education & tech

I came across to a website dedicated to promote the celebration of Internet good use. All bloggers are invited, and there is a contest about writing a story on how the web has transformed your life or the lives of a community you belong to, or the city you live in or your country, which means it goes worldwide. The story needs to be factual but you have the choice to be businesslike, narrative or even poetic. The stories can be reflections of how the web has transformed people’s lives, in the individual, political, economic, cultural and spiritual sphere.

OneWebDay.org is calling on this contest and has published the experiences from a student from a locally popular Institute of Engineering in India, currently in his third year of Information Technology. What it wonders me is his conclusions that he hasn’t learned anything from the Internet! Well, here in the States we have a great respect for students and professionals coming from India. Will Sivasubramanian Muthusamy be asserted on his appreciations? He explains the reasons why this student has learned anything from the Internet. "While we have institutions in India such as the Indian Institute of Technology where the facilities and quality of education match if not surpass the standards of some of the most renowned institutions in the world, this story truly reflects on the Internet access facilities and the attitude of the authorities in several schools / colleges across India."

One of the reasons developed countries enjoy a great advancement and their social networks work perfectly is the access to the Internet. David Sasaki has reason when he says there are three obstacles to a truly global conversation, he writes that censorship, lack of digital inclusion and language are the causes not all people are and feel included in mega networks as the Internet is. This is precisely what could be happening in India with Prabhu (the student who shared the story).

Those are good reasons not only to the hear when the world is talking but to join One Web Day 2008. Are you listening? The world is talking.

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Global Voices is working hard in Budapest and if you are not being able to assist, please follow the the reunion on all channels available, here.

The 'most influential citizen media projects in the world' is presenting its 2008 Summit to be celebrated in Budapest(Hungary) during this weekend June 27th and 28th. 'Global Voices has been an experiment in new media. A meeting in late 2004 at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, held at a time when blogging was just taking off in many regions of the world, was the starting point for the project, which has since grown steadily in size and scope.'

This 'experiment' has a wide range of projects. Among them are Rising Voices, Global Voices Advocacy, Voices Without Votes and Lingua. About this last one, one of the participants in the Summit Program has written and interesting report published in the Vol.12 No 3 of translationjournal.net. He is Chris Salzberg a Japanese-English translator, writer, and graduate student at the University of Tokyo and place where we've extracted this post quotations.

You are still on time to register. This 'event will bring together the members of the Global Voices citizen media project and its wider community with a diverse group of bloggers, activists, technologists, journalists and others persons from around the world, for two days of public discussions and workshops around the theme Citizen Media & Citizenhood' says the main page of the GlobalVoices Summit 08.

Is in this conclave that will be discussed in deep the lingustic impact of internal project Lingua. Into this Lingua are 14 different languages that GVO covers: German, Spanish, French, Malagasy, Portuguese, Albanian, Macedonian, Arabic, Farsi, Bangla, Hindi, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Japanese, and Italian. To understand better where we are going, let's bring Clay Shirky (quoted by C. Salzberg) to explain it a bit and which conjecture was brought in back in the 1999 "the definition of proximity [will change] from geographic to linguistic: two countries [will] border one another if and only if they have a language they can use in common"

Here we go. You all are very welcome.

Latin America is moving to the left and great part of this change has been patronized by Venezuelan President. However, as we all know, changing the educational curricula means a social change, indoctrination. Laura Vidal in the GVO reports the buzz on blogs en Venezuelan media:

Part of what is attacked is the new system, which seeks to remove some competitive sports. They propose more traditional games based on solidarity and equality. Also, there is the discussion of studies on national culture and traditions, since the new project seems to highlight African and aboriginal heritage over the European. Above all, an extended and detailed study of Chavez's government and ideals are preferred over world history and Venezuelan contemporary history.

How this will affect future college education generation in this South American country?

Tags: venezuela, education, blogging

"We have to move because Colombians might get confused as we are terrorists"

Cartoon credit: La Hora [ES]

The North American politics are an issue most media are concentrated in, but Latin America right now has special interest because after the OAS intervention and waiting for full disclosure after March 14th, the governments of the region's countries still are a great deal to say and to solve.

This is the reason why one of our trusted portals just launched a special edition por coverage af all these matters: Border Crisis in South America 2008 by globalvoicesonline.org.

Follow up!

Technorati: globalvoices, GVO, colombia, ecuador, venezuela, border+crisis

Global Voices Online holds in the media by itself and it doesn't need any support because its own team, the editors, bloggers and translators worldwide are doing it. GVO aim to get information spread where normally the heavy media doesn't have access or doesn't want to get to it. Today, we were reading a post from Scobleizer where he respectfully says that Global Voices Online "is the right blog to keep up with human rights blogging from around the world". We want to say, being part of the authors of Global Voices that citizenjournalism goes beyond Human Rights. Yes, we do concern about what's going on with poor and speechless people but GVO certainly explain plain clearly what are their goals. Why you don't spent a few minutes and please read the About Page of the website.

