Juan Carlos Herrera's Blog: Community: Global Education and Learning Community Archives

The project "Hello Buddy/Hola Amigo" is a Sun Microsystems' volunteers' initiative to reduce the digital divide. The digital divide is the gap between people that has resources and knowledge to get access to digital and information technology from people who don't. The source of digital divide came from social, economical, and cultural issues. Some technology (specially if come from the open-source world) can help to overcome the digital divide since open-source software does not have cost for using and also can be distributed freely, countries with with broader digital can use for free.

Digital divide states an important difference between rich and poor countries. Every technology company that claims to be responsible and have social responsibility might do something about digital divide. Volunteers project aims to reduce the digital divide through donation, education or other kinds of help to improve the knowledge and access to information technology.

The project itself is based on Wonderland a Sun's open-source project to create virtual 3D world. Wonderland gives us the platform to build a live virtual and 3D classroom where children of different countries can meet and share in a virtual space for fun...and learn. At the same time we can take advantage of this tool to teach and educate children, if we have technology that provides a broadband connection, audio, and publishing tools, we can develop and attend classes closer to a real world. Finally the project will have a children driven approach, in fact both English and Spanish speakers will teach each other their native language.

The project "Hello Buddy/Hola Amigo" is a good example of how Sun's technology within a open-source initiative can contribute to reduce the digital divide. Of course this project (as many) is powered by Java!

If you want to know more about this project take a look our wiki page and also you can join us at Java.net CommunityCorner JavaOne 2008 we have a mini-talk to share with you our experience.

Teaching Java at a Third World Nation: Globalization and Myths

Posted by jcherreram on December 06, 2007 at 05:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

First of all, I was born and live in Chile, that is a also "Third World Nation", although Chileans thinks differently ;), Just take a look at: http://www.gcr.weforum.org/ (The best ranked country of Latin America)

Three weeks ago I was teaching Java at Managua the capital of Nicaragua, a very beautiful place with very nice people. I was teaching Java also in other countries of South America, but it was my first time in Central America. When you think about these kinds of countries as "Third World Nation", small geography and population with a recent past of guerrillas, you can easily imagine a lot of wrong things about Nicaragua. But what about IT people, technology and Java? This is my opinion:

A good point about Globalization is the "natural" knowledge transference, everyone in Nicaragua can learn from authors such as Joshua Bloch through Internet, for instance I saw a few books about certifications as Linux, Java and Microsoft (nobody is perfect :P) bought at amazon.com

I'm teaching Java over five years, in numbers it could be an average of one thousand of people (from Chile, Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, Brazil) and I can't see any difference between these people and Nicaragua people, and in some cases the most advanced students had a level over the average. The questions always were smarts, very hard in some cases and fun!. The aptitude to learn was excellent, they were very punctual and finished late because of the questions, questions and more questions!

They are developing a bigger project for e-goverment powered by Java!

Chile and Nicaragua share the "a.k.a", knows as:"The Switzerland" of Central America (Latin America for Chile)

I hope to come back to Nicaragua....Vacation could be :D

Spanish Version/Versión en Español HERE/AQUÍ

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