Author: Neil Ballantyne

Expatriate Scot working as a senior lecturer in social work at the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand.

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.…

SWSD16

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…

People and technologies

Making sense of our tangled sociotechnical world.

In this blog post, Neil Ballantyne 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. I’d like you to join me in a thought experiment. Let’s imagine that you wake up one morning to discover that something very peculiar has occurred. All human technologies…

The teleherence project.

In this blog post, Dick Schoech 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. The paper describes the 5 year development and testing of a web-phone system that delivers a series of voice or text messages as well as questions that require…

On visiting infoxchange and making connections.

[avatar user=”Gareth Morgan” align=”left”]Gareth Morgan husITa Board Member[/avatar] Some of the things that the technological developments of the last decades are meant to have achieved are to remove the limitations of distance, make it easy to find out what’s been done elsewhere and share knowledge and experience. Why therefore did people from all over the world make their way to…

Hong Kong Democracy Demonstration

The battle for democracy: on the streets and in cyberspace

Hong Kong might seem an unlikely setting for popular democratic struggle. Yet on the 1st of July 2014, in the greatest public demonstration since the 2003 rally to mark the anniversary of Hong Kong’s return its motherland, over half a million people took to the streets. Among the many slogans and appeals, two stood out. Firstly, down with the Chief Executive. The…

Caravan Studios wins husITa best human services app.

The husITa award for the best human services app goes to Caravan Studios (a division of TechSoup Global) for their app Range developed by Marnie Webb. Range is a free app for US youth under 18. Range uses geolocation to identify times and places for free meals when school is out during Summer. It seems shocking that any developed country would need such a service but they do. Congratulations to Marnie and to Caravan Studios for their innovative work in fighting child hunger.

Congratulations also to our runners up ucForward by Ferret Information Systems,  and SafeNight also by Caravan Studios. Thanks to everyone who submitted an entry for your interest, and for your fantastic work in continuing to develop innovative and exciting human service applications.

Thank you for Range Award from Caravan Studios on Vimeo.