Month: January 2023

Video-papers in Spanish for English articles

Posted on by lindacq@um.es

A couple of months ago, I was echoing a publication by colleagues and myself that had just come out, and I posted it on Twitter. I often do it, especially if the publication is open access, to complete the cycle of diffusion and dissemination. I think it might get someone to read it and, as well as find out about some of the things we do in “the ivory tower”, give us feedback or make a comment.

The funny thing is that, like many of my publications over the last year, this publication is written in English, but mired of people on Twitter are VERY Spanish-speaking, so one of my colleagues from Argentina asked me, “Linda, where can we access the article in Spanish?”… and that got me thinking, the truth is… I don’t write the article in Spanish and then translate it; there is no article in Spanish… but I “care” that I think that what is in that article can be useful for teachers and colleagues who don’t speak English (in the same way that I am convinced that reading in other languages – whatever the mother tongue – is a splendid intellectual privilege)….  and I thought “I could run it through some automatic translation tool – like DEEP-L or Google – which nowadays work particularly well between Spanish and English”, but of course, to make that effort you have to be interested in the article… and how are you going to know if you are interested in the summary is only in English. You have only seen the title, which is also in English…?

At that moment, I had an idea, probably Instagram reels could be used for this, and I started a “project” that has been active since then, and I hope it will continue… at least as long as it continues to be of interest. The idea is to make a REEL (90 seconds) in which we summarise, in Spanish, one of the articles we have published in English. We also leave on Instagram as a post the documentation and QR codes to access the publication in question.  Here you have the first one I did.

 

Ver esta publicación en Instagram

 

Una publicación compartida por Linda Castañeda (@lindacq)

 

With a few days difference, I publish the summary also on LinkedIn and on my Youtube channel, where I have already started a list where you can find all the ones I have done so far:

I sincerely hope that the initiative may encourage teachers or colleagues who are resistant to English  to read some of the articles, even if it is in an automatically translated version…

At some point, someone asked me if I would do it the other way round (make a video paper in English of my articles in Spanish) …. … I wish someone had asked for them in English; I would surely consider it… I think there is a lot to do to decolonise discourses and lot to do to open our heads to other languages. … and although things are already starting to be done (I highly recommend reading this editorial in Learning Media & Technology “Reading internationally: if citing is a political practice, who are we reading and who are we citing?” and reflecting on what it means) I think that for the moment I will only do them in Spanish.

Attention, I’m wearing a filter; I intend to do them when I have time and sometimes I don’t feel good-looking enough for a video, so long live Instagram filters! 😉

Personal Learning Environments: Challenging the networked ecosystems with people agency

Posted on by lindacq@um.es

Just over a year ago, we held a symposium in which we analysed where we were on issues related to Personal Learning Environments (PLE), yes, we were not talking about personalisation, nor about adaptive learning, but about PLE, that elusive concept that we have been talking about for over 15 years but which, being little or nothing linked to productive or remunerated issues, has a “discreet” predicament. We talked about that symposium in the entry: LET’S TALK ABOUT PLE IN TEEM 2021 of the TEEM2021 congress and we were able to write a summary article about the session we held at that congress, “Personal Learning Environments as a Framework for Flexible Learning: Exploring Consensus, Asking Questions and Tracing Challenges“ (yes, it is just in Spanish but I’m sure the DEEP_L translation would help you to read it if you want ;-)), where the organisers of the Symposium (Graham Attwell, Nada Dabbagh and myself) collected the conversations of that time and explained where we were as far as PLE was concerned.

As a result of that symposium, we launched a special issue for the RED magazine “Revista de Educación a Distancia” (Vol. 23 Núm. 71 (2023) https://doi.org/10.6018/red) , which we titled like this post and which was published on January 1st, with the new year, and of which I leave you the list of contents below:

Articles

I would highlight that new names and areas of PLE research appear in the issue articles. Also,  some of the articles “listen” to what we said at the symposium, that some melons are opened, that there is variety in the discourse, but that we always, always talk about PLE, not personalisation, but about making learning more personal.

I hope you will be interested enough to read some of the articles and find them interesting and thought-provoking enough to comment on them and continue the conversation.

I want to thank my colleagues Graham and Nada, my gang in this effort as Guest Editors, the authorship teams who have participated, the people who sent in their proposals and who – for whatever reason – could not be included in the issue, the people who helped us by reviewing the articles and, of course, the journal’s team who altruistically maintain this channel of disseminating research. Without all of you, this would not be possible. Thank you.

Now, let’s read!