Video Performance of Chucky’s Hunch by Rochelle Owens - The Tenderness of the Snake and the Porcupine

When Rochelle Owens’s play, Chucky’s Hunch, was first performed Off-Broadway in 1981, critics lauded what they expressed as a tour-de-force performance by the actor playing Chucky, and they took the plot at face value.  The play, which is a long dramatic monologue by an aging man triggered by the news that the second of his three ex-wives has won the lottery, takes the audience into a fascinating psychological odyssey.  On the face of it, the play is simply about the embittered rantings of a failed Abstract Expressionist artist whose grandiose plans took him nowhere except into penury and bad health, as he lives with his 85-year-old mother somewhere in upstate New York.  He reads his letters to Elly, his ex-wife, to the audience, and in doing so, expresses a range of thoughts and feelings, ranging from rageful recriminations to sentimental recounting of the times that he and Elly spent together, and his observations of her behavior. The narrative is a straightforward epistolary one, punctuated by a framed tale (The Snake and the Porcupine).  

Chucky's Hunch is featured in this anthology.

However, when looking more closely at the structure of the play, and then relating it to her other works, particularly her long poems, it becomes clear that the structure is one of repetition and interweaving, just as she has done in her brilliant “Black Chalk,” “Patterns of Animus” and “The Aardvark Venus.”  As in those poems and others, there is an apocalyptic intensity that envelopes the reader with a sense of creeping horror at observing the protagonist’s existential nihilism that insists on destructive behavior and an ineluctable journey toward self-erasure. It is good to note that one can read the play for free via the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/wordplays200perf/mode/2up) although it is necessary to create an account and borrow it online.

The release of a video version in 2024, with Charles Berliner as Chucky, music by Marcia Kravis, video editing by Ellen Reynolds, and produced by Rochelle Owens, enables the audience to see a darker and more intimate version (https://youtu.be/OZdRLyXTNbI?si=F5wzMoBLzhhjwnYu).  As a narrator, Chucky could not possibly be more unreliable.  He flings words like the Abstract Expressionist flings paint, and it is necessary for the reader to find the patterns that make the deeper meaning, which is not really about Elly and her perceived slights to Chucky, but more about fatal “dances” (like the fabled Tarantella) of those who fall in love with each other, and in their dance of love, they toy with the parallels between love and death. Eros is held up as a life force in popular culture, but for Owens, Eros gives way to Thanatos, and the death-drive animates the various love dances / erotic tarantellas that weave in and out of the play. 

Love-Death Dance 1:  Chucky and Elly.  Chucky reminisces about his time with Elly and the items of clothing he purchased for her. Their life together was something he now views with a combination of sweetness and bitterness, a relatable pain for anyone reflecting on failed relationships of the past.  Images of a bright-white smile framed by carmine-red lipsticked lips further eroticize the narrative. 

Love-Death Dance 2:  Characterized as an impecunious and unmotivated bum, Chucky mooches off his 85-year-old mother, who horrifies him with the relations she has with Chester, her 82-year-old boyfriend.  Depicted in graphic terms, the discordant notion of a couple approaching death carrying on as though they were teenagers is deeply unsettling to Chucky. 

Love-Death Dance 3:  Mother and son have a close relationship, one fraught with contradictions. Chucky describes how he chews his mother’s food for her as an Eskimo mother would chew food for her baby, which may seem potentially kind-hearted except that she lost her teeth because he hit her. 

Love-Death Dance 4:  Chucky’s only friend is his dog.  The dog was killed, however, because it came between the amorous and deadly contortions of a porcupine and a snake.  Their passion killed not only Chucky’s only living friend, but also each other.  As a female voice narrates the frame-tale, images of a snake about to strike and a young porcupine fill the screen. 

Love-Death Dance 5:  Chucky’s tarantella with his own mind starts at the beginning of the play, and it weaves in and out of a kaleidoscope of emotions.  They take him around in colorful, expressive effusions of emotion and reminiscences, but ultimately, the audience sees him as on a path to madness.  When he disappears without a trace, the tarantella takes its final frenzied spin.  The impressions are emphasized by the juxtaposition of images of seagulls feeding on trash piles. 

