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UnaMesa Association Update Mar 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. Examples include: - a prototype of
Hesperion's Hesperian's Disabled Village Children book converted into a wiki that allows regional experts to add critical local information - a fielded ServiceLink system to support a physical therapy clinic
- supporting the Bangladesh Virtual Classroom project where students view lessons by video and respond via SMS
Creating better IT for We're excited to begin working more closely with educators and caregivers over the next 6 months to support their learning and caring requires more than just technology. adoption of best practices. The far more difficult challenge lies combination of free information tools and shared, local knowledge may be the most effective way to create positive change in sharing the knowledge of how to use that technology to delivery the best possible care. To meet underserved communities. Please see http://academy.unamesa.org/ for some first thoughts on tackling this challenge UnaMesa is experimenting with a number of different community-based approaches. Inspired by the through a kind of Barefoot College of India, 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 believe that peers are the most effective teachers and that learning from each other is the best path to change. This is the approach that has worked very well with the TiddlyWiki community and many other online groups. During the next 6 months, we will be building upon these lessons to bring the same style of learning to a small group of community care providers. If successful, we will 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 more information on UnaMesa current projects and updates from 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. 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 all over the globe from including San Francisco, Boston, London, and Bangladesh. As a medical doctor who has run a nonprofit that runs schools in underserved 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. Lead associate: Saq Imtiaz We have been working closely with Prof. Islam 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... Lead associate: Jon Jackson Lead associate: Martin Budden References for learning more Outline Introduction - UnaMesa background, context, and summary of current status (GW) MORE project (SAQ) Bangladesh Virtual Classroom Workshop planning Educational Wikis Wikispaces integration work Disabled Village Children prototype ServiceLink project ServiceLink2 prototype deployment IT infrastructure for learning and caring TiddlyWiki.org 2.3 released New plugins Backup to SharedRecords SharedRecords Updated API New barcode and record broker functions Organization update
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