Pedro-- Seth knows about xmca, so if he is interested in starting up another
group, I am sure he has many good reasons. XMCA is overwhelmingly English,
although it is a pleasure to see Portuguese and Spanish appear, and my
impression is that the language barrier is more difficult along a north/
south axis than east/west, primarily because so many of our European colleagues
read, write, and speak English. Still, the assymetry in language facility
does retard contributions, no doubt about that.
We have some experience here in California with north/south interactions
around chat-like ideas. There is currently a new, funded iniative associated
with internet2 to increase Univ of California/Mexico educational
interactions that is being headed up by Richard Duran at Santa Barbara.
>From our previous experience (about 2 years ago) we found that we could
deal pretty well with the language barriers by helping each other and
using translation programs (which make hilarious mistakes, but also
provide a lot of insight into language differences and can be used to
create a zoped for interaction).
Thanks for keepin xmca apprised of the new opportunity for international
communicatin.
mike
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Oct 10 2001 - 15:49:09 PDT