Health content

  This page is part of the OLPC Health Project. Hardware | Software | Content | Health Jam

Welcome to the health content project. This page will hopefully give you enough information about the project so you can get started right away.

Goal

See Health Database to see our main project for Health Content and our eventual goal.

Books

• Hesperian books : see Adapting Hesperian Books. We are in the process of adapting the books by the Hesperian foundation into a format for the XO.

• Human Physiology : The wikibook project Human Physiology[1] is a good Health resource if not immediately applicable. Work is underway to cleanup, format and record an audio version.

Links

Links to useful sites and repositories: The health coordination team at Health Sciences Online have put together the following spreadsheets, categorized by url, description, audience and topic:

• File:Health-links-1.xls, File:Health-links-2.xls, File:Health-links-3.xls, File:Health-links-4.xls, File:Health-links-5.xls

Images

We are compiling images (photos and illustrations) to aid diagnosis and to assist training of health concepts and techniques. See Health Images for how you can get involved with this project.

Getting started

How to volunteer

1. Read this document, Poke around the site, see what is happening and what you are interested in.
2. [Learn how wikis work]
3. Take a look at the skills we need, as well as the jobs we need done.
4. Add your name as a link to the volunteers list.
5. Please put a bit of information about yourself on your user page. (user:yourname)
6. Sign up for our [list].
7. Contact the coordinator for the project you are interested in working on, or contact David Greisen if you are interested in starting/coordinating a new project.

What is needed

Skills

• public health experience in: Nigeria, Libya, Rwanda, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Thailand
• Write and speak any of the following languages: Portuguese, Spanish, French, Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, Kinyarwanda, Thai,
• Educational Writing
• Illustration, animation
• Game programming

Tasks

• *Module Coordinators* - general public health experience beneficial
• *Module Localizers* - public health experience in a target country or target language fluency beneficial
• *Content Creators* - all are welcome. If you don't have experience in public health, please coordinate with experienced volunteers
• *Content Editors* - these aren't so important at the moment, but later in the process - round about April - we will need lots of people focused on making the content into a focussed, coherent and polished whole.

Module (or Sub-module) Coordinator

As a Module Coordinator you get to plan your module, recruit submodule coordinators, guide content creators, and work with module localizers. Module Coordinators need public health experience, preferably in at least one of the target countries.

If you would like to become a module coordinator please contact David Greisen. If you would like to become a sub-module coordinator, please contact the module coordinator. Then on the [list of modules on the front page]place your name, with a link to your user-page, next to the name of the module you want to coordinate, and turn the name of the module into a link. For example the line: ** Vectors would become: ** [[Vectors]] - [[User:Davidgreisen|David Greisen]].

Next, outline your module on the new page you made a link to, create content, recruit volunteers to create even more content. If there are organizations you think might be willing to donate content, put it in the appropriate place on the front page, email David Greisen, and we'll see what we can do. Remember any donated content will have to conform to the OLPC requirements.

Project Overview

Health education is fundamentally different from most other learning that will happen on the laptop. In math science and other academic subjects, you don't want kids doing things by rote, you want them to fundamentally understand what they are doing and why before they start doing it or as they are doing it. In health education, children need healthy habits even before they have the capacity to fully understand why those habits are important. Additionally, an understanding of the health issues does not automatically lead to healthy habits - I know biologists who do not always wash their hands after using the restroom. Habits learned as young children are powerful. Habits learned as young children and subsequently reinforced through a thorough understanding of the underlying reasons are even more powerful. Health education that ignores either component is incomplete.