Entre la alfabetización informacional y la brecha digital: Reflexiones para una reconceptualización de los fenómenos de exclusión digital

This article analyzes the evolution of the concepts I–literacy, E–literacy, informational alphabetization (ALFIN as in Spanish) and Digital Divide, to find a common ground to complement conceptually the measuring of the divide. The convergence process between I–Literacy and E–Literacy has been retrieved, reaching the final concept of informational alphabetization (ALFIN as acronym of the Spanish expression 'ALFabetización INformacional'). To propose its differentiation into three levels: the basic level of verbal–technological codification, second level for meta–analysis, and upper level for ethical–critical action. This proposal aims to rethink the digital divide, raising questions about the meaning of measurement, and the necessary precautions to avoid confusing measurement with assimilation. We state that the concept of information literacy (ALFIN – informational alphabetization) should feed the study of the Digital Divide, and describe how this could affect the pyramid model of ICT appropriation developed by the author. In further research about digital exclusion The Pandora's box quality of the Web is emphasized. It can reinforce exclusion, threatens democracy and freedom in the absence of a literate digital citizen, if further simplification is carried under the access–to–infrastructure model, if the citizens' formation in capabilities that exceed the instrumental. We conclude that measuring these meta–analysis and ethical–critical action skills is the advisable way to build a metric for the digital divide. We warn about the possibility of finding a second–order divide much larger and complex than the access divide

When digital democracy falls short: insights from Colombia

Colombian e-government development has been internationally recognised by the UN as a leader in Latin America, and one of the 20 most developed nations of the world in the area. However, ICT tools and services such as broadband are a luxury. Colombia suffers from an access divide due to economic and infrastructural limitations, and a second level digital divide because of weak information and data literacy. This Brief focuses on identifying the impact of ICT mediation in democratisation and citizen engagement in terms of what is understood as governance, how those representations are legitimised, and the ways in which they change power relations. The authors reviewed Colombian ICT mediation policies, placed them in relation to the context, and contrasted them with previous research about local e-democracy developments. This gave a characterisation of how Colombian e-government routines have evolved. The Brief analyses the government project called Urna de Cristal (UDC), which is the centrepiece of President Santos’ mandate on e-government policy and democratisation. This brief is part of a series from IT for Change produced from its Voice or Chatter research project, which examines the relationship between ICT-mediated citizen engagement and democratic governance.DFIDUSAIDSidaOmidyar Networ

Generating Quizzes to Support Training on Quality Management and Assurance in Space Science and Engineering

Quality management and assurance is key for space agencies to guarantee the success of space missions, which are high-risk and extremely costly. In this paper, we present a system to generate quizzes, a common resource to evaluate the effectiveness of training sessions, from documents about quality assurance procedures in the Space domain. Our system leverages state of the art auto-regressive models like T5 and BART to generate questions, and a RoBERTa model to extract answers for such questions, thus verifying their suitability.Comment: In Proceedings of the 15th International Natural Language Generation Conference (INLG 2022

SpaceQA: Answering Questions about the Design of Space Missions and Space Craft Concepts

We present SpaceQA, to the best of our knowledge the first open-domain QA system in Space mission design. SpaceQA is part of an initiative by the European Space Agency (ESA) to facilitate the access, sharing and reuse of information about Space mission design within the agency and with the public. We adopt a state-of-the-art architecture consisting of a dense retriever and a neural reader and opt for an approach based on transfer learning rather than fine-tuning due to the lack of domain-specific annotated data. Our evaluation on a test set produced by ESA is largely consistent with the results originally reported by the evaluated retrievers and confirms the need of fine tuning for reading comprehension. As of writing this paper, ESA is piloting SpaceQA internally.Comment: In proceedings of the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2022

The Paradigm of Informational Behavior as an Alternative to Understand the Informational Phenomena in Latin America

La Ciencia de la Documentación, predecesora de las Ciencias de la Información, históricamente descuidó el estudio del hombre común. Como producto de la era fordista, suponía que el valor de cualquier comportamiento informacional era su carácter técnico y económico. Como contrapunto, este artículo presenta algunos de los aportes el paradigma del Comportamiento Informacional, que abandona esta tendencia y su énfasis en el sistema de información, formal y estandarizado, para estudiar al usuario común y su día a día. El Comportamiento Informacional desarrolla una epistemología ecológica y evolutiva. Los Trabajadores del Conocimiento ya no son la única comunidad digna de estudio. Se investigan las comunidades, los nichos cerrados, los grupos excluidos, poblaciones representativas de las grandes mayorías de la humanidad. Para la Ciencia de la Información en países en desarrollo esta es una oportunidad para comprender la situación de sus usuarios informacionales desde otras perspectivas y evaluar críticamente conceptos importados tales como la Brecha Digital, cuya base está en la visión utilitaria y tecnocentrista del paradigma clásico.Documentation science, a predecessor of information science, historically neglected to study a common person. As a product of the Fordist Era, documentation science supposed the value of any information on behavior was its technical and economic nature. In contrast, this article presents some of the contri-butions of the paradigm of informational behavior, which moves away from this trend, and it emphasizes on a formal standardized information system to study a common use and that user’s day-to-day life. Informational Behavior develops an ecological and evolutionary epistemology. Knowledge workers are no longer the only Community worthy of being studied. Today studies research communities, clo-sed niches, excluded groups, and representative po-pulations of vast human majorities. For information science, in developing countries, this is an opportu-nity to understand situation update information on users from other perspectives and critically evaluate imported concepts like the digital divide, which is based on, and utilitarian technocentric vision of the classic paradigm

El paradigma de Comportamiento Informacional como alternativa para comprender los fenómenos informacionales en América Latina

Documentation science, a predecessor of information science, historically neglected to study a common person. As a product of the Fordist Era, documentation science supposed the value of any information on behavior was its technical and economic nature. In contrast, this article presents some of the contributions of the paradigm of informational behavior, which moves away from this trend, and it emphasizes on a formal standardized information system to study a common use and that user’s day-to-day life. Informational Behavior develops an ecological and evolutionary epistemology. Knowledge workers are no longer the only Community worthy of being studied. Today studies research communities, closed niches, excluded groups, and representative populations of vast human majorities. For information science, in developing countries, this is an opportunity to understand situation update information on users from other perspectives and critically evaluate imported concepts like the digital divide, which is based on, and utilitarian technocentric vision of the classic paradigm

Exclusão Digital de Gênero: quebrando o silêncio na Ciência da Informação

Latin America does not research on the problems of digital divide related to gender. This was one of the findings in the research made at Universidade Estadual Paulista, which included the most cited literature in English, Spanish and Portuguese in the domain of the digital divide. Women's lack of access to digital information technology or their inability to benefit from it, due to their gender, define a type of exclusion that is being studied in developed countries, but Latin America is neglected. To contribute to the development of gender research in librarian and information sciences, this study compiled the most relevant works about gender digital exclusion, identifying the main problems they refer to, articulating them in a conceptual map that allows to perceive the challenges and opportunities of research that they imply to the region. The target is to break academic silence in librarian and information sciences, and spread out what we know about gender digital exclusion, articulating it comprehensively to boost new projects, valuing female exclusion in science and technology, and specifically in information and communication technology, as a central problem of the research agenda of librarian and information sciences, of all Social Sciences, and of Latin American education and research institutions