A bunch of updates since the last mail to dsh-hubs@googlegroups.


1. Digital Polyclinic.

For those who have joined the mailing list recently, Digital
Polyclinic is a spin-off of DSH for disseminating health-related
information in villages.  Anna, one of our "star interns" was the one
spear-heading it last year; and now she's back!

She's off to a quick start this time.  We have struck up a partnership
with a new hospital and are starting to film open-air info sessions in
villages conducted by doctors from the hospital.  Additionally,
Urvashi organized a meeting attended by parents of Study Hall School
children who are doctors.  People were enthusiastic.  The first
filming session with the parent doctors will start this Friday and
will be conducted in front of Prerna children.

These DPC efforts will blend with the core education DSH activities in
several ways.  (1) Some of the content will be played to both older
school children and parents.  (2) We will leverage the same equipment
that we have already placed in schools for the same DPC activities.
This is also part of the effort of getting community involvement and
parent involvement in schools.  (3) Some of the new experimental
technical work will be shared between DSH and DPC.  For example, an
Asterisk-based phone system, which we will briefly mention below.

Some selected discussions on this:
http://dsh.cs.washington.edu:8000/Projects/54/05330/
http://dsh.cs.washington.edu:8000/Projects/54/05362/



2. "Voice social network" for teachers.

As said in an earlier post, we are increasingly recognizing that we
need to do a lot more than putting the content in schools and telling
local teachers to use it.  One important aspect that we feel that we
need to work on is to build a sense of community among all the
participating teachers.  So they can receive feedback, encouragement,
and share experiences with everyone else in the "network," so that
people know that when they do well, there's a larger world out there
that cares about their progress.  This could potentially be an
important mechanism to keep participants motivated, and to help keep
us more closely informed about developments at all schools, and more
promptly fix problems when they occur.

Sumeet has been building a voice system based on the open-source
Asterisk hardware and software framework.  Perhaps a most
straightforward analogy of this is a "voice mailing list."  It not
only allows us, staff at the hub, to more easily broadcast messages to
our recipient teachers, but also allows geographically dispersed
recipient teachers' voices to be heard by each other.  For starters,
we're acting as "mailing list moderators".

Recently, we had a recipient teacher workshop.  One of the topics
covered during the workshop is the phone system.  Since everyone
generally agreed that the workshop was a very useful place for
teachers to talk to each other and learn from others' experiences, the
idea is that the voice system would become a natural extension of the
workshop.

We had fears that the concept might be a bit difficult for people to
understand, but surprisingly enough, from the feedback we received, it
seemed people pretty clearly understood how this was more powerful
than regular phones and were enthusiastic.

The system is starting to operate only recently.  We will continue to
work on schemes of useful activities that we can plan on the voice
system to improve work at our schools.  We will keep the list posted
on the developments.  If you have thoughts and ideas on how to make
this work better, please let us know.

A similar system will be put up for Digital Polyclinic, so that the
villagers (probably through our mediators) will be able to talk back
and leave queries.  (One may think of this as the human health
equivalent of the well-received agricultural LifeLines system.)  The
intent is not to use the voice system to do actual "doctoring," but to
use it as an additional channel of information exchange between us,
the doctors in the system, and the villagers.  For example, some of
the queries might be addressed by the production of more DPC videos;
some of the queries may generate replies delivered through a voice
mailing list; some of the queries will be addressed by physical visits
("camps").

some discussions:
http://groups.google.com/group/dsh-discuss/browse_thread/thread/dd082e2ac6564dc9



3. DSH-Pakistan.

If all goes well, DSH-Pakistan is finally scheduled to kick off on 3/10!

http://groups.google.com/group/dsh_pakistan



4. Preparation for a 12-school evaluation.

This is funded by NSF and University of Washington.  People from the
Education School of UW will be involved.  Richard just came to visit
the 12 government schools that will participate in this study.
Richard's reports on the visits:

http://groups.google.com/group/dsh-discuss/browse_thread/thread/53f203849ad9fb46
http://groups.google.com/group/dsh-discuss/browse_thread/thread/a3caa95cc6261c7c
http://groups.google.com/group/dsh-discuss/browse_thread/thread/bb189d3cbd3130e5



5. Matt York and a purely solar-based solution for DSH.

I met Matt York during the Tech Awards 2008 trip.  He runs: http://www.ompt.org/

Matt and I have been talking about a purely solar-based solution for
DSH: replacing the 19in TV with a cellphone-sized "pico projector"
that costs $290 and burns less than 10w, among other things.  Matt
will be in Lucknow in a few days to help put this together and test
it.

