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Summary:

UnaMesa works with educators, caregivers, and other social service providers to create and deliver free software tools and web services that fit their work practices. In the last three months we have:

• Launched the Student Notebook pilot project in conjunction with Andrew Lister at Queens University
• Compiled lessons learned from the Virtual Interactive Classroom pilot and began planning to support other trials around the world as part of the MORE project
• Partnered with nonprofit publisher Hesperian to help them publish an updated and digital version of their "Where There Is No Doctor" health manual
• Planned the initial pilot version of the UnaMesa Academy to take place later this fall

Keep reading for details on these and other projects. Also, I would like to remind everyone that we hold weekly conference calls with our associates. These calls are open to your participation and transcripts of the calls appear each week in the Conference Calls section of our project wiki found at http://projects.unamesa.org/

Updates:

UnaMesa Academy
The UnaMesa Academy is a free training program that engages individual organizations or networks of organizations for customized technology trainings. Our goal is to help staff members of social organizations learn how digital tools can create better experiences for their clients and then to have them share that knowledge with others. Under the guidance of Paul Lamb and Heather Zenone, the pilot for the UnaMesa Academy has started taking shape and initial courses are expected to take place during the last two weeks of October in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Hesperian
We congratulate the non-profit publisher Hesperian on their well deserved recognition from the Clinton Global Health initiative. They have been awarded a $2.7 million grant by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to help update the “Where There Is No Doctor” health manual. As previously reported, UnaMesa has been engaged by Hesperian as one of their technology partners on this project and work is expected to commence during this quarter. Textbooks such as “Where There Is No Doctor” help empower communities in confronting death and disease. We look forward to working with Hesperian to increase its distribution and bring it into the 21st century by means of multimedia aspects and facilities for localizing and collaboratively updating.

MORE
Following the success of the Virtual Interactive Classroom project in Bangladesh, educational institutions from Ghana, Mongolia and South Africa have expressed an interest in adopting the same techniques. We are continuing to work with Professor Islam to explore the development of a service that would allow interested parties to easily deploy VIC's in their own environments. We've also been looking at additional ways to support mobile education and data gathering in conjunction with members of the OpenRosa project, MobileActive.org, and Digital ICS.
Open Rosa is a consortium dedicated to developing data gathering tools for mobile phones, Mobile Active supports the development of mobile technologies for social impact, and Digital ICS is a mobile phone-based tool dedicated to the needs of Organic and Fair Trade growers. Note that Digital ICS is a follow up to the Origins project initiated by UnaMesa in 2006.

TiddlyWiki
A prototype of a student notebook and instructor's notebook, based on TiddlyWiki, was developed in consultation with Andrew Lister, assistant professor of Political Studies at Queens University. It is currently being trialed in one of his undergraduate classes which consists of over 250 students and has been met with considerable enthusiasm:

“I have to say that the instructor's notebook is fantastic. I type once to create my slides. I add private notes, if I have time - no more rifling through
stacks of paper from previous years trying to find out what I should be saying. I sync to the wiki, and the content is online for students to discuss, slide by slide. In class, I present and edit on the fly, if need be. If I do edit, the changes are sync'd to the wiki. Students add their own notes to their own notebooks. What a system!” -- Andrew Lister

Due to privacy concerns for the students involved we cannot share these instances of the notebooks, however, a public demo will be made available in the near future along with the ability for educators and students to generate their own copies.

Shared records:
UnaMesa is working with the National Health Services in Dumfries and Galloway (Scotland) to produce digital versions of their paper based assessment forms for their Falls Prevention program. The first phase will involve the use of customized TiddlyWiki notebooks as digital forms, and the second phase will involve a service to allow easy and secure sharing of records between health providers. This will complement other work being done by UnaMesa in the realm of sharing medical records and other forms, such as the ServiceLink project and OpenRosa.

This newsletter was prepared by Saq Imtiaz and Greg Wolff with input from all UnaMesa Associates.

See the UnaMesa Newsletters (http://www.projects.unamesa.org/Newsletters) for previous updates.