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 months, we have focused on prototyping systems for health education. Examples include:

Disabled Village Children prototype

Examples include:

• a A prototype of Hesperian's Hesperian 's book - Disabled Village Children book .
  • This was converted into a wiki that allows regional experts to add local information
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• A fielded ServiceLink system to support a physical therapy clinic
• supporting the Support of the Bangladesh Virtual Classroom project where students view lessons by 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 underserved under served communities. Please see http://academy.unamesa.org/ for some first thoughts on tackling this challenge through a kind 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 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.

Mobile Research and Education (MORE) project

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...

SharedRecords infrastructure and ServiceLink project

Lead associate: Jon Jackson

TiddlyWiki core and community

Lead associate: Martin Budden

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
• 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