http://dsh.cs.washington.edu:8000/Projects/StudyHall_Discuss/upload/070506-140348.cgi-lib.30187.1.spk_wkshp_IMG_6453.jpg

We just had a one-day spoke school workshop.  Thanks to the cow town
DSH staff and all the teachers, I think it was very well run.  It was
tightly packed with a lot of interesting discussions and Khomeini had
to shorten lunch and break slots to get the show fit in the deadline.
Here's some notes.


(1) Spoke school presentations.

We had a picture slideshow of each spoke school; so the other schools
get an idea of what their comrade schools look like and what they do.
(For the hub workshop we're planning, I suggest we do something
similar---each hub could bring a photo slideshow.)

With the backdrop of the slideshow, in the foreground, each school has
2-4 representatives talk about how DSH has worked in their school.
Both the good stuff plus the problems.

Due to my non-existent Hindi knowledge, I will have to wait for the
transcribed meeting notes to analyze the discussions more carefully :)

One thing I know we probably accomplished was to give recognition and
encouragement to the schools and teachers that have worked well.  This
is also likely to be a good forcing function to get the schools who
have not done so well to catch up without any explicit prodding from
us.

In general, there was a lot of excitement about what DSH could do.
For example, the SEWA leader wanted us to immediately expand to 10
SEWA centers inside cow town.

The thing that I thought we didn't do too well on was to have a
serious brainstorming about problems and their possible solutions.
Although each team was asked to talk about problems and they did, I
thought there might have been too much gushing positives.  This is
something that we'll have to do better on in the future I think.
(Khomeini thought that was a mis-perception due to my non-existent
Hindi :)  Maybe I should have learned some Hindi after all :)

People enthusiastically brought up a lot of potential spoke expansion
targets.  We might need to slow down a bit on that front.  We will,
however, at least bring up the pig town (Kanpur :) spokes that Salil
worked so hard to bring in, plus a few others.

The pig town folks volunteered to have their teachers study the
materials on their own before school starts in July.  We only gave
them the class 5 and 6 math and science DVDs---we're in the process of
redoing all the class 3-5 English discs so those could wait till we
finish the newer versions.  The primary materials, on EVS and social
studies, will start to be recorded only in July, and those will have
to be "pipelined" to the spokes as production happens.

Salil, it might help "your" school if the equipment for the spoke
arrives early so they could potentially do some studying on their own
before class starts.

Salil, I know you're organizing funding for the equipment of one pig
town spoke.  Some representative, whose name escaped me :) said they
would really like to bring up one other spoke, with potentially two
others.  We told them that we would discuss with you about funding for
the extra spoke(s) :)


(2) Digital Green

As a prelude to some of the other stuff we wanted to talk about, I
gave a mini-presentation of DG.  We all thought the DG stuff went very
well :)  It gave people inspiration of a broader agenda based on the
same underlying infrastructure.


(3) Preliminary healthcare discussions

Khomeini invited four doctors, and the workshop was meant to be a
forum for an initial discussion on how DSH would proceed on a
healthcare spin-off.

I started the discussion with a brief analysis of what I learned in
China (with Khomeini's Hindi translation).  [A quick recap: (a)
distance medicine, conducted with broadband, practiced on a massive
scale, involving tens of thousands "spoke" hospitals; problem: no
training to expand the pool of "experts," bottleneck of good doctors,
ends up serving only the rich.  (b) separate paramedic training
program, fed by books, CDs, Internet, much poorer quality, no feedback
from "experts," not tied to practice.  (c) conclusion: distance
medicine without training a larger pool of paramedics doesn't work,
training without any meaningful feedback from experts or practice
doesn't work; so these two aspects need to be tied together.]

One of the doctors at the workshop has many decades of experience of
hardcore doctoring to the poor.  (She said her classmates from the
prestigious medical school, doctoring in the US and Europe these days,
thought she lost her mind.)  These days, she's starting a two-year
paramedic training school, recruiting students exclusively from the
poor.  This is a residential program.  After two years of schooling,
they get a gov-recognized certificate, which gives them a credible
employment track after graduation.  She also works with schools in
villages (vanilla schools, not medical programs).

At this point, it looks highly likely that this doctor's paramedic
training program is where we will start.  This is very preliminary and
the details remain to be worked out.  We need to visit her school
first.

In terms of exactly what DSH should "teach" in the healthcare field,
while everyone agreed that informational good practice should be done,
there was a spirited debate on whether we should attempt knowledge
"higher up," venturing into areas of knowledge that a paramedic would
use to help others.

On the one side, the village folks who spoke up, all thought this
should have been done yesterday!  On the other side, two of the
doctors expressed quite a bit of doubt.  Some of the example doubts:
(1) it's hard to teach the mass even the most pressing and simple
practices, like the need to get their kids vaccinated, so the idea of
teaching them something more advanced is unlikely to work out.  [At
the time, she probably didn't realize that the more "advanced"
training was meant to target selected paramedic trainees, not common
folks.]  (2) there's the issue of liability if we screw up.  [The
village folks brought up counter arguments such as: the docs with
credential nearby (which is still quite far away actually) won't help
them, and the doc who claims that he's about to get some degree, seems
more eager to help, but he gets stuff wrong all the time anyhow.]  I
was a bit surprised that Khomeini mounted a more spirited and more
forceful argument for the need of training paramedics than I could
have---remarkable considering how pigheaded I am in an argument :)

--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
http://dsh.cs.washington.edu

Studyhall-hub mailing list
dsh-hubs@googlegroups.com

To unsubscribe from this group, send email to dsh-hubs-unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/dsh-hubs

When replying to messages from this list, please consider changing the recipient address to studyhall-discuss@lists.cs.princeton.edu.
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

_______________________________________________
http://dsh.cs.washington.edu

Studyhall-discuss mailing list
Studyhall-discuss@lists.cs.princeton.edu
https://lists.cs.princeton.edu/mailman/listinfo/studyhall-discuss