Patricia Diaz

en español

Years of research in neuroscience, and complementary disciplines, have given us great insight into how humans learn, while advances in technology allow for impressive ways to process information and generate new knowledge.

I've studied the learning process from all possible perspectives with the aim to optimize knowledge flow. Over the years, this has crystalized, among others, in innovations in education, design of learning environments, and creation of new features, platforms and products. Below are some concrete efforts that showcase the longstanding potential and impact of this endeavor.

Using mainly Legos in a playful one month Robotics Design Studio course at Wellesley College at the dawn of this century, Rachel Schwartz and I designed a Touchlator as a proof-of-concept for the very complex Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) problem of communicating with a person going blind and deaf at the same time.

SoundStage, a project developed with Jen Carlile for our Multimedia Design & Programming course in 2002, gives the user a unique and creative way to look at color as related to sound, fostering a new appreciation for multimodality through the perception of everyday sights and sounds. For a small taste check out the Sound Palette (please note that this project may not run without a plug-in).

An initial exploration of a global online community for youth that I worked with for 9 years The Computer Clubhouse Village: a virtual meeting place for an emerging community of learners was published in the Journal of Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics in 2004 (abstract also available at the MIT Media Lab).

In 2007, before iPhones and iPads made it to the market, Maciej Sudra and I envisioned the future of textbooks and built a prototype for the beta version of the OLPC's XO to show the potential. It is now possible to create an interactive multimedia textbook and collaborative notebook at once, that feeds from online content from multiple sources and is presented in a self-contained library that is easy to update. See the details in our paper Textbooks for the 21st Century written for Chris Dede's Emerging Educational Technologies course at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Knowledge and great ideas are not enough. What makes a difference in countless lives are the changes that are actually implemented. In Possibilities at the Convergence of Government, Industry, Academia, and Society, Enabled by 21st Century ICT Policies I analyze a successful initiative to bring Manizales, a medium sized city in Colombia, into the knowledge economy. I also suggest a social learning framework useful to identify precise points where good intentioned policies fail to have the desired impact so that corrections can be made over time to bring policies back on track. This paper came to life thanks to the brilliant guidance from my professor Calestous Juma at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

In 2008, through a research grant from the Colombian Ministry of Culture, Israel Tanenbaum and I created Musia (featured briefly in this clip from the event Experiences of the Future that we designed for Cali teachers in 2015). In Musia we coded videos so that the user can zoom in and out at will, not only the image but also the sound of each instrument, without interrupting the music. We also superimposed videos of experts who alert the learner to focus on key details of the music performance that can be turned on and off at will while the video is playing. 

Another aspect of my work with over 100 Clubhouses in 21 countries around the world is reflected in "Going Global: Clubhouse ideas travel around the world", second chapter of The Computer Clubhouse: Constructionism and Creativity in Youth Communities (Edited by Yasmin Kafai, Kylie Peppler and Robbin Chapman, Teachers College Press, 2009).

Late 2011, I founded Musintec and, with a phenomenal group of colleagues learning from the emerging future to transform the present, brought to life many projects with global impact.

In 2012, I wrote El Cambio Posible en la Educación (The Possible Change in Education) a chapter for the book Learning and Educating with 21st Century Technologies, published by Colombia Digital, where I argue that digital technologies have had such an impact in society that education needs not only to adopt them but to be restructured from the base in order to adapt to the new paradigms.

Since 2012, I have been a visiting professor at Universidad de La Guajira where I helped shape the Master's Degree in Pedagogy with Information and Communication Technologies.

I've enjoyed public speaking but many of my engagements have not been properly documented. Here's a keynote (in Spanish) on Innovative Knowledge and Learning Labs at Somece's international virtual symposium in 2015. I also used to blog and for a while was a contributor to Palabra Maestra.

More recently, I've taken a deep dive into the interplay between Artificial Intelligence and Knowledge, and, with Davy Risso, we're tackling interrogations on the structure and topology of knowledge. I've built on Max Boisot's robust information space framework –epitomized in his publication with Agustí Canals Data, Information, and Knowledge: Have We Got It Right?– as well as on groundbreaking contributions from Rodolfo Llinás.