Biology Reference
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communication technology and how “recommending to the sender the
optimal amount of context information in the message” can be achieved.
Moreover, Habermas (1998) defines communicative action as “the interaction
of at least two subjects capable of speech and action who establish inter-
personal relationships. The actors seek to reach an understanding about the
action situation and their plans of action in order to coordinate their action
by way of agreement” (Te'eni 2001; Habermas 1984).
Reaching our targeted audience of community responders who have lim-
ited ICT resources, the platform and the resources needed to run the training
application were also a consideration. Recognizing other software applica-
tions may provide a level of sophistication and savvy a esthetics greater than
PHP/HTML, the unknowns and lack of ICT resources for many of our study
participants would be compromised, increasing the risk of problems during
the study while participating from a remote location. Post-study statistics and
system log files, also confirmed that the application design did accomodate the
participant ICT resources. The findings reflect that study participants did not
encounter any performance issues or interface issues. The study participants
were located in five states and two countries with participation from rural,
suburban, and urban areas.
To initiate the training, one continuous crisis scenario was introduced. As
the crisis scenario unfolded, the participant was prompted to respond to a
task (request for information). The crisis scenario was designed for the role of
a community volunteer who has been requested to respond in an early storm
warning. A series of five episodes (six tasks) were introduced. Responder
pretraining assessment measures serve as a baseline before training is intro-
duced and the focus of our discussion. Two episodes with three tasks are
performed before training is introduced as a way to obtain a pretraining
baseline communication exchange message and capture three task responses.
Three short training modules with associated communication episodes and
tasks are then introduced. This one-to-one relationship of task prompt type
with an associated episode and tasks allows for the task prompt type to par-
allel the speech act invoking the SMS text message response. To conclude the
training session, posttraining assessment measures are collected. Moreover,
pretraining and posttraining tasks have parallel task prompts (Figure 7.1).
7.4.1 Web-based application Participant role
The Web-based training application that was field tested leverages Searle's
Speech Act Theory, and Ruth and Murphy's Writing Task Assessment Model
to obtain written SMS text message responses that can be objectively assessed
based on the 160 character per text-message exchange limit. Figure 7.2 depicts
the role of the study participant as an action team volunteer where the action
team coordinator is a simulated role.
The community responder role (community volunteer), which feeds the
public health system, is the focus of this research. The community responder
