Introduction and Invitation to Online Dialogue

[eddie avila]

Hello all,

Just wanted to introduce myself, as I've been a subscriber for the past month - I'm Eddie Avila and part of Global Voices Online, an international network of bloggers interested in the field of citizen media as a way for digital storytelling and discussing online what is happening in our countries. I head up the Rising Voices project, which is our outreach arm that seeks to bring more underrepresented voices into these conversations. We do that by supporting small-scale grassroots projects interested in teaching their own local communities how to use these tools. We also try to draw attention to and amplify different outreach initiatives around the world, and that's why we recently featured Phil Cash Cash and his work at promoting the use of technology as a way for language revitalization and preservation:

http://rising.globalvoicesonline.org/blog/2011/10/06/languages-phil-cash-cash-and-nez-perce/

How these tools are being used by different individuals and groups around the world will be one of Rising Voices' focus areas for the next nine months, and some of that interest is based on my own personal experience supporting a project in El Alto, Bolivia called Jaqi Aru. A group of Aymara linguistic students have been bringing people together to learn how to encourage the use of Aymara on the internet, with a special emphasis on encouraging young people to maintain the Aymara language. They are doing so by blogging in Aymara, and having a strong presence on sites such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as the Wikipedia site in Aymara. 

So we're sure that there are many more experiences of using the internet for these purposes, not only for endangered languages, but all under-represented languages on the net. So we're partnering with the organization New Tactics and the Indigenous Tweets project to have an online discussion from November 16-22 on these experiences, challenges, best practices, and other components of these emerging field. And hopefully further efforts like that of this list to bring people with like-minded interests. 

http://www.newtactics.org/en/dialogue/using-citizen-media-tools-promote-under-represented-languages

I'd like to invite those on this listserv to participate and if you would be interested in being a "Featured Practitioner," please do let me know. We would love to learn from you and hear about your efforts for language preservation using web 2.0 tools like blogs, social networking sites, and other forms of online media.

Thanks so much,

Eddie 
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Eddie Avila
Director | Rising Voices
http://rising.globalvoicesonline.org
Skype: barrioflores




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