Kestrell

The healthcare policy advocacy group that I participate in had a fascinating speaker this week: Richard Antonelli, who is currently working out of BOston Children's Hospital, and is a researcher for developing metrics that can be used to measure care coordination and care integration, which is a huge, complex, confusing but incredibly vital issue in developing person-centered healthcare policy. You can learn more about what he does here
http://www.nhpf.org/speakerbio_richardantonelli

During a different presentation, I brough up the issue of hearing other consumer express confusion about the different phrases that are used: "care coordinator," "care manager," and one geographically-specific healthcare program that coined the phrase "care partner." At the same time, many of the consumers are using phrases such as "case worker," to refer to their contact person at the health insurance program, which suggests that they are still unclear that this is using a different model than the social welfare system, and this model gives them more agency over making choices.

Bottom line: I get to continue the conversation with someone at the health plan who wants to get a better grasp on what consumers are confused about. Heck, I've been doing this for a couple years now and I'm still confused How much of the word choice is about creating a different and (implied) improved model of delivering health care, and how much is branding to make your plan appear to be different than the others? This is where the intersection of disability advocacy, media studies, and semiotics has brought me: it's an interesting crossroads, but you have to be careful around such trivium.

Also spent huge amounts of time this week learning to use VoiceOver and Google Classroom--I'm still trying to figure out how to move files from Google Classroom to Google Drive (I keep hearing that it's supposed to be automatic, but that appears to be a lie, er, misconception), and NVDA. NVDA is just different enough from Jaws to be tricky, and I haven't figured out why I keep hearing so much of the formatting and field codes (I really do not need to hear about every carriage return, or every cell location of an object in a table).

Oh! And Alexx and I finished watching Mike Flanagan's "The Haunting of Bly Manor," and it was really wonderful, perfectly splendid! (such an innocuous term, and yet, now, so creepy...) Mike Flanagan is a director with the soul of a bibliophile: I am in awe of how much Henry James he must have read to create this series. I'm almost tempted to go back and read the stories Flanagan references in his series, but then I remember how annoying James can be.

Okay, I'm off to risk having my brain explode and do a bit more Voiceover review before lunchtime.

It's not unusual for people to apologize for finding themselves using gestures while talking to me, although I always assure them that, being Italian, I get it.

Here is an article that explores the theory that gestures and other body movements are an integral part of learning language itself, and that making related gestures can improve language learning
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-the-brain-links-gestures-perception-and-meaning-20190325/

I've been enjoying Alexx's descriptions of signs he sees, but I really wish there was a Website where someone collected and captioned the best signs.
Yeah! "the semiotics of protest signs" --someone needs to do this as a thesis!

For now, could I ask people to caption the signs in this article?
https://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/not-usually-a-sign-guy-but-geez?utm_term=.pn8W4qv4zE#.oc24M6jMxW

I would also be interested in people leaving comments regarding their favorite signs.