Bolivia: Web 2.0 Workshops for Aymara School Teachers · Global Voices
Victoria Tinta

On May 2 and 3, 2012, a series of Web 2.0 workshops were held in the Department of Oruro in Bolivia. These workshops were organized by the Ministry of Education [es] and the Jaqi Aru [ay] Project, which is comprised of a group of linguists in the city of El Alto, Bolivia. This group has been promoting the use of the Aymara language on the internet. Many of the volunteers from Global Voices Aymara [ay] also form part of Jaqi Aru. Education professors from the Teacher Training Superior School (ESFM for its initials in Spanish) took part in the workshops, and the event's objective was to help the professors and their students begin to create digital media content in the Aymara language.
According to the planned program, the workshops took place in the following schedule:
On Thursday, May 3, the workshop began at 9:30 am in the conference room with an opening presentation by the facilitators from Jaqi Aru.
Following this presentation, Mario Duran Chuquimia [es] gave a talk about Web 2.0 and Wikipedia. In the afternoon, hands-on workshops took place in the computer lab, where each professor worked on an individual computer with an Internet connection.
Martin Canaviri provided a workshop about social networking sites, focusing on the use of Facebook, and Ruben Hilare [ay] shared his experience in the use of Twitter. Finally, Victor Paco Montevilla [ay], gave a presentation about the use of the photograph sharing site Flickr.
Photograph by Mario R. Duran and used under a Creative Commons license
On Friday, May 4, Elias Quispe spoke about blogging on WordPress, and Edwin Quispe [ay] introduced the participants to Skype. Hilare later presented a workshop on Wikipedia Aymara.
The workshop ended in the conference room with a short evaluation, in which the professors gave thanks to the members of Jaqi Aru and the Ministry of Education for organizing the workshops and for the training sessions. Many participants said that they were motivated to create content using these new technologies.
Professor René Chura Quispe from ESFM Mariscal Andrés de Santa Cruz Calahumana, located in the Department of La Paz, said:
…los conocimientos tecnológicos debemos experimentar, las herramientas son muy importantes…
Antonio José de Sucre, a professor from ESFM Antonio José de Sucre, mentioned:
Un trabajo conjunto esa motivación hacia nuestros estudiantes, es poder hacer el uso de plataforma; no solamente en idioma Aymara, sino también en idioma castellano.
Cristina from ESFM Caracollo in the Department of Oruro said:
…que no sea este único taller sino que haya más talleres sobre el manejo de herramientas digitales; difundamos nuestra idioma Aymara en Internet como idioma Ingles.
The professors indicated that there is a commitment to create and spread new content on these virtual platforms, which they learned about during the workshops.
Jaqi Aru published a blog post [ay] about the workshop, where they also published the following video from the event: