unintended consequences of that solution.
8. Synthesize knowledge and insight gained by speaking to practitioners to better understand and improve those solutions.
9. Work in teams to overcome problems that arise in multi-disciplinary work.
10. Translate complex terminologies, technologies, and solutions in order to communicate effectively across practice and academic domains through written reports, oral presentations and discussion.

The topic outline at the moment is:

1. The state of things — 2 weeks of onboarding.
2. Introduction to potential projects — 1 week
3. Technology deprecation and the determinist mindset — 1 week
4. Stakeholder discussions — 1–2 weeks.

This would leave around 10 weeks of time for development and work in addition to the 2–3 the students would have at the onset.

Along the way, lectures and discussions around miscellaneous topics will attempt to provide some guidance and room for thought for the students to pursue. Some of those topics will include work i’ve been doing in EM and Tech integration:

• Verification Pause — the pause to wait and verify disasters are indeed heading your way before taking action.
• Race, gender, ethnicity, and other things we do not notice and why.
• Current models, expectations, consequences, and problems around resilience, risk, and equity.
• The gap between practice and research and its impact on seeing your work realized.
• Funding gaps among and between private, public, NGO, local, state, federal, and tribal EM spaces and its impact on tech integration.

In tandem with these goals and outline was a variety of metrics that could be used to understand how students are comprehending the course. Many of these metrics are tied to projects that are provided by stakeholders in the Omaha metro region or FEMA Region 7 more generally.

In this article, I will set out readings, multimedia content, and other resources that students will be asked to read, watch, or know about.

The thing I am concerned about is overwhelming students. With the addition of a massive, team-based project for class, the thought of reading and discussing things is itself perhaps a step too far. Yet, the need to remind students about the reality they need to maintain for their projects to work is very important.

The importance is not simply because I want students to finish the course, but that I want students to be able to put these projects on their resume, to be proud of them, and for the work to find its way into practice at some point.

So there is a list of readings that i’m interested in showing students as well as movies and other portions of pop culture that can help convey a spirit of things.

The resources are labeled below:

Resources

Short articles

For these, I wanted to get a lot of bang for as few bucks as possible. While they may change, I thought i’d go with Palen and Anderson’s fantastic piece on how Crisis Informatics has been failing. It is a great piece to drive home the difficulty of the space. Next, the RAND report will hopefully force them to consider equity whereas the OIG report will help outline more plainly the reasons why the lack of tech is so damaging.

• Palen and Anderson — New Data for Extraordinary Times
• RAND Report — A Scoping Literature Review on Indicators and Metrics for Assessing Racial Equity in Disaster Preparation, Response, and Recovery
• FEMA’s Longstanding IT Deficiencies

Journal Articles

As with the above, I wanted example papers. The first is policy-driven. What stops EM folks from using tech? Why? Next, emergent groups. Reddit gets involved every disaster. What good can they do and whats their relationship with EM? Finally, I wanted to outline a design fiction for the students in case their idea begins to fall by the wayside. There are ways to get at tech ideas without building.

• Barriers to Use of Social Media by Emergency Managers
• The symbiotic relationship of crisis response professionals and enthusiasts as demonstrated by reddit’s user-interface over time
• Patent Application for NEXTGEN Flood Based Early Warning System

Multimedia

These are all about representation. Shin Godzilla is perhaps the best movie to represent an emergency operations center, the politics of disaster, and barriers to communication that i’ve ever seen. It should be essential viewing for all EM interested people. Next, there is a brief documentary on the floods of Nebraska. It is a great piece for outlining the lack of tech but also how hard it would be to get it in there. Finally, I think I might create a playlist of introductory videos of existing tech in EM for students to see what they’re up against.

• Shin Godzilla
• And the Floods Came
• Playlist of Intro videos from WebEOC and other EM software.

Other Resources

Other resources are just that. IS courses through EMI, CE courses through TEEX, and perhaps some exercises from archive to show how EM personnel are trained. Additionally, i’d like to expose the students to policy documents and SOPs with additional guidance from the FEMA Acronyms, Abbreviations & Terms (FAAT) List. EM is filled with acronyms and procedures beyond any reasonable person’s desire. As such, it’s good to get into them.

• ICS Courses
• Policy Guidance
• COVID
• Social Media Threads
• Core Competencies
• Higher Ed White Papers

I guess it’s finally time to write a syllabus.