Oriol Miralbell's_research » Knowledge generation

Research Project – a third explanation

Oriol Miralbell — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 08:34:32 +0000

Here’s the link to the document that explains the research project of my PhD Thesis, on which I’m working since 2 years.
I’ve gathered most empyrical data after an intense fieldwork and I hope to start writing my conclusions the next fall.
This month of August I will write on the methodological arguments, which are the main contribution of my thesis (in my opinion).
You can download the project explanation from this link

Launching the NEW survey of my research

Oriol Miralbell — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 12:38:02 +0000

After more than two years working on the theoretical framework for my PhD research on “Evaluating Online Social Networks in generating knowledge among tourism professionals”, together with my two directors Dr. Francesc González Reverté and Dr. Jaume Guia, i’ve reached the point to launch the survey which is the first visible part of the epirical study.

I’m happy to be at the point where the first outcomes are visible, after this long period of readings and discussions, of questioning and asking to experts and friends about online social networks as learning environments.
I’m really excited on the possible results of the analysis I will do once I receive the information from you, the experts. At the same time, I fear I won’t ger enough responses from all of you.
This is a fantastic opportunity to learn about the web 2.0 tools and to have a better picture from this new and still unknown Network Society. I have found in this study one of the most exciting intellectual activities I’ve ever had. It has stressed from me all the rational and intellectual abilities I had, if I ever had one. It has kept me connected to the issue all time I was awakened and sometime in my dreams too.
Thus I want this project to finish with a set of conclusions that can help us all, users, academics, experts and, in general, followers of the web 2.0 and the social media and of e-learning to get more from it.
I’d like to invite you to participate in this survey that is directed to all those professionals, business people, academics, consultants, experts and lovers of tourism, that use online social networks to communicate and learn.

Here’s the link for the survey in SPANISH and here’s it ENGLISH.

I want to thank you in advance for your help by answering to this survey, that will take you only 15 minutes of your time.
I WISH YOU A PEACEFUL XMAS TIME AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR

Two days networking and learning at the PDF_EU in Barcelona

Oriol Miralbell — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 15:59:40 +0000

Approaching te last session of the PDF_EU forum (Personal Democracy Forum Europe, 09) celebrated at the Torre Agbar in Barcelona, I start to feel that things get repeated, though the final outcome is incredibly reach.
During two days, this forum that started in New York some years ago in its US version,the European one has taken advantage of the knowledge and excperience of US professionals and organizations in making e-democracy and e-activism something useful for society, but also has shown the most emerging and succesful examples of e-activism inicitaitives in Europe, giving their promoters and managers he opportunity to explain their insights and to speak abou their experience.
In the debates, many issues came into foreground, but especially the specific reality of Europe’s politics compared to the ones in the US. The Obama campaign that has been the star for months among the e-democracy campaigns (and still is) has shed lots of doubts and disapointments to Europeans when looking at our e-political reality, right when the new and first EU President has been elected in such a dark and undemocratic way.
The deficit of democracy in European Institutions and the problems to separe citizens’ democratic avtivism and institutional policy, brought us also to more empirical discussions like the communication problem that cause 23 different official languages inside the EU. There’s a discouraged view of most experts in regards on making Europe’s e-democracy strategies coherently active at a global European level, however there exist several good projects at a national level.

I want to go through the positngs of most participants in PDF_EU and then make a broader and deeper report on what has been discussed in this forum, though I’d like to advance that many new things have been said in PDF_EU that will, probably change the attitudes and hopes of many of the activists that make e-democracy posible in Europe. Or at least, I hope so!

CCK09 Eluminate session on Nov, 19

Oriol Miralbell — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:13:40 +0000

The great Eluminate session today with George Siemens shed some light into my doubts, but it also raised lots of questions that will require long tinking before putting them in order.
The session was the most active and participative I’ve seen in Eluminate thanks to George’s moderation and the dynamics he cretated on people inviting to write on the board, and raising questions directly to the audience.
The participation was, sometimes, chaotic, but it also showed what our technologies are still missing. I felt that in F2F collective sessions we have natural skills in identifying the origin of the messages, and we can concentrate in what we have interest on, whilst we can ignorate what we don’t want to listen to. In a digital synchronous session this is much more difficult.
The voice and the spoken language are an environment where we feel comfortable and we can even pay attention to two messages that are give simultaneously, even if we don’t get all of them. On the opporite side, I feel that our vision focuses and concnmtrates more in one direction and we miss all those messages that are out of scope. This doesn’t happen with oral communication.
On the other hand, vision and sound lets us idntify what and when things are happening. In a social event we learn that there exist protocols and latent rythms that we have to follow. In a session running only with sound and chatting, even with collaboration board, like Eluminate, these protocols and rhythms are less evident.
For the first time, after e-lecturing for several years, I felt that IT have to provide much more instruments to build rules and protocols similar to the ones developped in presential meetings, if we like to collaborate simultaneously on a digitla way.
Most of the issues raised by George where reinforcing my questions and also did the many messages wtitten by the other participants on the board or in the chat area.
We were dicussing about methodological concepts for teaching and collaborative learning, whilst the problems that emerged in the discussion where more practical and empyrical. It was a great feeling beeing in such a metaphor of collaborative learning experiment.
Thanks to George Siemens and to the rest of the moderators, and to all the coursemates.

Freedom in Internet

Oriol Miralbell — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:58:26 +0000

Never before freedom was so threatened in Internet like now. The European Parliament has refused to legislate letting this decision to the country members individually, in punish or not (with no need to follow judiciary procedures) file downloaders in their country. Besides that this is a strange decission (borders are easily broken in Internet). it is the recognition that Europe has not a clear policy on how to deal with freedom in the web. Though we could also identify a consequence. If the European Parliament refuses to act in this isssue it may be because they don’t consider it as a subject that fits in their competencies. Commerce and consumer protection are fundamentals comnpetencies of the European authorities. Thus, we could understand that Europe does not see this as an issue that affects commercial or consumer regulation. So we are back to a no man’s land’s legislation. Who is competent in this issue?
Meawhile, some countries, like Spain are punishing in advance all the people who buy any CD, DVD (even if users don’t copy any other file than their ownes) and the electronic equipments to work with them, with a “canon” that goes to the agencies in charge for defending authorship.
This irrational behaviour of governments like tha Spanish one, is the consequence of the lobbying of the record companies and media producers and distruibutors, that are refusing to accept that market rules have changed. After decades of controling the market, these big conmpanies like SONY, Universal, etc., are affraid that people now can decide how they want the market to function. Not from upside down, but with bottom-up decisions.
But let’s see what this new scenario has cuased. In most places, there have never been so many concerts like now, and this is thanks to the power of Internet in spreading music more effectively than ever before. There are more movie makers in the world now and more films viewed (from short cheap-produced videos to megaproduction from Hollywood) produced than ever before and this happens thanks to the new technological paradigm and the power of Internet spreading all these videos.
We can imagine on who is losing and who wins. The majority of the people win, because knowledge is shared and distributed, fostering, at th same time indicidual and public initiatives that make innovation possible and help creativity to become more visible than ever. Only these few business man, loose their privilege of beeing the ones who could control the market, fixing prices, and censoring all those musicians and other artists that were not submissive enough.
From the business side, the growth of art industry is also an indicator that this market is healthy and is creating wealth and giving opportunities to many people to work and earn money. Though this is a better distributed business. With less concentration of benefits and more facilities for new players to enter the market. So, what governments are trying to legislate is not protecting authors’s rights but protecting a model that doesn’t work anymore.

There’s a perverse strategy that music and film companies are using in this regard. They pretend to compare file sharing with stealing cds or dvds. This strategy goes parallel to a campaign to convince, first the authors that they got stolen, and second to governments, drawing a false picture that says that this is a crime and it has to be prosecuted.
I call this a perverse strategy because it places a completely new way of communicating under the law of old ways of commeerce. But even so, their strategy is fake and corrupt, because they’ve never prooved that there’s a direct consequence on the decision of people to stop buying cds and dvds with file sharing. In fact there is not s direct relation between these two facts. The growth of the music business in Internet has not stopped file sharing, thus we can see rather a direct cuase of these changes in the first rule of commerce: “value for money”. Cds and DVDs don’t provide to the customers enough value foe the money they have to pay.
Could we imagine a campaign like this sixty years ago, where record companies could have started a cmpaign against broadasters because they were pushing people out from buying vinil records? Obviously not, and for two main reasons: first, because music producers had not such control over the market, and second because they saw an oportunity rather than a threat in broadcasting music over the radios.
Why do these companies do not see in Internet an opportunity as they saw it decades ago. Just because the Internet is giving much more power to the consumer than ever before, and they are reluctant to become more flexible and invest money in new strategies.
Though we all know that companies like iTunes or Spotify, two major succesful services of music on the Internet, have reached agreements with the biggest music producers. Music cpmanies have more than one strategy: supporting the emergence of new markets in Internet and lobbying to force governments to prosecute file sharing.