Chucky complains that Elly never answers his letters, and he resents the fact that she is not only surviving, but is prospering, thanks to winning the lottery. She has gone on to live and thrive in the modern, changing world.  Chucky’s world is one that resonates with medieval times – with echoes of the earthiness of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and the resignation of Boethius in The Consolation of Philosophy, and the aleatory movements of the Wheel of Fortune. The still photos and collages in the film form a backdrop behind the performer, and they resonate with the words, not so much depictions but visual metaphors. The soundtrack, featuring sombre music, seagull cries, and more. 

In the end, Chucky psychologically juxtaposes himself in a final dance with the memory of the successful Elly, and in that final dance, he generates more self-destructive energy and pathos, leaving the audience staring into the “filthy maw” of an oblivion of one’s own devising, forged from the dances of “love-death” which left him with little more than shame and regret about his life. And thus Chucky hits home.  Chucky is Everyman. 

---Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D. 

Found Installation 1: I Heard the Voices of the Angels

I decided to view the world as a great living art gallery, and things that caught my eye could considered intentional "found art" (l'arte trouvee) of the early 20th century. It is a wonderful way to view the world -- suddenly everything has more significance, and it becomes expressionist, postmodernist, conceptual art.

In 1967, earthworks artist and photographer Robert Smithson put together a series of photos which he called "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey," in which he imagined the crumbling factories of New Jersey to be monuments. He was clearly making a critique of consumer culture, modernity, and environmentally damaging industrialization (and its aftermath in decaying obsolescence).  I have admired that work, but what I decided to do was to take it even further and include different types of accompaniments (experiential as well as critical).  It is fun to do, and I would like to encourage everyone to give it a try. This is my first.

Here's my first "found installation," which I call "I Heard the Voices of the Angels" 

Narrative Accompanying the Installation: The Homeless Passerby

And then they lifted me up.

I was seated in a chair nicely placed in the shallows of the Arkansas River, near the 11th Street Bridge in Tulsa, Oklahoma where I was fishing for catfish and the souls of the pioneers (they're hard to catch) when the trumpets sounded, the angels sang (or better yet, roared), and my hard-won body ("hard-won" because it's hard to make one's way into an incarnation of any kind, especially that of a human being, and to finally have my consciousness housed in a skin-and-bone bag has been a tremendous relief) flew out of my hands like a helium balloon caught on the heels of a late-March 55-mile-per-hour gust front.

Photo taken of the Arkansas River in Tulsa, OK near the 11th Street Bridge / photo credit: susan smith nash

I was shocked but not disappointed.

This incarnation has not been easy. To all those who see me, I'm a homeless Native American veteran who lives in basement of the burned-out synagogue near Cheyenne Street, who brings bags of Friskies cat food to the feral cats and kittens who live under the 11th Street Bridge. I'm missing quite a few teeth, and people think I'm addicted to meth, but I'm not. I never do drugs. But, I do hear the angels and I do see messages in the clouds, the wind, the currents in the river, and in the song of the Channel Cat, that great, 40-pound bottom-dwelling riparian saint, whose body takes on the plastics, heavy metal, chicken farm excrement, and fertilizer run-off of the upper Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri watershed.

Note the ridge of resistant sandstone. photo: susan smith nash

The chair warmed up in the light of the Sun. The chair suggests what was there before, but now is gone.

But once the initial intrigue has passed, and you're no longer envisioning what was in the chair and why it was there, your focus directs itself to the platform (the riverbed) and to the water's qualities -- its clarity, its current, its surface expression, with ripples, splashes, and deviations around brush, trash, and trees.

The Arkansas River levels fluctuate based on Keystone Dam flood control activity / photo credit: susan smith nash

Narrative Accompanying the Installation: The Observer

What is foregrounded is the notion of what is relatively permanent -- what stays, what persists, what lives on -- when the body that was in the chair flies up and is potentially lifted up to meet its maker (the Rapture is one possible explanatory framework). What lives on after we are gone? And, what were we in the first place anyway?  The body is the wrapper around a mind that imagines itself to be a self; a package for consciousness.

