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The inclusion of the social aspect in technical training processes

This week I was talking with one of my collaborators, and we were making some history about the gray hair that the years have taken us in these development processes -More mine than the one that supports his bald head-.

DidacticsI explained to him how the evolution of my distractions caused me to mutate from the artistic field to Engineering and then to the social; always looking for how to find secrets to technological innovation. In one of his conclusions he reminded me of a phrase I had read there, that the illiterate of the future will be the ones who can not unlearn and adapt to the changes.

If there is gain in the social field, you learn a lot about how to understand people. Whether we are going to work in a purely technical, administrative or developmental context; Knowing how people work is vital. In this case I want to refer to the processes of teaching learning; Of course I kill the essay of a class I'm studying and I add one more article in the place where I write regularly.

How important is social management with the teaching-learning processes?

Traditional education

It is possible that one of the reasons engineers can end up being bad teachers is because they see few examples of well-applied didactics. I remember having professors with doctorates but with a deficient capacity to transmit; For example one of them who was offended because we called him teacher.

-It took me 11 years to get my engineering, masters and doctorate. -said- so please do not lower me to the teacher level.

A good amount of advice born of these mentalities made us think that as engineers we were an elite class in the field of innovation; Confusing role with knowledge and accreditation. While we learned to apply information that is undoubtedly exclusive, we also unlearn attitudes of low self-esteem disguised as titulitis and arrogance can take half of our lives.

So if the professors of the field of engineering did not insist on complementing their pedagogical training, they will have great limitations in the transmission of knowledge and treatment of the students as clients of their service. Although I must clarify that some of them were born teachers, and his chair was simply exquisite.

In the end, their teaching is good in technical matters, but their scope stays at the traditional level as long as they do not progress in knowing negative aspects of positivist didactics and the different models and spaces of learning applied to behavioral psychology that see teaching more like A process than a simple product.

Why do people learn?

My foray into the field of technical education began when I AutoCAD course. I must admit that the mistakes were over, almost as many as the patience of my contractor.

It is one thing to build a methodological script and another to make sure that students' expectations are met according to our objectives. Among the things that complicated the process were: having students who came only to meet the requirement to learn the news of AutoCAD with respect to the previous version, others who took it because they expected to dedicate themselves to it as a source of income, young people distracted with the Internet of machines and adults who could barely master the mouse wheel.

So the empiricism led me to enter the constructivist didactic, learning 32 commands with which you could develop the plans of a house; leaving of last complicated aspects like the paper space and the 3D rendering. Finally after repeating it many times the students learned to use AutoCAD and I learned not how people learn, nor how is it taught Why people learn.

Some of this implies reading a lot, getting off the podium and accepting that the student is the owner of knowledge on which they will have to build new knowledge. Based on the previous knowledge of the students, it is guided so that the students manage to build new and meaningful knowledge, being they the main actors of their own learning, -Although to say it is quite easy-.

But that's how it is; People learn because they find productivity and progress in what they receive. They learn because they realize that the new information has a scaffold to be mounted on. They learn because without being personalized the teaching, the individual interest moves.

Didactica 2How teaching processes evolve - learning

Understanding people is one of the irreversible trends in the mix that now includes the information age. Digital journalists without a career have more readers than the traditional ones, not because they have a popular blog, not because they spend their time in social networks, but because the experience has made them understand the masses of readers as people.

In the field of teaching, something similar will gradually happen. The time will come to sell a book on how to learn AutoCAD will be a frustrating business, because the Internet is scaffolding enough information to learn. The challenge of pedagogues will be to know how to channel information, in the migration of learning communities to spaces for the efficient management of knowledge; challenge that undoubtedly will not be simple.

That people learn AutoCAD through videos on YouTube will create gaps that did not exist in the traditional chair, but there is no other option but to adapt to this context. Democratizing knowledge has a risk, but whenever it has happened there have been important revolutions in the world. It now remains to be seen what will happen to one that has reached the point of being called the “information age”.


In conclusion, the result that will bring the opening to the information that now constitute the digital media will be a momentous landmark that we do not know at the moment. But there will undoubtedly come a demand and need to understand the people that will lead educators to seek better tools, techniques and models adaptable to increasingly global contexts.

The final recommendation is basic and simplistic; We must learn to unlearn. To the extent that we acquire abilities to mutate we can have better results not only in adapting to the changes but to materialize with more certainty our objectives; Are as sublime as the democratization of knowledge or basic as the generation of money.

Golgi Alvarez

Writer, researcher, specialist in Land Management Models. He has participated in the conceptualization and implementation of models such as: National Property Administration System SINAP in Honduras, Management Model of Joint Municipalities in Honduras, Integrated Cadastre-Registry Management Model in Nicaragua, Territory Administration System SAT in Colombia . Editor of the Geofumadas knowledge blog since 2007 and creator of the AulaGEO Academy that includes more than 100 courses on GIS - CAD - BIM - Digital Twins topics.

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