So, why some bloggers don't have a say about Kenya incidents? Is it only the Tech blogs that are being quiet?

In the education arena, David Warlick remind us of The 2008 Education Blogosphere Survey. This is the second annual survey Scott McLeod has designed and it's online and for all those educators linked to educational matters, please head up and spent some worthy time completing such a valuable bank of information.

Hurry up! The deadline for this years participation is January 26, 11:00pm, (GMT-06:00) Central Time (US & Canada) See last year results here.

Firefox is said to be having problems to attract money and compete with the IE from Microsoft that pours lots o money to keep their browser running. However, even when Firefox doesn't offer technical support for the enterprise circle, the add-ons are one of the most strongest arms this Firefox browser does have.
It over one month in the playground of the add=ons for Firefox and today has more than 35 thousands downloaded. Its name is FreeAccess Plus!. But why is so important and why in such a short time has received that large number of hits? Well, if you take a look to this map build up by the Global Voices Advocacy, you can easily notice that many countries had banned the Internet access and that's precisely the point, this add-on allows Firefox to work as a proxy and bypass censorship of YouTube, del.icio.us, Flickr, Technorati, FriendSter, livejournal, MySpace, Hi5 and even some other Persian (farsi) sites in Iran and other countries that blocked this sites ...

The note has been taken from GVO(Global Voices Online) and according to the article, the add-on author, MohammedR said the current version of FreeAccess Plus! does not support the option to add websites to those currently listed. However, this feature — an editable and configurable list — will be added in a future version of the program.

A report from Nielsen Online shows the following results for social networking sites and blogs among which Facebook, LinkedIn and Club Penguin are with the most significant growing. Between 2006 and 2007, Facebook jumped from 8,682 to 19,519 users; LinkedIn went from 1,705 to 4,919 both with an average of 157% of increase.

Why Am I pointing this out? Because the number of online users who are looking to engage in social networks are on the move. Despite the numbers of blogger that are using Blogger as hosting for their free blogs, the company with the best results has been Wordpress.com, they were from 2,10 to 411,440 which represents the 444% of incorparated new users.

In this frame Ecuador after a few hours will start testing the output of its new Citizen Journalism oriented newspaper: Ultimas Noticias. This new project, according to Christian Espinosa, one of the most read online jornalists, is owned by the El Comercio Group. Let's keep track of this launching by 9:00 PM (Eastern Time), follow the links trend using the Microsoft Link Command, +linkdomain:http://www.ultimasnoticias.ec/.

Even tough, citizen journalism is not a new concept, it is for Ecuador. A good example is being set by Global Voices Online. They're at the same time looking for a correspondent in this country. Cobertura Digital brings the note, as well.

Have you all a great weekend and I hope you read this post with the great Firefox, latest version.

Looking forward to know what it will be the trend results for the next year!

I felt very nice after reading two posts from two fellow bloggers, Silvia who's picking one of our blogs as her favorite. Iwon't abide by rules in this Blog Day but I want to participate and let to know who are by now the blogs and people. Happy BlogDay 2007 to everyone.

Weblog-ed, Will Richardson is a professional who pursues and research the tendencies in technology applied to the classroom. He's the Learner in Chief
in topics, discussions and reflections on the use of Weblogs, wikis, RSS, audiocasts and other Read/Write Web related technologies in the K-12 realm.

Paul Stamatiou, he's a very young man with a tremendous potential and knowledge about technology and apple related stuff. He's a penchant for all things high-tech
as himself describes. We are subscribed to his page since the very first time we get to know him. Power to the people of Georgia Tech.

eLearnspace, is held by George Siemens and he's very passionate about learning technologies from he's also a teacher in the University of Manitoba. I'm enamored with the potential of technology to transform learning and society. And he certainly is. Every educator should be paying attention to what he has to say on a regular basis.

Hackosphere, has being blogging from a while and he's our gradfather because thanks to his deep knowledge
in Ajax and feed readers you can see a nice blog design in this blog. He has created bVibes which a prosperous feed sharing portal. Ramani will be in our sight forever.

BlogBloke, is the only way I know him because it's very hard to find out his real name. He's being creating blogs with tips and tools for the blogging community and loves to write about Blogger Tips and lately he's being thinking to switched to Wordpress(so sad, I might say). 'He was one of the earliest to make RSS feeds (by hand, not automated, mind you)' as one of another fellow blogger states.

Hope you all something special to say about your favorite blogs or bloggers. As for ourselves we want to join in the special celebration in our home city, Loxa and home country, Ecuador. Or more in Global Voices Online.

