Interviews

Organizational Learning and Instructional Technology (OLIT) is a program that combines several areas of learning in organizations. That is individual, team and organizational learning plus how we use technologies for developing learning environments; so, we include distance learning, e-learning and multimedia development. Our mission is to educate adults to work in different organizations, to train them in instructional design for different learning environments; work processes, such as team development and delivery of instruction; use of new technologies, new platforms and knowledge management, and processes related to training and development, so that they can also function as human resources development people in different organizations. In short, we facilitate lifelong learning in adults and also train these adults to facilitate lifelong learning in others.

This is not the first time you have visited the UOC, what are the main reasons for your current visit?

Our program is a combination of theory and practice. We are very interested in developing communities of practice. Here at the UOC, I’m going to talk about an instructional design model that we’ve developed called WISCO (Wisdom Communities). How do you develop wise communities online? Can communities really share experience and expertise? And, how do you assess that learning has taken place and that these communities have become wise, transformed themselves and changed their perspectives? Our model looks to give an answer to these questions.

Traditional instructional design models are called ADDIE (Analyze Design Development Implementation and Evaluation). Many of these ADDIEs don’t give you many guidelines and there are many inherent problems with them, because they don’t consider learners as individuals, with different learning styles. If you are using social constructivism while designing instructional models, ADDIE models fall short. With my doctorate students, we realized that if you want your community to become wise, you have to develop a community base, a cohesive community; surrounding that community you need certain kinds of support like mentoring: help of each other, help of external people, help of instructor, etc. Another important concept is the different types of learner support, which addresses communication issues or media and technology use. In the WISCO model, it is also very important to capture knowledge that the community creates while working together; ie, knowledge management.

One of your fields of research is cross-cultural communication. What did you find out in your inquires?

Culture is a very fascinating topic to research. As we open ourselves globally, through e-learning, we have diverse audiences and we must confront different cultural contexts. In the context of online environment you must define culture a little bit differently; it’s a cyberculture, a hybrid culture developed as a result of interaction. For example, knowing the country people are from does not help us to identify a culture online. Online, people can play different roles, they can change their identity. Also, through interaction with each other they might change their cultural context and one group can develop a culture of their own. An important finding was the concept of “social presence”. When people go online to interact with others, one of the main concerns is: “How do I let the other person get a sense of who I am?” Many communicants online spend their time figuring out this question, in a way to get connected with others. The degree to which you feel connected to another person is social presence.   

If people don’t show their real identity, do they still feel connected to each other?

In cybercultures, and when there is anonymous communication, people often don’t show their real selves or prefer to change a little bit their personality. Only after trust is built, they reveal their true identity. What I’ve learned in my research, in terms of designing online communities, is that trust-building and self-disclosure are very important. Therefore, during the first two weeks of my classes, I have activities for my students to build their community, so they don’t feel alienated from the group.

Do sociocultural factors affect online communities?

Well, ICTs divide: not everybody has access to this technology or feel comfortable with it. Also, language divides. A very important factor that I’d like to investigate further is what Hofstede called “power distance”, the degree of power that separates each other in our societies. In online media, people don’t look much at each other in terms of status. My research in Monterrey, Mexico, where society has a high power distance between individuals, showed me that this societies look for the online medium as one in which it equalizes the power structures. People in online groups prefer to know about their role in the learning environments, to judge themselves for their contributions in this environment, rather than finding out who they are in real life. If the poor get into online communities, there is the possibility of the environment to equalize differences between rich and poor. In Morocco, men and women do not mix much before they get married, due to the social structures, and engaged couples meet each other for first time on the day of the wedding. Online media enable them to know each other better; furthermore, they also allow people who don’t have a voice to discuss political issues in forums.

How do you see the future of education in a global framework?

I think there are positive and negative things with this digital revolution. Positive is this whole concept of networking minds: before, we were not able to truly have, for an extended period of time, a dialog between people in other countries. Through interdisciplinary work we can create new knowledge, which will far surpass what we can create individually. We can identify and solve world problems like water, poverty, wars... As we are doing now, I can work in collaborative research with UOC’s investigators. On the other hand, I think we alienate ourselves from the people who do have not access, in terms of technological or psychological access. This is our challenge, to make this access equitable, if we really want to make paramount use of these digital technologies.