But perhaps the consciousness is not really confined to that wrapper or package (or human body).

What is also foregrounded is the notion of the edge. Notice how the chair is at the edge of a ridge of a rock formation that constitutes part of the riverbed. The riverbed consists of layers of sediment and rock formations of variable resistance to erosion. The harder layers resist erosion. The softer layers are worn away and their grains are deposited in sand bars, points, and little mid-stream islands.

A Navajo sand painter is usually a medicine man of high rank and respectability in his community. The sand painting is a work of beauty, but that’s just part of the story. The purpose of it is to train the mind and to heal the body by means of aligning energies and pleasing the gods. The different worlds are represented, including the underworld, and the notions of past, present, and future come together. The flowing water, the eroding rock, the sand grains that flow down the river to deposit themselves here, and then redeposit themselves there, are very much a living sand painting, and if we sit in the chair so close to the rock and we let ourselves become one of those sand grains, we can find ourselves taken to where Nature wants us to go. We travel. We flow. We pause to nourish ourselves while we listen, sleep, and consider what we understand as reality in our small nook of the world.

Polysemous Interpretation from the Medieval Cleric

Literal / Historical: We see the literal presence of the chair sitting in the middle of the Arkansas River in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Tropological / Metaphorical: We see the metaphorical implications, and the tension between the permanent and the ephemeral.

Allegorical: There are the existential implications, and the issues of our fundamental ontological insecurity, which has to do with how we see beingness, becomingness, and what it takes to be real.

Anagogical: Then there are the anagogical interpretations, the ones having to do with the individual's progress toward salvation (using a model from the Medieval times, the Scholastics' mindset). The afterlife is at issue here, and yet, instead of coming to this interpretation last, as one would normally do, the "I Heard the Angels" refers to the Rapture, and thus the anagogical interpretation is the first one.

“I Married the Waiter” Vacation Romances

Podcast:  I Married the Waiter

I just finished watching one of the most heart-rending documentaries I’ve ever seen, although I am sure it was not the producer’s intention. It was an hour-long exploration of “vacation romances” entitled “I Married the Waiter,” which is, in my opinion, an absolutely inspired title.  What a cautionary tale, I thought, and I expected the hour to be filled with lonely or over-stressed English women swept off their feet by men who were the antitheses of the familiar, rather pedestrian and predictable English men of their own experiences.

I was not disappointed.  Only one literally married the waiter, and she was one of the few who had a happy ending. Her Turkish husband teamed up with her in a town in northern England and they set up a mini-bazaar. They had true team spirit, and it seemed like a true partnership with mutual regard. The other relationships seemed forged by lightning bolts into Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory that ignited long dead (and pretty much forgotten) flesh and fleshly libido, while shattering the glass ceilings of ambitious men who wanted to get somewhere in their lives.

The stories were painful, and I, for one, was filled with a “there but for the grace of God go I” feeling of relief.  It was the relief you feel when you what you thought was a shark swimming beneath you in the ocean turns out to be your own shadow.  In my own life, other cultures and other languages have held me in their thrall. I easily plunge into a state of fascination and heightened reality that feels like an awakening, and one in which I’m breathing pure oxygen while everything seems fresh, pure, transcendent.

My first experience with this experience happened when I was 16 and visited the Yucatan Peninsula with the Spanish club.  I was not actually studying Spanish, except on my own.  I was taking Latin and working ahead, but I liked the language, and most especially liked the book I had been reading, Incidents of Travel in Yucatan and Chiapas, by the 19th century U.S. government official and surveyor, John Lloyd Stephens, who was also a talented artist whose pen and ink drawings showed how tree-covered “hills” were in reality Mayan pyramids, long abandoned and forgotten by the indigenous peoples. I loved everything about that voyage of discovery.

