Digital ecologies are spaces that can be used to generate true active knowledge, where students, professionals and workers become knowledge producers. Active knowledge, therefore, involves the use of digital ecologies that allow participatory design by social actors to create new knowledge in constant evaluation and nutrition by the community involved. This means that anyone who is in that space can contribute something to the learning experience.

Social actors in the community take responsibility for their learning since they can choose to participate continuously and holistically and, as a consequence, produce shared understandings.

Active knowledge is a response to the fact that the world we live in today values less the work of memory, because this technological phenomenon, this mass of information, is at our disposal all the time. Therefore, what now matters is people's ability to produce and design ideas, arguments and artifacts that demonstrate the quality of learning and not what a person is able to remember that they learned.

We can see these changes evidenced more clearly in workplaces where the idea of working as a team, participation and contribution in projects and the design of ideas, systems and artifacts are increasingly encouraged. This change is called "agency balance", which means that from a world of competition, command and compliance, we have a world where you are supposed to participate more actively within the work team by contributing ideas, making suggestions, being creative, being innovative, taking risks.

Specifically, I would like to exemplify "active knowledge" in practice with a brief example based on the principle of "Project-based learning". In the article "Application of project-based service-learning courses in medical education: trials of curriculum designs during the pandemic" of Shih-Chieh Liao, Miau-Rong Lee, Yung-Lin Chen y Hank Szuhan Chen a valuable example that was launched during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The researchers explain:

"Due to COVID-19, face-to-face service activities in service-learning courses have become unfeasible. To address this challenge, this study aims to integrate project-based learning into medical education’s service-learning curriculum."

135 first-year medical students participated in the study and were taught a course that involved various service activities aligned with the needs of their local communities. The students were organized into 12 groups, each working on different service-learning projects, such as raising health awareness or educating the public about specific diseases. As a result, the researchers observed that the project-based service-learning course significantly improved students' “interpersonal communication skills,” their ability to “learn and grow on the job,” and their sense of “professionalism.”

For more information see:

Liao, SC., Lee, MR., Chen, YL. et al. Application of project-based service-learning courses in medical education: trials of curriculum designs during the pandemic. BMC Med Educ 23, 696 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-023-04671-w