In my opinion they want to get rid of their stocks gaining time for it, while they know that the present situation has no turn back. Music or video file sharing cannot be a crime or cause dammage to any author, because it is a social action. I’m convinced that this idea will prevail because it has been the grounding philosophy of Internet and the engine that has made of this networking tool the global miracle of the last decade. What cosnumers will be reasy to pay is “value for money”. IN music, as in other industries, Internet has cuased de-intermediation and re-intermediation, and this is the oaradigm that companies have to gace to find their opportunity.

It ’s true that Internet has pushed many people to change their jobs, and many companies to change their strategies. The same as in earlier times did the steam engine . The only difference is that this changes have occurred globally and in a much shorter lap of time.

How many lifes do we live in one day?

Oriol Miralbell — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:44:09 +0000

Every morning when I get up (i’ts difficult to say what I look like, because I hate to get up early) I get more and more surprised by the huge amount of twitts and blog posts, and the updates in facebook from my friends and people I follow. It’s incredible how these messages can bring me into so many different lifes- They use to happen close to me, or maybe at the other side of the world. It doesn’t matter because all these lifes are related to mine. The same as these toughts are linked to mines.
So, at the end of the day I’m exhausted but happy because I’ve lived so many lifes in one day.
It’s great to have all these hundreds digital friends and mentors in the big social network of my life.
Thanks to all of them!

Las organizaciones abiertas y la generación de conocimiento

Oriol Miralbell — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 11:12:18 +0000

Parece mentira que aún con la cantidad de redes y contactos lejanos que la gente tiene en Internet, se siga pensando que las organizaciones de cualquier tipo pueden generar conocimiento y ganar competitividad de igual manera.

El otro día, des de la web de CitiLab en Cornellà presentaban la entrevista a David Starck, profesor y experto en innovación en las organizaciones. David Stark, tiene en alguno de sus artículos referencias a la importancia de que las organizaciones deben ser abiertas para innovar. También afirma que a veces funcionan mejor las colaboraciones transversales que las jerárquicas y si son de departamentos diferentes, pueden complemenbar su conocimiento para generar nuevo.
Aunque en la entrevista que le han hecho en CitiLab de Cornellà (http://es.citilab.eu/actualidad/opinion/stark) el título diga: “En realidad no son los individuos los que innovan, sino las organizaciones”, els siempre entiende que han de ser grupos abiertos los que generen conocimiento. Parece lógico, que en un sector compuesto mayoritariamente por empresas pequeñas y medianas (con poco más de 15 personas), como es el turismo (del cual me ocupo en mi investigación) resulta a menudo difícil generar conocimiento colectivamente dentro de estructuras tan herméticas. Sin embargo si las empresas colaboran en los procesos de producción o en la cadena de valor, entonces la generación de conocimiento es más posible a través de la interacción.

Hoy, a través de Twitter, Dolors Reig anunciaba su post en el blog El Caparazón (altamente recomendable) bajo el lema: “Empresa abierta como condición necesaria para el aprendizaje también abierto”. Para mí éste es el paso más difícil para las organizaciones. abrirse a sus proveedores, su competencia, sus clientes, su entorno, en general. Dolors hace referencia a un estudio de Deloitte sobre “más de 400 empresas, incluyendo algunas en la lista Fortune 100″ muy interesante donde se ve el interés de las empresas por potenciar las comunidades en su interior.

Aunque como dice ella respecto a los resultados (respuestasde las más de 400 empresas) del estudio de Deloitte,

Aprendizaje, Conocimiento, parecen no aparecer todavía, posiblemente por falta todavía de aplicaciones empresariales adecuadas, en el marco de la web social. Los PLEs, cuyo desarrollo en entornos verticales preveo importante en 2010, pueden cambiar el panorama, aproximarlo un poco más a la idea del Aprendizaje abierto. Empresa abierta como condición necesaria para el aprendizaje también abierto.