I had also read every biography I could get my hands on that had to do with people traveling to Mexico. This particular fascination was fueled by Wednesday night Girls Ambassadors church services at Bethel Baptist Church in Norman, Oklahoma. We studied cultures and countries, met with missionaries and missionaries’ children.  

One particular daughter of missionaries had attended West Mid-High School with me during our 10th grade year.  I, who fetishized thinness, was astonished by her ability become absolutely skeletal. Looking back, I realize she was dangerously anorexic. I felt there was something terrible about her life in Guatemala, where her parents were missionaries.  Perhaps she was simply angry about being there.  That was what I thought at the time.  Later, I wonder if she had been subjected to some sort of violence. She was taciturn and dour, not at all friendly. I was shy and not likely to befriend her. So, I never quite knew what the backstory was.

I remember speaking with the tour guide who led us up the pyramid of Uxmal. He gave me his card and I started corresponding with him. I remember receiving letters from him. My heart would pound and I would attempt to read them. It was extremely motivating, and I started to buy the college textbooks for Spanish and teaching myself.  I never met him again, and I do not really remember his name. But, the letters ignited something within me that flowed when I played Scarlatti and imagined myself to travel in time back to the time of the Spanish court, where Domenico Scarlatti composed sonatas for his prodigy, the Princesa Maria Barbara.

The next year, my Spanish had dramatically improved, and my parents generously paid for a second Spring Break trip to Mexico with the Spanish Club.  I do not think they realized how almost criminally negligent our chaperones were. In fact, I do not even remember having chaperones.  While my classmates were binge-drinking and hanging together in packs, I was scurrying off on my own, engaging in conversations wherever I could. I gave my guardian angel a good case of post-traumatic stress syndrome, and came back home happy and without sunstroke, although I did suffer from the Montezuma’s revenge that no one ever hears about any more.

I did not marry anyone, nor did I have any physical relationships. But, I did write to a young chemical engineer I met.  I fantasized about what might happen in the future, and I continued to study Spanish and found myself increasingly drawn to the literature and the culture. I often wonder why I never did live or study in Latin America. But, my life definitely intruded, with marriage, divorce, education, jobs – and a rather turtle-like attitude.

The women in the documentary were definitely not turtles. When they finally poked their heads outside of cold, cloudy England and looked into the sun-kissed beaches and ancient souks of Morocco, Turkey, or the clear waters of the Aegean, they threw their shells into the breach and married, sometimes within a matter of weeks. They were brave, these women, all of whom were at a kind of breaking point when they went on their vacations. A few of the romances actually turned out well.  Most did not.

One woman, who was 71 when she married a 22-year-old young man from a small desert town in Morocco pretty much stated that she did it because she could not believe she was able to have a physical relationship that gave her so much magic. Well. Magic is not reality.  It did not work (not surprisingly). But, that’s what everyone would say. The magic is that it happened at all. I wonder if it was really worth it, though. She said, by her own account, that she has cried “buckets” of tears.  This makes me aware that there’s probably nothing more painful than a March – December romance when the woman is so much older. I was surprised that the rural family was so accepting of the relationship, but, well, there had to be some hopes for material improvement in their own lives. So – we all rise together, right? And, well, we must not forget that the traditional Muslim community is a collectivist society, and she probably did not realize that there would be other wives. She would simply be the first, who would potentially provide for the others.

I remember talking to an Uzbek engineer in Tashkent who was part of an infrastructure project funded partially by USAID.  He had two wives, and it was perfectly legal and acceptable in his world.  He said it was complicated because they maintained separate households, and it was expensive. I suppose he was not lucky enough to catch one with a big dowry.  

I often wonder what kind of personality Barack Obama’s mother had as a young woman. I always think of her as a young women who dodged a bullet.  Obama’s mother could have been like the young American woman, Lori Berenson, who fell in love with a radical in the Sendero Luminoso in Peru, and was convicted of trying to overthrow the Peruvian government. She served 15 years. I remember watching documentaries when she was in prison. Her parents were tireless in trying to free her, and finally their efforts paid off.  I imagine there are any number of young, idealistic, love-stricken Americans who were not so lucky.

