Updated February 4, 2010 to include the presentation, update the conference tag, and change some of the wording.

A few weeks ago, a colleague asked me if I still think about Africa a lot. “Every day,” I replied. “Every day for the past year — six months before I went, and six months after coming home.” The experience certainly had a profound effect on me. While you wouldn’t necessarily see it in my day-to-day work, there’s been an attitude shift. Maybe it’s a change in perspective. Maybe it’s a broadening of horizons. Maybe it’s just an acknowledgment that the whole world isn’t like Northeast Ohio. The whole world isn’t like the United States. The whole world isn’t like North America.

That’s a valuable lesson. It’s not necessarily something that could be measured on a test somewhere. It may not even be something that I can articulate very well. But today, I hope to try. My presentation for the eTech Ohio Educational Technology Conference focuses on lessons learned during my Education Beyond Borders experience.

Here’s the video from my presentation:

Here are the other resources from my session:

• Education Beyond Borders has a website/ning, a Youtube channel, a Twitter feed, and a Facebook group.
• The resources used in my presentation are all on delicious. They’re tagged with “oetc10” and they include the sources for the population and cell phone proliferation statistics. There are also some resources tagged there that ended up being cut from the final presentation.
• Most of my photos from the experience are on Flickr.