.Edu.Co.Blog

I really hope I'll get soon the time to write in English, and not only to cross-post comments placed elsewhere. However, this is as much as I can allow myself right now, so please bear with me. Another cross-posting of a comment to a post by David Warlick, entitled "Ethan Zuckerman and the Internet is NOT flat":

Hi David,

I just saw this post. The ideas are very interesting for a third world blogger like me. Do you know if there are slides, podcasts or some record of Mr. Zucherman's presentation?

It caught my attention the idea of Brigde Bloggers. Last Monday I was talking with a group of colleagues including Nancy White and Leigh Blackall, about technology stewardship.

I proposed that, for Latin American countries, it makes sense to talk not only about tech stewards, but about tech bridge-builders, because of the huge language gap that we have. According to some official figures, less than 1% of Colombian population have basic communication skills in English. And, alas, most of the content on Internet is written in english.

That means that, for Latin America, the gap has to do not only with wires, but with language issues. In practice, the effect of this situation has two sides: One, most of our population are exposed only to the information translated by the media (obviously is barely a portion of what's going on). Second, we turn our attention to Spanish speaking countries that produce much more content (Spain, mainly).

This has a huge impact in areas like education, because most of the conversation happens in english, and we don't have enough edubloggers to keep up. Consequence? Ideas like, let's say, connectivism have taken almost two years to be translated. So, there is a real gap there. We are not participating in the conversation.

In the end, I agree with Zuckerman about the need to have more tech bridge-builders / Bridge bloggers (or Bridge Geeks?). If we want to keep up with what's going on, we really need them.