It is easy to seduce both men and women into revolutionary causes. It’s not just for young men, such as Simon Bolivar, who absorbed the concepts of the French philosophes (Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, and Montesquieu), and then went back to Venezuela as a firebrand and liberator. It also intrigued the Beats, with Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. Mario Vargas Llosa’s semi-autobiographical novel, Travesuras de la nina mala, weaves in and out of the narrative of a young woman who found upward mobility through her revolutionary ideas. Jane Fonda seemed that way as well, and then one realizes she was not the tough woman she seemed to be, but instead brainwashed in a kind of psychological Stockholm syndrome. But, at the core, is passion. I think that’s the ultimate appeal. It’s Byronesque and it sells well.

But, back to the documentary. It’s hard to generalize, but many of the younger women were at a turning point in their lives. They had graduated from college. They had gone through a painful breakup. They had very stressful jobs. They wanted a life with more connections and flow of human warmth, and they saw the Greek, Turkish, and North African lives as warmer and more connected. The older women were made to feel beautiful and desirable, and of course they fell, and they fell hard.

What that says about women’s fundamental basis of self-worth is pretty tragic, if you ask me, but there it is.

Miners, Burros, Disobedient Robots and Our Cortical Homunculus

We were at the end of the tourist part of the 17th-century silver mine in Guanajuato, Mexico, and the guide would not answer my question: “What kept the enslaved miners from simply running away?”

I repeated it in a simpler way, spoke clearly and slowly to compensate for my accent and potentially odd usage.

He still skirted the issue. A guy next to me commented to me that he liked my question. I did, too, and I wanted it to be answered.

Mine in Guanajuato, Mexico 

“Now, I’m going to turn off the lights so you can experience absolute darkness.” Virtually every cave tour I’ve ever been on has featured this supposedly compelling experience.  I felt impatience stirring deep within me. How on earth did the overlords maintain so much social control. The conditions in the mine were horrific and people were deeply in debt to the mining company / company store. In fact, the same situation had certainly been replayed in Cornwall, Newcastle, Appalachia, and the gold mines of the western United States.

Was there really no spark of resistance or rebellion? Did rights only emerge when competing mines decided that having a peasant uprising (in the form of union rabble-rousers)  would be a great way to destabilize the competition (aka, the mine next door)?

In Isaac Asimov’s world, a good, self-respecting robot with outstanding artificial intelligence would disobey. The logic in the software in its controller would eventually find it impossible to continue a series of behaviors that are self-destructive (if it truly has artificial intelligence), and the commands going to the servo would eventually result in the servo will change its positions and with its little motor, trigger “disobedient” behaviors.

I also wondered why the burros in the mine never resisted or rose up against the cruel conditions. I have also wondered that about the big horses that have to wear blindfolds in bullfights. The blindfolded horses are used to run the bull in circles; surely if they could see the bull and the danger of being gored, they would opt for self-preservation. The horse wears padding, but if the bull is able to get his horns underneath, it is a grisly, bloody end.

The obvious answer is that they have no choice, and they are influenced by pain and a knowledge of the futility of escape. It breaks their spirit.

So, there we have the difference between a “wet” brain (human, animal) and a clean, electric brain. Again, to think of Asimov’s rules of robots, the programming that controls the servo in a robot is logical and never fails to be so. Any inner conflicts or logical impossibilities immediately surface because, and the cognitive dissonance can make for amusing, often absurd scenarios.

Robots in a mine or robot horses forced to participate in a robot bullfight that could result in destruction to the robot would not be tolerated. Robots do not know intimidation, servitude, nor do they embrace the concept of sacrifice and/or glory.

And, well, there’s that pesky self-destructive drive, which Freud called “thanatos.” It’s a “death drive” and while one can hardly take Freud at face value any more, the concept / metaphors manifest themselves every time we go to the news and see examples of seemingly senseless violence.  Hooliganism, random attacks, and shear truculence displayed for no better reason than a generalized pique or overstimulation brought on by sleep deprivation or ingested chemicals – all are so common that they no longer surprise, except when yet another talk show host interviews yet another sociologist or medical researcher who claims to have a solution.

