Monday, July 31, 2006

Seminar in Bogotá, Colombia

So, the last week we held the Seminar Workshop "Strategies for the use of High Speed Networks and Learning Objects" in Bogotá. We were lucky enough to have presentations by Stephen Downes, Peter Stucki, Rachel Smith, Christina Siroskey, Victor Castelo and Tom Boyle. The event's proceedings will be available soon in the ColombiaAprende portal. So far, here are links to some comments on the first day presentations, posted by Stephen Downes in his Half an hour blog:

If I can find the time to translate them, I will publish later more info about the speakers.

Sunday, July 30, 2006

A new beginning

So, this is my first post in this blog I'll try to keep alive. The person responsible for getting me to say something into the blogsphere (after a lot of time of being just a lurker) is Stephen Downes. He came to Bogota last week to help us with a couple of presentations in a conference about Educational uses of Learning Objects and High Speed Academic Networks. I got the chance to talk a lot to Stephen, and he helped me realize one of the biggests obstacles for us (Colombian teachers and researchers): We are not that used to share, and we are not that used to write (I mean blogging, more on this later).

So, the best way to go from discourse to reality is to act, so here I am, writing my first blog entry. I have to say, anyway, that I'll be posting both in English and Spanish. Why English? Because it helps us to keep in touch with so many interesting people around the world. Why Spanish? Because is my mother language, I love it, and we really need to get our teachers and researcheres to express their opinions.

I have to say something else about the opinions and ideas that I will be expressing here. They do not compromise the organizations I work with actually (Universidad de los Andes, Ministerio de Educación Nacional, Universidad EAFIT). Many of my thoughts will definitely have to do with the work I'm doing in these institutions, but they remain my personal view of the world.

And the last disclaimer: Please, please, I would like you all readers to forgive me for my english writing flaws and limitations. I really hope some of the things I'll write make sense, and I'll try and get better over time.

So, that was it. My first blog post. Not as painful as I thought it could be... LOL