Momentum: The Organization of American States

Wow!  What a lot has happened since I last logged in and wrote about this wonderful adventure - but I haven't been idle.  Not at all!  Instead, there's been so much going on there just hasn't been time to write - a good reason, right?

I've now talked with many more people - including some Panamanians and Jean who taught at UTP on a Fulbright last year!  What terrific information they've shared with me!  I echo my earlier post:  People have been so open and willing to share even very nitty gritty information (like whether I need to cover my tattoo - which apparently I do)  To all of you, THANK YOU!

In the meantime, I've also been working on building relationships with people in Latin America to help define and build on my goals.  Matt Kam introduced me to 2 folks from the Organization of American States (OAS) when I was in Washington for the User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA) conference in early July.  I had a truly inspiring conversation with Dr. Juana Maqueria and Cecilia Martins - what incredible people and what vision for education in Latin America!  We agreed to work together going forward, so I'll keep them in the loop as things move ahead.  They can (and will) introduce me to the Minister of Education in Panama, Lucy Molina.  She has a big interest in how technology can improve education.

We also discussed the need for more open educational resources (OERs) in Spanish to make knowledge more readily available and accessible, both physically and linguistically.  I hope that UXPA's magazine, UX, and/or journal, JUS, can help provide high quality articles that are available online.  UX already translates the abstracts of the articles into Spanish (along with Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, and Korean - one of my proudest legacies to UXPA from my tenure as Director of Publications)

OERs are going to become increasingly important IMHO going forward, so I discussed the possibility of publishing Spanish-language content in UX.  There are some significant issues with this, as Whitney Quesenbery, the talented person who has gotten UX online (another of my legacies to UXPA) pointed out.  She and Gerry Gaffney (my extremely wonderful successor) promised to look into this however so I'm crossing fingers that we can see such content from UXPA available throughout Latin America.