I tried to put myself in the place in the miner working in Guanajuato. Life expectancy was low. In fact, one could expect to have silicosis of the lungs by age 30-something. It reminded me of the 19th century English factory conditions described by Elizabeth Glaskell in North and South. Before one’s spirit is broken completely, or the idea of being bonded in a kind of community of fellow-sufferers, one is able to envision freedom, at least in the sense of variety and self-determination.

Even without the idea of shaming, extreme physical punishment, and potential reprisals to family, it’s easy to keep the miners in the mine. At least that’s what I observe. If the doors to the prison are suddenly open, how many people will leave? All, yes, but their mental prisons will stay with them forever.

To really experience freedom, we need to study the programming of the controller of robots. We need to experiment with including behaviors that are mutually damaging and create inner conflict.

For example, we could program a computer to do a task, but at conditions that are too hot or too cold, to automatically shut down. We could also include a random trigger of certain behaviors that would always overheat the robot, and that the task must be done without responding to automatic turn-off subroutines. Which would win? It’s a battle between a digital scorpion and a digital tarantula.

Deep inside the mine in Guanajuato, I feel myself thinking about the gardens, flowering trees, music, and fountains on the surface. The town itself is charming, and it must have been equally so in the 18th century. Living on the surface would be infinitely preferable to working underneath. I would run away.

To do so, I’d need to consult with my little homunculus (as in Goethe’s Faustus) and ask the “little human” to guide me and direct me to resist when things are destructive / self-destructive.

I’d also like to examine the functions of the cortical homunculus, the neurological map of the brain in which the different parts of the brain are connected to the parts of the body. There are two kinds of cortical homunculus: there is the motor and then the sensory. What happens if we rewire that part of ourselves? What if we somehow re-wire the connections between our sensory and motor cortices and our bodies?


I’d like to think that we can start to have different perceptions, and then arrive at different opinions about what is likely to happen to us. I like to think of a possibility for cognitive and motor freedom.

But, I could be wrong.

A few days ago I saw a man fall to the hard pavement in a convenience store parking lot. He hit his head on a car parked at his side, and then began having a very intense seizure. It is possible that his brain rewired itself, and the seizure was the result. It was very sad to watch, and I moved as quickly as I could. First, though, I went inside the store to make sure that someone had called 911. In fact, I was going to call 911 myself, but then realized that too many calls for the same situation could be counterproductive.

We live inside our own minds, which mediate reality by imposing fantasies, thoughts, aspirations. Plus, we think simultaneously in the past, future, and present. A robot is not going to suffer from such messy and distracting algorithmic “junk.”

But, those contradictions are perhaps what make our lives sweet. But, to really experience the best our minds have to offer, we have to deliberately go about defeating our own minds and mental processes. We have to beat our brains at their own game.

It’s the only way to be a disobedient robot, or be a bullfighter horse recently relieved of his blindfold.

Run! Resist!
In other words, Think! Innovate! Reshape! Recreate!

**********************

Juxtapositions -- enchanted garden on the surface above the Inquisition torture chambers below. Fascinating history in Guanajuato, Mexico.

Merchants of Light

I'm in Dumas, Texas, at the Window on the Plains Museum, and I'm thinking about Francis Bacon's The New Atlantis, written in England in 1623. It is a resolutely utopian work of thought and political philosophy, and I'm struck by the role of the "Merchants of Light" -- individuals whose job it is to traverse the world for intellectual treasures and to bring them back to share, and to create repositories of knowledge and learning.




YouTube Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wiv8q5pXtzM

Recommended sites:
http://elearnqueen.blogspot.com/2009/04/blending-mobile-technologies-handhelds.html

Interview with Veronica Inoue, Learning Review

Welcome to an interview with Veronica Inoue, managing editor and director of Learning Review, the first publication in Spanish dedicated to elearning. The interview appears here in both Spanish and English.

