1. Seattle mirror updated.

The "most recently added" link shows a good eclectic collection of new
content---from DPC, Calcutta, etc:

http://pnet.cs.washington.edu/cgi-bin/search_su.py?sort_field=Upload_Time&sort_order=decreasing


Urvashi, Paul, and I visited Calcutta, Dhaka, and Bangalore (minus
Paul).  Here's a little trip report.


2. Calcutta.

http://dsh.cs.washington.edu:8000/distance/snaps/AA_Calcutta/

Day 1, we visited Paul's "community school," a school that Paul
started in his neighborhood for street children.    Ruma is the
teacher in charge and she's really great.  From 4:30pm to 7:30pm,
there are two Bengali classes and one Hindi class (for children from
Bihar).  The Bengali classes are being recorded.  This "community
school" model, as both content production and consumption locales, if
proven successful, might be one of the things we'd like to replicate
elsewhere in the future.

Day 2, we visited Loreto.  In the morning, we attended classes taught
by Soumitra (and recorded).  Soumitra is also a very good teacher.  We
were all very impressed by the apparently enormous amount of
preparation he invested for the recorded classes.  The children are
poor kids who also simultaneously attend government schools.  Among
the preparations Soumitra does, he makes a lot of carefully crafted
teaching aids.

Both Ruma's and Soumitra's lessons can be found in the latest pnet.cs updates.

In the afternoon of day 2, Urvashi conducted a mediation training
using Soumitra and other teachers' lessons for a roomful of teachers
from "centers" that are potential spokes.  This was apparently the
first time that Soumitra saw how his lessons were to be used and it
appeared to be quite an eye opener for him: among his duties, he does
a lot of teacher training at Loreto and he decided that this is *the*
way for him to try to do future trainings at Loreto.

We ended our day at Loreto discussing with Sister Cyril about plans of
the first batch of spoke schools.


3. Dhaka, Bangladesh.

http://dsh.cs.washington.edu:8000/distance/snaps/AC_Dhaka/

Yousuf and Zillur planned and organized a brilliant agenda to launch
DSH!   The core of the agenda is a workshop attended by potential
model teachers that may participate in filming.  They come from a
variety of schools and some from universities.

Day 1.  We played three model lessons almost in their entirety from
Lucknow and Calcutta.  (English by Bani, math by Utpal, and science by
Soumitra from Calcutta in Bengali.)  The video teachers, particularly
Bani and Utpal, are universally acclaimed :)   Beyond the applause,
the agenda was to get teachers to discuss what's good about these
guys, the principles underlying good classes, and how they might want
to learn from their styles.

Day 2. We talked about DSH in its bigger picture in the morning.  In
the afternoon, teachers are asked to develop example model lesson
plans and deliver the lessons in front of fellow teachers and have a
discussion on what's good or not so good about these lessons.
Yousuf's plan is that, in addition to using this as a training
exercise, we're also using this as an "audition."  At night, we set up
the DSH machines.

Day 3. We went to an NGO school identified by Yousuf as the filming
locale.  Personally, it was the little things that blew me away---for
example, Yousuf and Zillur had studied the Lucknow lessons and they
decided that the look and the environment of the filmed location
mattered and Prerna-Lucknow just looked good.  So they went as far as
having similar colorful round tables made and made sure their kids are
dressed in nice colorful uniforms!   It was an incredible amount of
scouting and preparation work that they did since our last visit and
they have busy day jobs!  :)   Kudos to Yousuf and Zillur and team!

So anyways, we filmed four demo lessons on that day.  All the workshop
attendees sat on the side of the classroom.  And in the afternoon,
snippets of the filmed lessons were immediately played back to all the
teachers and we had a discussion about these lessons.

In the evening, the "technical staff" talked about the technical pipeline.

Day 4. The teachers discussed and agreed on a preliminary lesson and
filming schedule.  People are very enthusiastic and I think the plan
is very ambitious :)  We'll see how well it pans out :)  The
"technical staff" continued talking shop into the evening.

In addition to serving as a platform of launching DSH, I personally
felt that this was a really well-organized way of doing teacher
training.  This is not abstract.  Instead, it's about (1) observing
real good teachers in action from the videos, in the context of
unrehearsed real-life lessons in their entireties, and (2) having
teachers work on lesson plans, trying them out in front of real kids,
and have the film played back immediately for constructive peer
criticism, and (3) doing everything in a productive group setting and
having lots of active discussions.


4. Bangalore.

Urvashi and I split our ways in Bangalore.  Urvashi went to talk to a
potential new hub school.  This is just a first visit and we'll
probably hear more about this in the future.  I went with Rikin to an
agricultural NGO called BAIF.  I was enormously impressed by BAIF.
One of the things they do is that they identify a number of poorest
families and work with them face-to-face on a "package" that lasts 3-4
years!  They give them some "stuff" in the form of, for example,
seeds, saplings, cattle, money, etc.  And work with them on how to
turn these modest investments (on the order of $500 for the entire
duration) into seeds for successful livelihood opportunities and
skills.  Rikin is going to work with them to develop a Digital Green
version of these skills, such as a meticulously detailed "syllabus" on
animal husbandry.   I've already typed a lot and I'm getting lazy so
this short blurb does not do justice to the tremendous work BAIF is
doing :)  BAIF also has a presence here in the north and we're hoping
to hook up with them and do the "Rikin-equivalent" work here as well.
Anna and Julia joined the Rikin fan club and followed him to their
"animator meeting" on a later day.


5. DPC.

http://dsh.cs.washington.edu:8000/distance/snaps/AB_DPC2/

Anna just finished the women's reproductive training course at the
second village.  Frankly, we thought the second village didn't work
out as well as the first one.  Will probably forward more of Anna's
thoughts a bit later.  We'll work on improvements.

We'll also take this opportunity to welcome Ronak to cow town!  Ronak
just graduated from Tufts with a B.A. in International Relations and
Biomedical Engineering, and he volunteered to come to cow town to work
on DPC.  In particular, Ronak is working on the patient record
database.  For starters, this is just for a single hospital (St.
Mary's).  Down the line, we want to turn this into a single coherent
(though distributed) patient database for poor folks, so that people
at any place (such as staff at outlying clinics of St. Mary's, other
similar hospitals, NGOs such as the one that Ronak worked before in
Assam, or even people in the US) can "tap into" the database and help.
 Think of it as the poor man's version of the Google Health system or
Microsoft's HealthVault, but I think it can have potentially very
different and profound implications.

Here's a little movie that Ronak made on what he did last year in Assam:

http://dsh.cs.washington.edu:8000/Projects/StudyHall_Discuss/upload/Assam.mov

Paul observed that cow town is turning into grad school---I haven't
had to deal with so many young punks since Princeton but this is so
much cooler! :)

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