Abyecta de Aprendizaje – I’m going Spanglish baby!

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }
.flickr-yourcomment { }
.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }
.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }

Titulo, originally uploaded by MrGluSniffer.

I find myself tonight in San Juan, Puerto Rico, late at night, horribly sleep-deprived, hoping that the humidity that is fogging up every surface in the hotel room won’t somehow screw up my laptop. Tomorrow, I’m scheduled to speak on the subject of “open educational resources” for an innovation network of 20 Latin American universities partnering with the Open University of Catalonia. Besides getting a sponsored trip to Puerto Rico (first time in the Caribbean), this event has some resonance for me on a personal level. I got my start in this field as a teacher with the ITESM Campus Sonora Norte, in Hermosillo, Mexico so for sentimental reasons I don’t fully understand I want to do well here.

I am planning a somewhat stripped-down version of the talk I gave in Barcelona a couple weeks back (oh yeah, I never blogged that, but Ismael did), which itself was a stripped-down version of the talk I gave at the Open Education Conference (audio for that debacle is now public).

One challenge I feel like I need to deal with is the language thing… The meeting is being held in Spanish, and I’ve been advised that the English skills of attendees will vary quite widely. I speak Spanish like an illiterate Diazepam addict (no offense to illiterates, or to addicts), so while I can order in restaurants and talk politics with cab drivers I certainly don’t feel up to giving a presentation en Espanol.

So as an attempt to meet the participants half-way I have tried to translate my visual materials. I also interviewed a couple of people I often cite as examples in my presentations, so I will have a couple short clips in decent Spanish to play live, with more clips people can check out later. Jon Beasley-Murray discusses blog-based teaching and scholarly discourse (and the importance of students developing a public voice) in the Detectable section, and Pedro Pernias discourses on his work with distributed publishing and OCWinMotion in the RemixableFormatos section. I can’t express how grateful I am that I could tap such awesome contributions on very short notice.

If anyone with Spanish skills cares to correct the more egregious errors that are undoubtedly there in my materials, it is a wiki, and I would certainly appreciate it.

Now, I bow to physiological reality and try to get some sleep.