{"id":2724,"date":"2026-06-30T06:35:05","date_gmt":"2026-06-30T04:35:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lindacastaneda.com\/?p=2724"},"modified":"2026-07-27T06:57:26","modified_gmt":"2026-07-27T04:57:26","slug":"buscando-otra-conversacion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lindacastaneda.com\/en\/mushware\/buscando-otra-conversacion\/","title":{"rendered":"Looking for a Different Conversation"},"content":{"rendered":"

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When I started planning my research stay at the Connected Intelligence Centre (UTS), I was quite sure that I didn’t want to come to Australia just to do exactly the same things I do in Murcia, only 17,500 kilometres away and with a more exotic view. A research stay requires a considerable effort from many people, and I have always thought that it is worthwhile only if it forces you, at least a little, to step outside your usual conversations.<\/p>\n

For that reason, I never set out to find what would simply be an Australian version of a Faculty of Education. Not because I don’t value them\u2014indeed, I have good friends and collaborators in many of them\u2014but because I was looking for a different conversation. I was interested in something else.<\/p>\n

I have followed Simon Buckingham Shum’s work for many years (in fact, ever since I first met him at the KMi twenty years ago). Although his background lies more on the “techie” side\u2014though never exclusively\u2014what has always interested me is that much of his work has tried to understand how people learn together, how they construct knowledge through discourse, how certain learning processes can be made visible, or how technology can help us understand, rather than simply automate, those dynamics.<\/p>\n

In other words, I have never seen our research as running in parallel. Nor have I seen it as overlapping. Rather, I have always thought of it as two different ways of approaching some common problems. That is why the CIC seemed such an interesting place for this research stay. Not because I expected to find people who thought like me, but precisely because I expected to find different questions\u2014or different ways of approaching the same questions\u2014about problems that, ultimately, we share.<\/p>\n

So when we started talking about giving a seminar (some of the ideas actually came from conversations with Simon during June), I suggested trying something different. What if, instead of a single talk, we used the stay to build a small series? Not a set of independent presentations, but a conversation that could develop over several weeks and address issues that I hoped would also be relevant to the CIC community.<\/p>\n

The proposal also responded to something that has become increasingly important in my own work: how to reformulate and repackage my thinking so that it can enter into conversation with people who do not necessarily belong to the same field. That requires a process of translation\u2014not only into English, of course, but also across intellectual traditions, vocabularies and ways of framing problems. It also requires finding ways of presenting ideas that allow others to discuss them from within their own frames of reference.<\/p>\n

The four optical metaphors emerged as a way of giving that proposal some coherence. Each one offered a different way of looking at some of the issues I wanted to discuss and, at the same time, an open enough point of entry for those issues to be framed in other ways as well.<\/p>\n

The series eventually took shape around four seminars which, taken individually, deal with different topics but are really part of the same conversation. Each starts from a different question, draws on a different part of my work, and puts it into dialogue with issues that I believe also matter to the Connected Intelligence Centre. They were never intended to provide an overview of my research. Instead, they use parts of that research to open up questions that, hopefully, can be shared.<\/p>\n

The Prism<\/strong> uses AI as a starting point to ask whether the categories we are currently using to understand it are actually sufficient. Rather than proposing yet another framework, the seminar tries to broaden the conversation and, ultimately, to question the conceptual tools through which we observe the phenomenon.<\/p>\n

The Lens<\/strong> revisits Personal Learning Environments, a line of research I have been working on for many years, in order to return to a question that still seems fundamental to me: how do people organise their learning? The emergence of artificial intelligence has made that question, far from becoming obsolete, even more urgent.<\/p>\n

The Mirror<\/strong> turns its attention towards the university itself. It uses teachers’ digital competence as a way of discussing something that has concerned me for a long time: how institutions make decisions about teaching, and to what extent many of those decisions are never actually made explicit.<\/p>\n

Finally, The Telescope<\/strong> looks towards what is beginning to emerge. It is probably the most open-ended of the four seminars and the one that incorporates the largest amount of work still in progress. The question is no longer what artificial intelligence can do, but what we still want to recognise as evidence that learning has taken place, and what kind of teaching we need when machines begin to do things that, for a very long time, we believed were exclusively human.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Together, the four seminars revisit some of the themes I have been working on over the last few years. More importantly, they try to do so in a way that makes conversation possible with a community that does not necessarily share my disciplinary background. If the series works, I hope people will not see four talks about different research projects, but rather a conversation around a number of questions that we increasingly share, even if we formulate them from different places.<\/p>\n

Over the coming weeks, I will write a post about each of the seminars. Not so much to summarise the presentations themselves, but to tell the story of how they were put together, the decisions that shaped them, and the conversations they opened once they had been delivered.<\/p>\n

I have to admit that writing these posts feels a little intimidating \u2014perhaps even a bit scary…(in panic actually!) . But there is something of a personal challenge in doing it, and I find that discomfort\u2014my own discomfort\u2014worth paying attention to.<\/p>\n

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When I started planning my research stay at the Connected Intelligence Centre (UTS), I was quite sure that I didn’t want to come to Australia just to do exactly the same things I do in Murcia, only 17,500 kilometres away and with a more exotic view. A research stay requires a considerable effort from many Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"episode_type":"","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","_vp_format_video_url":"","_vp_image_focal_point":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[198,204,18,22,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ia","category-ia-ai","category-pedagogia","category-reflexiones","category-trabajos"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lindacastaneda.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lindacastaneda.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lindacastaneda.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lindacastaneda.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lindacastaneda.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2724"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.lindacastaneda.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2724\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2729,"href":"https:\/\/www.lindacastaneda.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2724\/revisions\/2729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lindacastaneda.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lindacastaneda.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lindacastaneda.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}