Intro al Aprendizaje Digital

El día de hoy voy a desarrollar una conversación que incluye unos asuntos íntimos que no los he compartido en el canal, como por ejemplo,  de dónde viene y como nació está expresión que ilumina el podcast la de KolaborAccion. A pesar que la historia ya tiene tantos años, voy a aprovecharla para introducir las motivaciones que en ese momento dieron a la creación de lo que para entonces era simplemente un portal web.  Desde allí, llevarlo a lo que serán varios de las sesiones que vamos a comenzar a desarrollar en largo de las siguientes semanas que van a centrarse en por qué es importante convertir en experiencias demostrativas en la educación en medio de la interacción digital, y como ello también se puede extender no solamente a los procesos de enseñanza - aprendizaje, sino a todos los de gestión de conocimiento.

In the transcript label, you will be able to find the full-text episode in English. 

Transcript

Digital Learning & Knowledge Management 

Today I will develop a conversation that includes some intimate issues I have not shared on the channel, such as where it comes from and how it was born.  This expression illuminates the KolaborAccion podcast. 

Although the story is already so many years old, I will take advantage of it to introduce the motivations that led to the creation of what was then simply a web portal.  Then, covering several of the sessions that we will begin to develop over the following weeks, focusing on how to turn education into concrete experiences amid digital interaction.  This can also be extended to the teaching-learning processes and to all knowledge management processes.  So welcome to this chapter.  Let's take up the story and look ahead.

In 2007 Hess and Ostrom stated: "At the dawn of the 21st century, new technologies will transform how students learn, professors teach, researchers question and documenters deliver resources to support the academy.  The most important contemporary academic change is to make digitally-mediated education the common practice in constructing knowledge".

2007 doesn't seem like a long time ago, but with the number of transformations we have lived through in this decade and a half since then, it looks like a whole generation.  In 2007, I was the Facultad Latinoamericanas en Ciencias Sociales at FLACSO's academic headquarters in Ecuador, taking my second year of a Ph.D. in Social Sciences with an emphasis in Interdisciplinary Studies.  Those who have lived the experience of doctoral studies, especially when facing the work of thesis development and archive building, will remember how lonely that experience is.  It could be overwhelming, and in many cases, we face a need to find mechanisms to alternate academic activities.  Other exercises often become almost therapeutic.

Thus, in 2007, I started documenting a previous decade of collaborative academic research.  I carried out this work throughout Colombia, in areas highly affected by the internal armed conflict and in emerging urban development cities.  It became an opportunity to test methodologies and technologies for social innovation and digital inclusion.

This is how in 2007, I decided to create a portal called KolaborAccion to share those methodologies and the results we had obtained working with such a diverse population.

This portal was selected (by Flacso Andes) as one of the best portals for disseminating scientific knowledge in social sciences, with the purpose of popularization and open access to that knowledge.  This favorable and unexpected result follows with training other researchers in mechanisms to disseminate, transform and transliterate the results of academic research so that it becomes a resource for social action.

Thus KolaborAccion was born almost 15 years ago, just with the development of Web 2.0 and all the opportunities for collaborative work that arose from then.  Today, we are amid "the new normal" after the confinement by the COVID-19 pandemic that disrupted and transformed much of the teaching and learning spaces throughout the world for more than two years.  Today we ask ourselves if we have indeed changed in these 15 years how students learn, researchers question, and documentarians share information? 

This podcast was born out of concerns about my observations in Canada and Colombia during the pandemic regarding digital media's accelerated and intensive incorporation into educational settings.   The conclusion to the opening question is that perhaps we do not have enough validated and systematic information to answer it positively. 

Indeed, we have witnessed a significant increase in the incorporation of devices and content in what we now call a sort of hyper-abundance of mediations.

They have configured and documented experiences of what we now know as "Informational Overload" or "Cognitive Overload."  due to the increased content and mediations incorporated in teaching and learning processes. By this, I do not mean that we are learning more and better, researching more collaboratively, and sharing and disseminating better results in education and research.

Here are three significant areas of development that still have a long way to improve and have great opportunities at the forefront of all learning processes. First, if we overcome the idea that teaching and learning are just the articulation and transmission of content will be consumed and validated through evaluation. 

Let us understand education and teaching and learning, together with research, as an experience of continuous knowledge management and learning as a constant flow. There would be three dimensions that we could take into consideration:

1. The digital management of that knowledge that we want to co-create. 

2. The digital learning skills we can enhance around using the available technological resources. 

3. The dynamization of the knowledge construction experience and learning in digitally mediated collaborative interaction communities. 

Digital knowledge management, digital learning skills, and digital learning communities are the three areas of development. They, I believe, still have a long way to go and a lot of work to do. But, of course, the same spirit of collaborative action in education and research work makes sense when we develop experiences in digital academic networks.

Now, a very brief introduction to these 3 + 1 critical dimensions in the processes of knowledge management and teaching and learning is mediated by the intensive use of digital didactics. We will develop chapters within the podcast, reflections, interviews, and case studies. 

Today I will introduce the first dimension: digital knowledge management.   Here it is essential to think beyond the common practice of digital repositories, which facilitate access to the knowledge already produced. Here we refer to the method of collaborative construction of that knowledge and its management.  