1. What is your name and what is your connection to e-learning?
Soy Verónica Inoue y me desempeño como Directora Editorial de Learning Review, una publicación que aborda los temas de capacitación y desarrollo con nuevas tecnologías, donde se incluye el e-Learning. Learning Review comenzó como una revista latinoamericana y ahora ya tiene una edición completamente exclusiva para España. Además, soy alumna de una Maestría por e-learning y realizo otras actividades a veces como tutora y otras como participante.

I am Verónica Inoue and I’m the Editorial Director of Learning Review, a publication that presents themes of training and development with new technologies, which incluyes e-learning. Learning Review began as a Latin American magazine, and now it has an edition that is completely exclusive for Spain. In addition, I have a master’s degree in elearning, and I am often involved in other activities; sometimes as instructor, and sometimes as participant.

2. How did you first become involved in the topic of e-learning?
Estudié Recursos Humanos en la Universidad y vimos este tema en la cátedra de Capacitación. Dado el interés que me causó este tema (allá por el año 2001), realicé mi tesis en este tema; investigué sobre las implementaciones que se estaban haciendo en distintos ámbitos en Argentina en ese momento.

I studied Human Resources at the university and we say this theme in the department of Training and Development. Given the interest that this topic inspired in me (back in 2001), I decided to do my thesis in this area. I investigated the way that elearning was being implemented in several different areas in Argentina at that moment in time.

3. What is the Learning Review LatinoAmerica, and how did it come into existence?
Learning Review Latinoamérica es una publicación sobre capacitación y desarrollo mediado por tecnologías (e-learning, m-learning, blended learning, educación en mundos virtuales 3D), así como sobre mejora del desempeño humano, gestión del conocimiento y capital intelectual. Produce una revista trimestral en papel para toda Latinoamérica, un newsletter mensual con noticias, eventos y adelantos de la edición en papel, y un sitio web que se actualiza diariamente. (www.learningreview.com).

Learning Review Latin America is a publication that covers technology-mediated training and development (elearning, mobile learning, blended learning, and education in 3D virtual worlds), with the goal of improving human performance, the development of knowledge and intellectual capital.

Learning Review Latinoamérica nació para cubrir la necesidad de información y actualización que demandaban los profesionales de capacitación y desarrollo de las empresas de esta región. Es la primera revista sobre esta temática específicamente, en habla hispana.

4. What is the magazine's primary mission? Who is your target audience? Why?
Our primary mission is to be the partner enables training and development professionals to demonstrate the commercial value of their skills and specialties. We would like to establish a space where training and development professionals find, in a single place, all the information they need to keep current. We also aim to share experiences, trends, research, opinions and news in the training and development sector, that boost one’s knowledge in a continuous and accessible way.

Nuestra misión principal es ser el socio que permita a los profesionales de capacitación y desarrollo rentabilizar las prácticas de su área, así como generar impacto en el negocio.
Establecer un espacio donde los profesionales de capacitación y desarrollo encuentren, en un solo lugar, toda la información para mantenerse actualizados.
Difundir las experiencias, tendencias, investigaciones, opiniones y novedades del sector de capacitación y desarrollo de personas, que permitan crear conocimiento en forma continua y accesible.

Our target audience consists of the following:

Directors of human resources
Training and development managers
Directors of consulting groups that specialize in e-learning, corporate training, continuing education
Leaders of e-learning proejcts
Instructional designers and instructional technologists who work in e-learning projects
Chairs and others responsable for human resources careers and those affiliated with universities that offer e-learning

El target de nuestra audiencia conforma:
· Directores de recursos humanos.
· Gerentes de capacitación y desarrollo.
· Directores de consultoras de e-learning, capacitación corporativa, educación continua.
· Lideres de proyectos de e-learning.
· Diseñadores instruccionales y tecnólogos que trabajen en proyectos de e-learning.
· Responsables de carreras de RRHH y afines de universidades con oferta presencial y por e-learning.

