A Course on Emergency Management and Technology - Getting Started

Parameters, Goals, and Outcomes

I’m finally digging in to developing a course around emergency management and technology. It factors in to some work i’ve been doing over the pandemic about science and technology integration but is additionally something that has been part and parcel of my research life since I graduated in 2018. I have constantly found myself thinking about this quote from an article in Science:

In principle, social science should figure strongly in social media disaster research. Social science research recognizes often ignored, but critical, distinctions between human behaviors that result from endogenous hazards that can be captured (e.g., crime-based events) versus exogenous hazards that cannot (e.g., weather events that give rise to natural disasters) (5). In social media research, these differences are often flattened, even though they lead to different interpretations and outcomes. Marginalization of these critical fields in data science is worrisome: inclusion of social science would allow for more robust computational social science (8).

Because while social science and data science need to work together, and while it is important to foster more fidelity within the analysis of not only social media data, but data in general, it is equally, if not more important to foster buy-in from existing EM practice. To do that, the tech sector and tech academia needs to do something it is not great at: provide easily accessible technologies that work without training, upkeep, or dependencies. And these need to be provided while focusing on fostering a world within which EM can gain new tools, knowledge, and techniques that exist within computation.

When I decided to build this first course (of however many there needs to be for a minor / certificate), I had 4 goals:

1. The course needs to be future facing in that it should show the current state of EM, the near future, and where EM could go.
2. Non-deterministic in that it needs to be practically guided by understanding the domain first and then searching for ways to increase either the safety/resiliency of residents in an area or the safety and effectiveness of EM personnel.
3. Public-facing in that it is meant to help provide EM agencies and departments in or near Nebraska (with exceptions to federal or tribal needs) with practical problems they actually want help with.
4. Integrate accessibility issues with EM concerns of resiliency in that planning should begin with access, not shoehorn it in.

Many of these goals are the result of being faculty in a technology school. We tend to be really short-sighted when it comes to integrating technology with existing practice to the point of never actually communicating or asking the domain what it wants.

The result here is then that I want students to leave this course understanding that:

• Technology isn’t an answer to everything.
• Technology often is a cause of disaster or often makes them worse.
• We often abhor old technology yet often also miss that that “old” technology could have a fantastic use.
• Accessibility issues persist for the same reasons as socio-economic ones.

And this is important because the course will be targeted at:

1. College of Information Science and Technology students seeking to start a career in technical fields.
2. College of Public Health / Department of Emergency Management students who want to start or further a career in EM.

So right off the bat, the most difficult part of this course will be to make it accessible for both EM students who traditionally don’t receive any programming or computational training with Tech students who are usually hyper-focused on tools and don’t receive any knowledge or training of specific domains.

These articles will help me organize my thoughts while also providing some guidance for an approach to technology for emergency management for academics, technology developers, and interested entrepreneurs.

I am a researcher of the socio-technical inside of a College of Information Science and Technology but primarily focus on older, more practical technologies. In general, I mostly dislike the computer, the internet, and most of all, social media. It should be no surprise then that these are all things that are front and center in my work as an academic.

Much of my career — as it is shaping out to be — focuses on emergency management, integration of science and technology with emergency management, and less directly, games, simulations, role-playing, computer science integration, and management. Taken together, this is an holistic approach to understanding how to foster technology usage in domains that have traditionally eschewed information communication technology.

At this point in my career, I am beginning to move some pieces around in order to take the ideas my work has generated and place them first in the classroom, and then later in training courses, continuing ed, and other ways that emergency management personnel tend to learn things.

As a kid in a working class family, the idea of being educated, having a PhD, and using my understanding of the world to influence others was probably about as foreign and suspect an outcome as possible. It is incredible just how much this part of my life has shaped me, my work, and the discomfort of being in higher education.

Much of where i’m from has manifested in my work. In my early years in Sociology, I focused on white nationalism and racism. This early focus on gender, race, and ethnicity, has shaped much of my work as I moved into information systems for crisis response and management as well as that of emergency management more generally.

I tend to see in the emergency management spaces, my dad and my brother. They work, have worked, or have retired from emergency services, firefighting, nursing, and hospital maintenance. As a result, when I begin a research project in a domain that touches on theirs, I spend some time thinking about what sorts of things those two figures would say to new technologies.

This is especially pertinent when some of my new colleagues offer python scripts, complex dependency pipelines, and closed / black-boxed algorithms that are meant to scrape, analyze, and produce insights of a domain that aren’t sought, asked for, or usually even wanted.

And so I find myself at the start of a new project related to developing a course surrounding “Technology and Disaster.”

Over the next few weeks, i’m hoping to polish a syllabi and course plan. At the moment, all I really have to go on is a description from a grant proposal I sent in.

That proposal stated that students in this course would:

get exposed to how technology has factored in to or been a cause of crises over the past 20 years. Students will additionally be exposed to how technology can be used to increase resilience to disaster events, aid in maintaining business continuity, and propose ways for businesses to train employees for the unpredictable and unprecedented.

But I feel like this description is more for a survey course and it was originally written before the Pandemic. This course is more meant to help provide new EM degree holders with fresh ideas and skills to head into the field with and for EM to get on the radar of developers who are more practically oriented.

Outcomes

Typically, we begin developing a course around where we want students to go. This means learning outcomes are the end that is the beginning. The proposal noted that in this course, students will learn to:

• Understand the current state of technology use in em.
• Deploy upstream thinking that can be reinforced and monitored with different kinds of data.
• Articulate how different kinds of technologies could or could not help with different types of disaster events.
• Describe how deploying technology without upstream thinking could impact kinds of populations, agencies, and companies within a geographic region.
• Use information technology to help prepare continuity plans for different kinds of disaster events.
• train others about how to use information technology during different kinds of disaster events.
• identify methods of communication available through information technology and how to use them in the midst of a disaster event.

All of the above probably needs to be reworked.