I was reading about how to get your blog better positioned in Google and I had the chance to go and probe all features in MyPageRank which by the way recomends me to work out in a better metatag description and proper word descriptions, not to mention that the title of this page should be longer in order to keeo up with the ratings. You are an expert, what do you think? Sumesh, are you reading this? I would appreciate your input in this matter. The first step for installing the sitemap was found in an old friend's blog: Vivek but if you keep digging you might find of good use what is written by Sai Prasad or Manoj Sangani.

I want to thank our dear friend Jaloe Tjimahi who has found of interest our post about Blogger Templates. He's displaying our link in the top left corner of his blog. We should say that pays to link, if you give us a link you will also receive the reward or linking back. I love the proposal of this young girl, Nicole Chen. She says: "once I see that you’ve link me I’ll link ya back".

Global Voices is growing at speed many would love to grow, now they're looking for a video editor, if you happen to be interested you just have to contact Georgia Popplewell. Hold on second, that's not all I wanted to tell you. There is also an agreetment with the NY Times to start publishing the GVO feeds in the Topic pages of this newyorkean big mass media. Stay tunned!

I haven't enough time to post these days and this blog hasn't being updated I it should. However, today while I was tracking our inbound links I've found two interesting topics that I would like to share with you. RugJeff has named this blog a great one! I am not sure what a great one is this but surely we are pleased to be selected at that level, specially when it comes from fellow bloggers who know how hard is to keep a blog with fresh content. Thanks RugJeff!

Another big surprise is the link that Repta gave us in his Internet y Noticias [ES]. Sometimes it pays to be bilingual and be able to follow what other fellow bloggers have to say in a different language than English. See a good example here.

On Thursday May 24, Reuters will be holding another of their Newsmaker events, this time on the subject of Darfur.

The event will take place in New York, starting 9:30 AM Eastern Time, and the event page is here. If any of you happens to be in New York and wishes to attend, here's a link through which you can RSVP. You can also participate sending questions or comments to the "Join the Debate" link on the event website

Ndesanjo from GVO online will be will be attending the event and may also live-blog it. If you want to get a link in GVO you just have to post about Darfur and send the link to: africa@globalvoicesonline.org.

"It’s hard for me to write about the rationale of Global Voices because the project isn’t my project alone. It began as a partnership and rapidly turned into a vast international collaboration. I know that Rebecca and I have different reasons for our involvement with the project, and I strongly suspect that my reasons are different from David’s, Amira’s, Ndesanjo’s, or those of any of the dozens of people who actually build the site every day. This post offers some of my reasons for being involved with Global Voices; my reasons may be close to, or far from, everyone else’s."

I won't even try to explain what I mean with this title. You better go and see for yourself.

Gloval Voices Online [New Design]

FeedRaider [GVO Core Blogs]

GVO en Espaniol [GVO in Other Languages]

Do you have any questions?

I've been writing while ago. I don't mean the scolastci writings that our teachers used to asked for, but the professional writing. When I was a teen I always dreamed of being an anchor or at least a person with strong network in the media. That was my dream! After many year spent in College, struggling to learn French and Russian I've ended up learning English! OMG. Things happened and nowadays I am fluent in both languages: English and Spanish. The French and Russian have flown, I don't know whether from my tongue or from my mind!

This personal disclosure is brought to you because I wanted to thank all my readers, those visitors that fall on any of my post and kindly drop a note or a message to tell me I am doing good or even to let me know that my grammar sucks! All due respect, for mild language. I've been plugged for a one of the best citizen journalists, David Sasaki. Much appreciation deserves Claudia Peña who has being kindly enough to inlcude our blog in her blogroll.

Alexis Rebolledo a chilean teacher and blogger made a generous review of our bple. You will notice how the bple had gone from time to time, changing not only in design but in contents. Our dearest Carmen from Spain also made a very short but provocative analisis of TonNet's blog and BTW, everyone is entitled to belong to UBH(Spanish Bloggers Network). And just yesterday a professional, very familiar with the Mac's World, wrote a presentación for our 'second son' a blog which is written in Spanish and that is focus on my mother country issues: Carlos Correa has a way, way genereous presentation for De la vida y algo mas....

Thank you all and promise to keep doing things better!

Let me put this straight. I am promoting the GoMeme 4.0 in a Spanish page known as UBH and someone wrote a comment where the person says Google may be punishing for having too many links un the same page which means the GoMeme have gone over two hundred members. Any ideas from your own experiences or any tip about it?

I've following the ecuadorian blogosphere since a while and I couldn't find relevant information -at least to me- and I couldn't see also David Sasaki pick anything from the ecuadorian blogosphere. Could it be that I and GVO are both wrong or it is only matter of another issues. Let's see what's going on.

