As Canada was busy earning gold medals and celebrating the end to an amazing 16 days of spirit and athleticism in Vancouver for the Winter Olympics, the Youth Voices Research Group team was busy enlisting the talents of youth in Toronto and Thunder Bay to serve as research consultants and social media innovators as part of the Access Project. The Access Project is looking at the twin issues of access to cigarettes and access to smoking cessation options for youth and young adults.

How do you capture meaningful data using social media?

This question has been on my mind a lot since we launched the Access Project. As you can see in the attached photo, I took some time out the other day to jot down some ideas on a whiteboard in an attempt to better understand where all of our data will be coming from and how to piece it together in a way that will make sense and tell a coherent story about the process and outcomes of the project.

Youth Voices Research Group is pleased to announce that the launch of the CoNEKTR (Complexity, Networks, EHealth, Knowledge Translation Research) lunch-and-learn event this Thursday February 11, 2010 from 12-1pm in Room 574, Health Sciences Building, University of Toronto.

The Youth Voices Research Group has been awarded a grant from the Ontario Ministry of Health Promotion to explore the interconnection between the availability of cigarettes and access to smoking cessation treatment in Ontario.

The 'ACCESS PROJECT' will connect youth using social media tools and technologies in order to learn more about the relationship between access to cheap (and illegal) cigarettes and prevalence in Ontario. The project explores issues of access to:

• Smoking cessation options for youth
• Cigarettes
• Knowledge
• New ideas and social innovations

It is with great pleasure that we announce that Dr. Cameron Norman has been awarded the Dalla Lana School of Public Health Robin Badgley Teaching Excellence Award!

Youth Voices Research Group is the leading collaboratory within a larger family of projects called CoNEKTR, which stands for Complexity, Networks, EHealth, Knowledge Translation, Research. Until this year, CoNEKTR functioned quietly as a collection of projects that Cameron Norman either led or served as a collaborating investigator on, but didn't serve much more than an organizing term.

It's a special day for us at the Youth Voices Research Group. After spending so much time helping others improve their communications with the public and various audiences we've decided to shine our gaze upon ourselves and made the big leap to improve our website. The new look brings with it inspiration and a renewed commitment to sharing what we learn when we learn it.

February 9, 2010
Youth Voices Research Group is pleased to announce that the launch of the CoNEKTR (Complexity, Networks, EHealth, Knowledge Translation Research) lunch-and-learn event this Thursday February 11, 2010 from 12-1pm in Room 574, Health Sciences Building, University of Toronto. http://youthvoices.ca/node/80

February 2, 2010

Cameron Norman, Youth Voices' principal investigator, will be speaking to the U.S. Institute of Medicine's Workshop on Health Literacy, eHealth, and Communication on March 17th in Washington, DC. The presentation will focus on the concept of eHealth literacy and its role in supporting health consumers in using the Internet for health. The work builds on the work that he and Harvey Skinner did on developing the eHealth concept and the eHealth literacy scale (eHEALS), which is currently in use in over 10 countries throughout the world.

Cameron Norman's work on the development of a measure of consumer confidence and skill in using the Internet for health (with Harvey Skinner) has been recognized by the International Medical Informatics Association as a Best Paper of the Year. The paper, eHEALS: The eHealth Literacy Scale, was originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (2006, v.4, e27) (see: http://www.jmir.org/2006/4/e27) and has been included in the 2008 IMIA Yearbook along with other notable papers deemed to have had high impact on the field of medical and health informatics over the past year.