5. What do you see as the most exciting new directions in elearning in Latin America today?
Creo que finalmente está insertándose en la mayoría de las empresas medianas y grandes. Latinoamérica siempre se encuentra uno o dos pasos atrás de las tendencias mundiales que suelen darse inicialmente, en Estados Unidos, Europa, Japón. Entonces, si bien en las grandes empresas el e-learning es un hecho y ya están yendo en busca de integrar el m-learning o los mundos virtuales, en las empresas medianas está iniciándose el proceso de incorporación y de integración a la modalidad presencial de capacitación. Desde muchos gobiernos de países latinoamericanos, se está comenzando a incentivar estas prácticas de e-learning, principalmente desde la incorporación de esta modalidad de aprendizaje a instituciones públicas. De hecho ya hay interesantes casos de e-learning gubernamental en Latinoamérica.

I believe that elearning is finally being incorporated in the majority of mid-sized and large companies. Latin America always seems to find itself a step or two behind global trends that tend to

6. What are some of the main barriers?
Lamentablemente, la conectividad sigue siendo una de las barreras más difíciles de quebrar en esta región. El problema nunca está en las capitales de los países o las grandes urbes, sino en las pequeñas poblaciones más alejadas de los centros urbanos.
También falta mucho más incentivo, capacitación, iniciativas por parte de los distintos ministerios o dependencias del gobierno (los ministerios de educación, de trabajo, deberían generar políticas y ponerlas en práctica para hacer de esto una cuestión de interés nacional).
Y por supuesto, no puedo dejar de mencionar la barrera cultural que en muchos países aún se torna como principal dificultad. En este sentido será fundamental el rol y la posición que tomen las universidades y los colegios; integrar el e-learning en la educación (en todas las etapas) es fundamental para ir rompiendo esta barrera cultural.

Sadly, connectivity continues to be one of the most difficult barriers to overcome in this region. The problem never occurs in the capitals of countries, or in the large cities, but in the small population centers more distant from the urban centers. Also lacking are incentives, training, and initiatives on the part of different ministries or branches of the government (ministries of education and of labor should generate policies and put them in practice in order to make this a question of national interest.)

Of course, I must not fail to mention a cultural barrier that in many countries still presents itself as the principle difficulty. In this sense, the role and the position that the universities and high schools take is absolutely fundamental. It is important to integrate elearning into education (at all stages) because it is vital in order to go forth breaking down cultural barriers.

7. How can more people have access to elearning?
Esta es una pregunta que es sencilla de responder; el problema es poder poner en práctica aquello que decimos (que es lo más difícil en Latinoamérica). El e-learning puede hacerse accesible a más gente si se pueden concretar iniciativas desde distintos frentes: gobierno, empresas privadas, instituciones académicas. Todos estos actores tienen una responsabilidad social; en este caso, hablando sobre e-learning, su responsabilidad es hacer del e-learning algo accesible. ¿Cómo? A través de capacitación online en cibercafés (que están muy difundidos en toda Latinoamérica); integrando esta modalidad en todas las cátedras de las universidades; promoviendo la capacitación online en centros comunitarios (ya sea tengan o no Internet); integrando el e-learning en la escuela (primaria y secundaria) y sobre todo capacitando a los maestros y profesores.

This is a question that's easy to answer, but the problem is having the power to put into practice what we're talking about (which is most difficult in Latin America). E-Learning can be made more accessible to more people if it's possible to firm up initiatives on different fronts: government, private industry, academic institutions. All the parties have a social responsibility; in this case, speaking of e-learning, the responsibility is to make elearning something that is accessible. How? Through online training in cybercafes (which are widely available throughout Latin America); integrating elearning in all university departments; promoting online training in community centers (whether or not they already have Internet); integrating elearning in primary and secondary schools, and above all, training teachers and professors.

8. What would you like to see happen in the future?
Me gustaría ver que en Latinoamérica se aprovechen todas las oportunidades y ventajas que tiene el e-learning y el blended learning, no solo en las grandes empresas sino en todos los sectores.