[OLPC library] Animals and Health

[Chris Leonard]

Seth,

I welcome any input, on or off-list and thanks for the encouragement.
I'm reasonably tech-savvy for someone trained as a molecular
biologist, but I must admit being a wiki-newbie, so I would certainly
encourage you or anyone else to jump right in and edit the Animal
health pages for content, structure or style.

I've started by trying to articulate the idea and it's potential and
the result is admittedly too wordy and a little bit
stream-of-consciousness.  I've made some further edits along the lines
of your suggestion.  If it will make it easier for others to jump in
and make contributions to this effort, I'm entirely in favor of any
edits that the list would like to make to the wiki.  There is far too
much for one person to do, particularly this volunteer.  I was
intrigued by Javier's mention of a large agriculture-related library
relevant to the Andean region and it would be great if some of that
material could be incorporated into the Animal health content
development effort.

While I'm writing to the list, I'd like to mention that I've been
struggling a bit with a concept that is not really laid out on the
OLPC wiki to any great extent.  While Localization and Internalization
are concepts that are clearly spelled out, they are focused on
language and re-use of code and content.  There is a somewhat related
concept (let's call it Regionalization) that I have not seen not
clearly discussed on the OLPC wiki.  While a univeral and localized
core of content in humanities and primary school subjects (math,
geography, etc.) can be expected to be valuable without regard to the
original language or homeland of the author/developer; certain types
of health-specific content (in particular, locally relevant public
health messages) will only be of value if developed with a specific
region's challenges in mind, thus Regionalization.

For example, hand-washing, clean water, proper food handling
practices, and even mosquito netting and/or eradication are in essence
universally useful and important public health messages to deliver;
but knowing that kissing bugs transmit Chagas disease is really only
directly relevant to people in South America (Triatoma infestans) or
Central America ((Rhodnius prolixus) and knowing that black flies
(Simulium damnosum) transmit river blindness is only meaningful in
Africa.  These latter are examples of content that needs to be
regionally-focused (and ideally labeled as such) so that it can be
easily found and retrieved by local educators or organized for a push
into a localized school-server-based repository.

I touch on this idea a little bit on the Animal health page when I
mention "special localization" issues, but I think it may have a
larger scope as an issue (at least in the context of public health
messages) and I'd welcome discussion of how best to address this in
the content development process (create new categories or other
metadata tagging?).

Another observation is that although I have noticed that many ideas on
the health portions of the wiki fall under the umbrella of public
health and a number of the contributors have public health
backgrounds, the term "public health" is not explicitly mentioned as
an area of focus.

Chris Leonard
cjlhomaddress at gmail.com


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---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Seth Woodworth <seth at isforinsects.com>
Date: Mar 10, 2008 9:49 AM
Subject: Re: [Health] Animals and Health


Allow me to reply to this on-list.

I think that this is a great idea, and a logical extension to our
current projects.  I've made it a sub-section under content on the
main page.

I suggest that you work on putting an overview at [[animal health[[
that is shorter and provides an overview to your sub pages.