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Interesting. FYI<br>
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Tom Gilliard<br>
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<td>Latin America Is Fertile With EduTech Experimentation</td>
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<th align="RIGHT" nowrap="nowrap" valign="BASELINE">Date: </th>
<td>Thu, 21 Mar 2013 15:08:04 +0000</td>
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<td>Educational Technology Debate
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:editors@edutechdebate.org"><editors@edutechdebate.org></a></td>
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<td><a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:satellit@bendbroadband.com">satellit@bendbroadband.com</a></td>
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<p style="font-size:13px;color:#555;margin:9px 0 3px
0;font-family:Georgia,Helvetica,Arial,Sans-Serif;line-height:140%;font-size:13px;"><span>Posted:</span>
21 Mar 2013 06:31 AM PDT</p>
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<center><img moz-do-not-send="true"
src="https://edutechdebate.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/olpc_uruguay.jpeg"
alt="OLPC in Uruguay" title="olpc_uruguay"
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<p>Hello, I’m <a moz-do-not-send="true"
rel="nofollow" target="_blank"
href="http://www.roxanabassi.com.ar/">Roxana Bassi</a>
and I’m now a co-editor at Educational Technology
Debate.</p>
<p><b>A bit about me</b></p>
<p>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 (<a
moz-do-not-send="true" rel="nofollow"
target="_blank" href="http://gesci.org/">GESCI</a>).</p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><b>The View From Latin America</b></p>
<p>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 <a
moz-do-not-send="true" rel="nofollow"
target="_blank"
href="https://edutechdebate.org/olpc-in-south-america/olpc-in-uruguay-impressions-of-plan-ceibal/">consider
Uruguay</a> with its one-of-a-kind 1 laptop per
child project REALLY deployed countrywide or Peru
with the <a moz-do-not-send="true" rel="nofollow"
target="_blank"
href="https://edutechdebate.org/archive/olpc-in-peru/">second
largest OLPC deployment</a>. With 20 countries and
600 million inhabitants that speak only two main
languages, it is a fertile area of experimentation.
</p>
<p>Consider that common languages are a fantastic
opportunity for educational content development and
sharing, supported by <a moz-do-not-send="true"
rel="nofollow" target="_blank"
href="http://www.relpe.org/">RELPE</a> (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. </p>
<p>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. </p>
<p>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!</p>
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