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UnaMesa Association Update March 2008

Summary

UnaMesa provides IT infrastructure for learning and caring. This means working with educators and caregivers to create and deliver free software tools and web services that fit their work practices. In the past 6 months, we have focused on prototyping systems for health education.

Disabled Village Children prototype

Examples include:

A prototype of Hesperian's book - Disabled Village Children.
- This was converted into a wiki that allows regional experts to add local information
A fielded ServiceLink system to support a physical therapy clinic, which allows easy sharing of electronic versions of records while maintaining the convenience and security of their existing paper-based processes
Support of the Bangladesh Virtual Classroom project where students view lessons via video and respond via SMS

We're excited to begin working more closely with educators and caregivers over the next 6 months in order to support their learning and adoption of best practices. The combination of free information tools and shared, local knowledge may be the most effective way to create positive change in under served communities. Please see http://academy.unamesa.org/ for some first thoughts on tackling this challenge through an approach similar to that of Barefoot College for staff members of social services. Criticisms, suggestions, and comments based on your experiences would be especially welcome during our planning discussions in the first two weeks of April. By working together, we hope to show that the right combination of technology and community support can overcome many of the barriers to delivering high-quality care.

Continue reading below for detailed updates from UnaMesa project leaders. Also, I would like to take a moment and recognize two UnaMesa Associates, Eric Shulman and Saq Imtiaz who recently received our first ever UnaMesa Service Awards. You will find details and organization updates at the end of this newsletter.

Mobile Research and Education (MORE) project

Lead associate: Saq Imtiaz

We have been working closely with Prof. Islam (formerly of BRAC University) and SoftEd on the Bangladesh Virtual Classroom project, a distance-learning English language course comprised of 26 lessons featuring interactivity features based on SMS responses. Recording of the videos has been completed and the first lesson will be broadcast by the Bangladesh Open University on April 4th. Initial surveys and small scale tests have shown the SMS interactivity to significantly and quantifiably increase the effectiveness of the education delivered. Our focus as UnaMesa is to support, learn from and document the work being done with the aim of developing this interactive pedagogical technique as a sustainable, scalable and universally transferable model for distance learning. Read more...

SharedRecords infrastructure and ServiceLink project

Lead associate: Jon Jackson

We have successfully integrated a web-application for practice management of physical therapy clinics with a Shared Records server. The Shared Records server provides a secure repository for all of the documents stored by the practice management software. In addition, Shared Records provides an easy to use infrastructure for storing and playback of videos captured by a physical therapist during a client's session. This allows the client to perform their exercises with better instruction, and provides the physical therapy clinic with a visible low-cost, value-add feature for their practice management software. As part of this project, several new components were added to the Share Records code base: fax interoperability, a name space server mapping names to individual Shared Records IDs, video playback, and improved logging and display of access to Shared Records.

TiddlyWiki core and community

Lead associate: Martin Budden
We have been working on the next TiddlyWiki release, version 2.3.1. This includes over 50 bug fixes and enhancements. The major enhancements are:

the ability to support "themes", so that the user can easily change the theme of their wiki and also so the it is easier to develop new themes.
an automated mechanism for updating your TiddlyWiki to the latest version

The community has done further work in creating translations of TiddlyWiki, including new translations into Indonesian, Latvian, Polish and Swedish and updates of the Chinese and Japanese translations.

TiddlyWiki and Wikispaces integration

We have done quite a bit of work to enable TiddlyWiki and Wikispaces interoperability. This has been primarily driven by the Disabled Village Children prototype. We now have the ability to convert HTML documents and import them into Wikispaces and/or TiddlyWiki so that they can be edited and updated.

References for learning more

The Disabled Village Children prototype
The MORE project support for the Bangladesh Virtual Classroom project
The ServiceLink project and Shared Records web service
TiddlyWiki community and use in education
The Barefoot College

Organization updates

Recognized Eric Shulman and Saq Imtiaz with the first and second UnaMesa Service Awards respectively
- I would like to take a moment and recognize two UnaMesa Associates, Eric Shulman and Saq Imtiaz who recently received our first ever UnaMesa Service Awards. Eric has been a tireless supporter of the TiddlyWiki community. Over the past year, Eric has truly served the community by responding to thousands of questions on the newsgroups. You can always count on Eric's answers to be informative and respectful.
- In the six months since Saq started working with UnaMesa, he has pulled together projects involving people from all over the globe including San Francisco, Boston, London, and Bangladesh. As a medical doctor who has run a non-profit that runs schools in under-served regions, Saq always makes sure to include and honor everyone's contribution. If you've received help from Eric or Saq, please take a moment to join us in gratitude for their contributions.
added Yousuf Islam, former dean of BRAC University computer science department, as an associate on paid retainer
Saq Imtiaz replaced Priya Raghavan as project coordinator for the MORE project (Priya is pursuing other interests)
Updated our web site and began using Wikispaces for UnaMesa projects to improve ease of use and community participation
Added articles of incorporation, by-laws, financial statements and other official documents to the public site