There in a southern ecuadorian blogger that is working hard to keep the local bloggers kicking, he is a very well informed person and if you are well prepared to to talk about Mac's then Carlos Correa is the right person!

I guess I've already mention this blog in other posts but today he's trying to show u s a new way to leave voice comments in our blogs. You better take a look in Library Clips.

Thanks to the great Ramani, bple has another face, I am still working to make a little changes and what I've learnt today is the NEO design is not comtible with the Table of Contents proposed by Hans. Maybe our new fried from Blogger Hacked can lent us a hand a help to solve this matter. Or perhaps Aditya Mukherjee who, by the way, had just updated his Native Blog Search. Kudos!

I am delighted Scoble picked on GVO and not precisely for tech endeavors but because an article from an iranian blogger, where in Scoble opinion the U.S. will remain up front in technology while such governments mistreat their citizens!

And I've already spoken about Palast and this post confirms what the petrolium money can do. All the almost three thousand army soldiers dead only to justify the control over the iraqui petrolium. Hold on! Not only iraquies but venezuelan are damn well!

If you need to follow the convresation of certain bloggers or journalist then you shouldn't forget about pmeme neither the new RSS without the HTML.

A while long I've sign to Ziki and right now they try to catch your attention, they allow you to post content. Great!

We are around the end of 2006 and the list and directories of Best Blogs are on the raising. The 10 Best Spanish Blogs listed by Esquizopedia and the classical Weblog Awards 2006. But unfotunately we don't belong to the very select network, maybe some day...

Conforme estaba previsto los ecuatorianos residentes en el exterior, en este caso en zona este de los EE.UU concurrió a votar en las diferentes localidades establecidas para el efecto. Por gracia del traslado de la sede ecuatoriana desde Union City hasta Harrison, muchos desinformados ecuatorianos aún concurrieron a la antigua sede y hasta se percibió servicio gratuito de traslado hasta las urnas para aquellos ciudadanos que estaban a pie y no podian llegar desde Union City hasta la zona de las elecciones.

Desde las 5h00 de la mañana, muchos ecuatorianos comenzaron a formar filas en la escuela pública número 19, en Queens, en Nueva York, en un proceso de elecciones que comenzó a las 7h00 de la mañana con el Himno Nacional. Esta es la primera vez que los ecuatorianos en el exterior votan, y al momento son 6.532 los ecuatorianos empadronados en Nueva York; en tanto que New Yersey hay 5.500 y en el resto de consulados como Washington y Miami hay un total de cerca de 2.000 ecuatorianos listos para votar.

Las elecciones en Whasington parece que fueron normales según lo reporta con imágenes Eduardo Torres quien tuvo la oportunidad de dialogar con el Sr. Jorge Icaza, Cónsul del Ecuador en Whashington.

En Espania votarían al rededor de 90 122 residentes pero no sin experimentar las mismas dificultades que el resto de ecuatorianos en el exterior tuvo que soportar:largas colas, falta de empadronamiento, desinformación respecto a los lugares de votación, etc.

Update: Vea el video que se ha subido en YouTube de los problemas que surigieron en NY el dia de las elecciones. Gracias a GVO.

A ésta hora se preve el triunfo de Correa en el Ecuador, cosa que es ninguna sorpresa puesto que el dia de ayer al cerrar el dia los pronósticos eran del 31% para el antedicho candidato y 25% de aceptación para Noboa (Para las diez de la noche esas estadísticas ya se muestran erradas porque según se ve en la fotografia de arriba, Noboa es el virtual ganador).

El reporte de ecuadorelige nos confirma que los dos candidatos pasan a la segunda vuelta. Mientras que otro de los proveedores de información por razones desconocidas esta fuera de servicio.

El mismo Consul de Ecuador en NJ, lamentó la falta de recursos para difundir la eleciones en zona triestatal (NY, NJ, CT) eso por supuesto ha impedido que tantos ecuatorianos se hayan registrado, empadronado y hayan podido votar y obtener el certificado ya con su propia foto impresa en el documento. Una persona decía no saber por quien votar puesto que le habian entregado un "álbum de fotos" y que concurría a votar porque necesitaría el papelito para cuando vaya a Ecuador. Otros por su parte se manifestaban orgullosos de haber podido por primera vez sufragar en el exterior.

Los reporteros que vinieron de Ecuador entre ellos la gente de Teleamazonas y el mismo Carlos Vera junto Christian JHonson, no perdieron opotunidad para mezclarse en la comunidad y hasta posar para unas cuantas fotografias. Los inalcanzables hoy estaban con el pueblo votante, bien por ellos.

La lucha por la segunda vuelta hace entrever una contienda renida entre la derecha y la prolongación chavista en Ecuador.