[IAEP] Fwd: Latin America Is Fertile With EduTech Experimentation

[Thomas Gilliard]

Interesting. FYI

Tom Gilliard


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	Latin America Is Fertile With EduTech Experimentation
Date: 	Thu, 21 Mar 2013 15:08:04 +0000
From: 	Educational Technology Debate <editors at edutechdebate.org>
To: 	satellit at bendbroadband.com



Educational Technology Debate


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Posted: 21 Mar 2013 06:31 AM PDT

OLPC in Uruguay

Hello, I’m Roxana Bassi <http://www.roxanabassi.com.ar/> and I’m now a 
co-editor at Educational Technology Debate.

*A bit about me*

Almost 30 years ago I connected to the prequel to the Internet, the 
BBSs, with a 300 bps modem and never disconnected. I grew up in 
Argentina, but have worked in four continents, the last six years mostly 
in Africa as Senior ICT Specialist of the Global e-Schools and 
Communities Initiative (GESCI <http://gesci.org/>).

Being an IT and Telecommunications engineer I consider myself a geek. 
But I don’t get as excited about new cool stuff as I get when I see 
people REALLY improving their lives thanks to technology. That has 
always been my objective from my very early days. As a logical 
consequence, my specialty is ICT for development, but I have spent most 
of my time working in IT in education.

Being a thorough project planner I love to work on technical areas like 
TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), large scale deployments of technology, 
technical support, and alternative energy sources, among others.

I have realized I am extremely diffident of new technologies, I trust 
more the old proven technologies than new ones. So I am the type that 
questions every new idea and asks for proof of results before I can 
really believe. Lately I have been enthusiastic about new areas that 
open education for everyone like MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses), 
while at the same time I am very concerned about the preservation of 
local languages and cultures in the new globalized Internet.

*The View From Latin America*

In these last years most of ICT4E effort – and funds – seem to be 
focused in Africa, probably because it contains many of the under 
developed countries of the world. But a lot of action is taking place in 
Latin America. Just consider Uruguay 
<https://edutechdebate.org/olpc-in-south-america/olpc-in-uruguay-impressions-of-plan-ceibal/> 
with its one-of-a-kind 1 laptop per child project REALLY deployed 
countrywide or Peru with the second largest OLPC deployment 
<https://edutechdebate.org/archive/olpc-in-peru/>. With 20 countries and 
600 million inhabitants that speak only two main languages, it is a 
fertile area of experimentation.

Consider that common languages are a fantastic opportunity for 
educational content development and sharing, supported by RELPE 
<http://www.relpe.org/> (the network of educational portals). 
Application of ICT in education in the region is expanding at an 
incredible rate, with many innovative projects going on, where we have a 
few lessons of success and many quiet failures.

Through the years working in different parts of the world I have learned 
that despite of the obvious differences, when it comes to ICT4E projects 
and deployments the challenges are very similar everywhere I’ve worked, 
and I am sure the Latin American experience can be used to advance 
projects in other parts of the world.

So now you know that my heart beats to the rhythms of Latin America, and 
therefore I hope to bring into Edutech debate examples, failures, case 
studies and experts from this region. We have many interesting areas of 
debate planned for this year, and I look forward to the discussion. 
Please help me expand south to south learning possibilities in ICT4E!


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