It is essential to consider that in this phase, two fundamental facts are emphasized: the first is that there are more and more organizations, environments, and people whose daily performance is crossed by the intensive use of distributed and disaggregated information; secondly, many of the processes that are developed with such attributes are articulated to growing demands of production, systematization, and visibility of that knowledge. The volumes and stocks are such that it is only possible to account for such commitments through an appropriate combination of management strategies with digital media.

To make this possible in the strategy we are going to cover, we consider five pillars: 

1- Text analysis 

2- Digital consultation 

3- Multimedia resource management 

4- Localization and contextualization 

5- Multi-format content management 

Let's look at each of these five components: 

The first is digital consultation. The first aspect of raising is the importance acquired by the great variety of existing options for developing online consultation and capturing information in real-time. 

It seems a long time ago when the consultation was only possible in an analogical way when we had to go to archives, take pictures, and get printed material. Today, more than fifteen years after Web 2.0, queries can be made as a collaborative practice with open metadata. Furthermore, now with the development associated with "natural language" platforms with artificial intelligence and the emerging Web 3.0, we have the possibility of the algorithm doing the query for us. In other words, fundamental changes are happening. Which, of course, should force changes in skills, procedures, and platforms for each digital consultation practice we develop in teaching and learning processes.

The second aspect typically part of the daily practice of teachers, professors-researchers, and students is the analysis of texts. Although in research programs, in particular, we tend to privilege consultation through surveys, the reason for this is that these are considered more easily structured and parameterizable. On the other hand, it is believed that the analysis of open texts with qualitative information is time-consuming to process, and the results are not very systematic. All of the above may be true, as long as we lack the appropriate strategies and tools to make this process much more efficient and valuable in academic circles and decision-making.  

Today again, not only with the existing resources in qualitative data analysis and mining but also with the resources for machine intelligence-assisted processing, the possibility of analyzing and processing open text has been profoundly transformed. This has advanced to such an extent that discussions have even arisen as to whether some components of the scientific method, particularly content queries as part of the theoretical framework, are still relevant. For example, suppose a researcher replaces 50 or 60 percent of his time in document review today with artificial intelligence resources. In that case, this critical human research task can potentially be replaced by an algorithm. In this sense, what remains of the research practice regarding cross-referencing documents with the results of previous research. Thus, many transformations are taking place in text analysis. It is worth considering them to rethink what research means today, especially in the social sciences and humanities. 

The third pillar that we mentioned within the Digital Knowledge Management dimension is the localization and contextualization of the knowledge being co-created and produced. One of the most significant contemporary challenges is establishing enriched relationships between the context, content, and place of production, consumption, and circulation of knowledge. Knowledge production is not a distant "Olympus" unaffected by the conditions of the production process and, above all, by those who produce it. Such a position puts distance from the profound implications of how our environment, our place of enunciation, and the historical conditions that influence knowledge production.  

We can take advantage of tracking the production chains around research results. Either to establish relationships between the indexing system, to indicate who are the centers of production, who produce more, and who are more visible in those indexed systems.  

We need to use it to open up the implications of the relationships that constitute the proximity relationships in the processes of knowledge construction. This is how the arrival of modular, open-source applications of the new No-Code movement allows us to develop "workflows" and forms of referencing. 

We can integrate different processes of knowledge production that will enable them to open the sources of consultation, the instruments, and the way they are constructed. Above all, the stakeholder's participation.   The expansion of conditions of connectivity and access for the use of new devices, and above all, guaranteeing the social appropriation of this knowledge. 

In this way, we could establish a relationship between the forms of production, their historical contexts, and the proximity environments open to cooperation. I believe we will be making a significant leap in today's growing interest in the so-called "social appropriation of knowledge ."On this subject, we will also dedicate a chapter to the podcast.  

The fourth component of digital knowledge management is multimedia management. This is no longer a matter only of a Designer; Designer Mentality and Computational Thinking are among the critical 21st-century skills. In this sense, one of the two most significant in managing and sustaining new forms of information and knowledge has to do with taking advantage of the multiplication of formats and media through which content is built and shared.

The potential of the convergence of media and mediations is wasted if such a variety of produced pieces are not available through consultation, recovery, and co-creation systems. We need to facilitate their use and growth of the impact in communication and social benefit of such resources.

Currently, we all have multiple resources in front of us. Although some variation in the level of sophistication and technical capacity is required, many do not demand technical skills. The opportunity lies in taking advantage of co-creation, use, open distribution, and appropriation of knowledge enriched through the convergence of media and mediations.

Finally, the fifth component in digital knowledge management is image repositories. I mention that the image has ceased to be a mere complement of learning processes to become a fundamental resource of expression and information exchange. In this sense, the proper management of logs of capture files in different formats: photographs, and representations of real-life objects, is an essential resource. But its use and exploitation also require new skills and new interfaces. These are increasingly incorporating machine intelligence resources that make it possible to make maximum use of the image as a fundamental source of information.  

We end this brief description of the first dimension, which is part of the new season of reflections and interviews that we will develop in the following weeks. Today, we simply introduce the digital management of knowledge; in the next chapter, we will present another of the dimensions within the new discussion areas that we will develop throughout this season; thank you for your attention.