{"id":2801,"date":"2013-03-21T09:31:33","date_gmt":"2013-03-21T13:31:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/?p=2801"},"modified":"2013-03-20T12:10:59","modified_gmt":"2013-03-20T16:10:59","slug":"latin-america-is-fertile-with-experimentation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/2013-ict4edu-trends\/latin-america-is-fertile-with-experimentation\/","title":{"rendered":"Latin America Is Fertile With EduTech Experimentation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><center><img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/olpc_uruguay.jpeg\" alt=\"OLPC in Uruguay\" title=\"olpc_uruguay\" width=\"593\" height=\"350\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-2806\" srcset=\"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/olpc_uruguay.jpeg 593w, https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/03\/olpc_uruguay-300x177.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 593px) 100vw, 593px\" \/><\/center><\/p>\n<div style=\"float: right; margin-left: 10px; margin-bottom: 20px;\">\n<div class=\"addthis_toolbox addthis_default_style addthis_32x32_style\"><a class=\"addthis_button_preferred_1\"><\/a><a class=\"addthis_button_preferred_2\"><\/a><a class=\"addthis_button_preferred_3\"><\/a><a class=\"addthis_button_preferred_4\"><\/a><a class=\"addthis_button_compact\"><\/a><\/div>\n<p><script type=\"text\/javascript\" src=\"http:\/\/s7.addthis.com\/js\/250\/addthis_widget.js#pubid=wayan\"><\/script><\/div>\n<p>Hello, I&#8217;m <a href=\"http:\/\/www.roxanabassi.com.ar\/\">Roxana Bassi<\/a> and I&#8217;m now a co-editor at Educational Technology Debate.<\/p>\n<p><b>A bit about me<\/b><\/p>\n<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 href=\"http:\/\/gesci.org\/\">GESCI<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>Being an IT and Telecommunications engineer I consider myself a geek. But I don\u2019t 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>\n<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>\n<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>\n<p><b>The View From Latin America<\/b><\/p>\n<p>In these last years most of ICT4E effort &#8211; and funds &#8211; 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 href=\"http:\/\/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 href=\"http:\/\/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>\n<p>Consider that common languages are a fantastic opportunity for educational content development and sharing, supported by <a 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>\n<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\u2019ve worked, and I am sure the Latin American experience can be used to advance projects in other parts of the world. <\/p>\n<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>\n<div class=\"embednewsletter\">\n<h2>Don&#8217;t miss a moment of the action!<\/h2>\n<p>Subscribe now and get the latest articles from Educational Technology Debate sent directly to your inbox.<\/p>\n<form action=\"http:\/\/feedburner.google.com\/fb\/a\/mailverify\" method=\"post\" target=\"popupwindow\" onsubmit=\"window.open('http:\/\/feedburner.google.com\/fb\/a\/mailverify?uri=EducationalTechnologyDebate', 'popupwindow', 'scrollbars=yes,width=550,height=520');return true\"><input class=\"text\" id=\"email\" name=\"email\" type=\"text\"><input value=\"EducationalTechnologyDebate\" name=\"uri\" type=\"hidden\"><input name=\"loc\" value=\"en_US\" type=\"hidden\"><input value=\"Sign Up\" class=\"img\" type=\"Submit\"><a href=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/EducationalTechnologyDebate\"><img loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~fc\/EducationalTechnologyDebate?bg=003366&amp;fg=FFFFFF&amp;anim=0\" height=\"26\" width=\"88\" style=\"border:0\" class=\"fburner\" alt=\"\" \/><\/a><br style=\"clear:left;\" \/><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hello, I&#8217;m Roxana Bassi and I&#8217;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1398],"tags":[1411,243,586,1390,41,1413,1412,107],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2801"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2801"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2801\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2809,"href":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2801\/revisions\/2809"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edutechdebate.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}