Está claro que hay trabajo para convencer a las empresas en que el aprendizaje forma parte del proceso de innovación tal como Wenger, Starck, etc. ya han afirmado. Importante tarea, pues, el difundirlo.

Se genera conocimiento colectivo entre las empresas turísticas?

Oriol Miralbell — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 09:33:54 +0000

Este es parte de un post hecho en mi blog de la COMUNIDAD HOSTELTUR, una comunidad muy activa e interesante del scetro turístico. Hago mención aquí de este post porqué está generando un debate muy interesante en dicha comunidad. Podeis leer más en: Se genera conocimiento colectivo entre las empresas turísticas?

Llevo unos años trabajando en ello pero no había realizado ninguna pregunta abierta a la comunidad Hosteltur. Creeis que entre las empresas turísticas se genera conocimiento de forma colectiva?

Me explico: las comunidades de práctica son concidas por su importancia a la hora de generar conocimiento de forma colaborativa. Dichas comunidades pueden existir por muchos motivos, sin embargo las dinámicas que se generan, si funcionan de manera normal, suponen unas condiciones de colaboración ideales para la generación colaborativa de conocimiento.

Continuar leyendo aquí

Leadership for connective knowledge?

Oriol Miralbell — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 18:18:51 +0000

I’m working in my PhD research and after two years of rambling through the immense world of scientific and academic literature dealing with Social Networks, Knowledge Management, Virtual Communities and Informations Systems, I discovered last year the CCK08 course which impressed me so much that I’ve decided to follow it this year again. I must give up that this is something completely different of the course last year,and it’s because of the people taking part on it. The act different, react differenr. In other words we all are different, which makes connective leanring something unique depending on the moment it’s done and the group.

I’m working on a model that wants to understand what factors inmpacta positively in generating knowledge in a virtual community that uses online social apps to communicate. My research wants to study a specific VC, that is a VC on Tourism Professionals,. because this is an Industry where professionals seldomexchange knowledge and thus where innovation is scarce among the small and middle sized companies, qhch are de huge majority of the industry. Only big oturism companies (groups or chains) are using internal knwoeldge management tools and innovate.

So I decided that Connective learning could be also a way to learn outside the classroom. Professionals could use it and I wwanted to see if these professionals use Connective leraning as means to generate knwoeldge, or at least if they are aware (or recognize) that they’re using connective knowldge inside their VC.

I asked to Stephen Downes on the factors that would be determinant to consider that a VC is achieving a coonnective learning. A sort of success factors for connective leanring communities. I must thank Stephen for his quick and generous answer. The fundamental factors like Autonomy, Diversity, Openness and INteractions / connectivity have been integrated in my analysis model tha I will use ion a survey to the members of these VCs.

Todau, though I got a mail from another participant to the CCK08 last year (Dolors Reig) and great expert in participatory communities of knowledge who sent me her feedback to my research proposal and suggested two new issues to be considered in my research: Find relations in benefits for thr organization vs. benefits to the individual; and the second: learning vs. knowledge sharing. I will have to work on those comcepts to integrate them in my model.

Finally I knew over Twitter about the Post of Prof. Valdis krebs about the Connections of the Chicago 2016 Commitee and the reasons of the failure. And after thinking his conclusions (he could proove after a SNA, that there were two different clsuters with different interests) that this showed a lack of leadership in the Chicago Commitee which probably influences he decision of the CIO.

So it comes to my mind a questions: do connective learning communities leed any kind of leadership? What do you think?

Sorry for making it so long.

Starting a new project

Oriol Miralbell — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 15:40:29 +0000

This site is intended to be an instrument of communication in my academic research. Actually I’m working on my PhD Thesis and after two years of readings and observations I’m at the point of finishing the queationnaire for the survey I want to launch in the coming weeks.

Parallel to this research I’m following the CCK09 course that George Siemens and Stephen Downes are coordinating over the Internet. I strongly recommend this course to all rthose qho are interested in e-learning, knowledge sharing and connective or cooperative learning.

I hope and wish that this site becomes a forum for debate and knowledge generation.