A pure solar-based solution is important for us: (1) There are plenty
of places that are beyond the flaky grid.  We have been using a diesel
generator at some location, but there are problems: diesel of course
costs money; it could be mis-used for non-school purposes; and the
smallest generator typically generates much more power than we need so
if you don't want to waste the power, you want to buy a lot of
expensive batteries...  (2) A portable solution for purposes like a
DPC van could use something lighter than the huge batteries Anna has
been carrying.

http://groups.google.com/group/dsh-discuss/browse_thread/thread/ea4e73607d30fc0/
http://groups.google.com/group/dsh-discuss/browse_thread/thread/9c4013901e85b5a2/



6. More people coming.

Let's welcome Athena Mak to cow town!

I met Athena also on the Tech Awards 2008 trip.  Athena has an
undergrad and master's degree from Stanford (with no less than a 4.0
GPA).  Before this, she was working as a consultant.  Last year, she
volunteered in Tamil Nadu as an English teacher.  She wants to do
something for education and crazy and DSH seems to fit the bill on the
crazy front!  She will be only the second Chinese person within a
radius of probably quite a few hundreds miles.  Unlike the first
Chinese person (yours truly), she actually likes India!  :)

In a few weeks, Elizabeth Alinikoff will be coming from University of
Washington.  And come this summer, we'll have a couple more IIT-CS
"interns,"  and one more student from IIM.  DSH-cow-town has not seen
this many students at once!



7. "Normal" DSH work continues.

Recording continues.  In a couple weeks, a new mirror of the Lucknow
database will be put on pnet.cs.washington.edu, thanks to a disk muled
back by Richard.  The number of objects in the database currently
stands at over 3200.

There's still a lot of classes/DVDs people are demanding.  The
following post mentions the class DVDs that our spoke teachers are
demanding at the workshop:

http://groups.google.com/group/dsh-discuss/browse_thread/thread/a94defa4a8c63608



8. DSH player device proposal.

We recently wrote a proposal proposing to replace the DVD players with
a network of hard drive-based players.  The proposal, as always, is a
long shot, but in case people have ideas or have ways of helping make
this happen...

http://dsh.cs.washington.edu/09aDSHdvr/
http://dsh.cs.washington.edu:8000/distance/09aDSHdvr.pdf

One of the candidate devices that we're working on is the "Tornado
M60" made by SysMaster, a company in Walnut Creek.  SysMaster has
generously donated a device to us for initial prototyping.



9. Misc.

For those who are joining the mailing list recently, the
"dsh-hubs@googlegroups" is a relatively sparsely trafficked list that
has hundreds of people on it.

If you are interested in hearing more babbling, along the line of the
discussion mails quoted above, then there're other lists.  There's a
lot more traffic there and there're fewer people there.

archive: http://groups.google.com/group/dsh-discuss
signup: https://lists.cs.princeton.edu/mailman/listinfo/studyhall-discuss

You can browse it, sign yourself up if you want, or ask me to do it for you.

For people who are already on the busier list, if you prefer to move
back to the quieter list, please let me know too.


Lastly, we are looking for "Motorola C350" phones to buy.  The ones
bought in the US, unfortunately, don't work.  (So eBay is out.)  It
seems that there's some signal issue (that I don't understand).  We
need to buy them in India.  These phones are kind of old and are not
easy to find.  They are being used on our Asterisk server.  If you
know where to get them, please let us know.  And if you happen to know
a way of getting the US version of the phone to work on the Indian
carriers, please let us know too.

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