New media devices for participatory learning

Our work focuses on participatory learning, working with health related communications, training material and on developing Internet environments for these services. Our approach is to use use the strengths of participatory learning, supported by the use of community software, to compensate for the absence of a local physical guide or expert. We have worked with various organizations on platforms that provide e-training, advocacy, forums, wikis and social networking in an effort to take ICT solutions and services to organizations involved in social development. Our experience has been in understanding the information and dissemination needs, to organize knowledge bases, and help deploy them in contexts where it is not easy to find technically able people. This presentation will be about how a small set of tools that are available in the open source domain can be used and configured to setup "sophisticated environments" in health training and related contexts. Further more, we concentrate on Indian scenario to elaborate some of the details on how we have used these techniques in real world situations and needs. Our work includes, but is not limited to, participatory learning in HIV/AIDS, Palliative care, adolescent health and primary health care, specifically the preventive aspects of Public Health.