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MAKING CONNECTION BETWEEN THE UNIVERSITY AND THE LOCAL DEVELOPMENT OF VENEZUELA
The main objective of this Site consists in presenting the experience we are undertaking in Venezuela in order to link universities with the local development within a win-win relationship to achieve the transformations of these actors.
The Research and Development Interdisciplinary, Inter-university and International Virtual Group (Techsudil), in preparation process, is a center for the Research and Development of concepts, proposals and new technologies in order to "transform" all the internal processes in academic formation. Also, to put under way projects for the transformation of specific social communities and their interactions. It’s main goals:
- To increase the university and community technological competence in orders to impulse their own transformation.
- To bring up an interaction between university and community through new technologies to obtain effectively an integral development based on self-sustained local technology and the community participation.
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It origins from an eight-year investigation project, in which metatheoretical elements that make possible the theoretical transformation of the society development concepts elaboration are analyzed. In this sense, academic and social formation reproduction processes development means and supposes a new interaction between University and Community to increase and diversify the "local productivity". That implies the production of resources to guarantee both their own survivals in an ecological and global environment and their transformation towards a sustainable reality, which also would reward the technological and academic area resources for their reproduction and continuous improvement.
For that, an integral treatment is required either from the conceptual point of view or the implantation management for new proposals and technologies. Political consensus of actions and interdisciplinarity are necessary to achieve such treatment. Inter-university agreements with local governments, private enterprises and consulting firms are the most effective way to achieve such integral treatments. Nevertheless, without an information system compatible with the recent competitiveness requirements, it is not possible to instrument completely interchange mechanisms between the project constituents and the communities to be analyzed. Neither, to serve as a model, within the national and international context, to analyze and guide new experiences in this field.
The integral treatment of the projects that the Virtual Group comprises, whose interdisciplinary character supposes a consensus of actions in the academic, government and entrepreneurial field, has taken to the need of an information system compatible with the requirements that form the interchange of its own constituents. It takes as reference the absence in the national context of an academic/research information infrastructure with an interdisciplinary character, to permit the Virtual Group having an own capacity to create and feedback its own knowledge and information processes towards the goals and community interventions proposed by the group.
Dr. Miguel Angel Briceño during his Post Doctoral course in Berlin, Cottbus and Frankfurt started to connect the metatheoretical elements that make possible a theoretical transformation of the society development perception. Since that moment, the project began to be conceived through the signing of inter- and intra-university agreements with the purpose of creating an interdisciplinary group. The philosophical stuff would be the common point in this project.
Background and context of group research at graduate level
In order to promote this research project, we decided to use the “Group Research at Graduate Level” strategy, which helped taking advantage of the potential of interdisciplinary knowledge production of the different groups of graduate students from related courses in the universities taking part in this group project, which was defined as a network of research and development projects adequate to the idiosyncrasy and specific needs of a pilot community, namely the Chachopo and La Venta parishes in the Miranda municipality of Mérida state (Upper basin of the Motatán River) . The Chachopo project implied, on the one hand, the creation of an interdisciplinary, interinstitutional and internationally connected science and technology network of innovation for integrated development. On the other hand, its diversification in terms of production, connected in the future to other new zones to create a synergic network, would be a model of what could be done for national development.
Different Venezuelan universities have taken part in this experience, namely the Universidad Central de Venezuela (UCV), the Universidad de Los Andes (ULA), the Universidad de Oriente (UDO), as well as four German universities, which are the Universität Cottbus, the Universität Göttingen, the Universität Tübingen and the Potsdam Universität.
Local NGOs, representatives of the civil society, irrigation system associations, the organized community and the Miranda-Timotes local government also took part, supported by lots of material including a compilation and analysis of official, scientific and technical documentary information about the potentialities of the zone and the community.
Regarding the methodology, the project is based on a holistic approach, as the proposal goes beyond the limitations of traditional research. It is a project of the “action research” type, since it provides a methodological and conceptual referential framework, which is necessary to integrate the different efforts undertaken in each knowledge field with a strategy that will result in creativity and innovation by proposing elements that can break with thought and action structures. This proposal presents research as a global, evolutionary, integrating, linked, organized and consecutive process.
In this kind of research project everyone makes a contribution (the people, the members of a community, the technicians, and the experts, among others). Thus, carrying out this project was the result of the community support, which was understood, justified, approved and oriented by the scientific method, taking into account three main aspects:
1. There is no need to wait until the end of the research project to begin action (because everything carried out during the process is already action and affects reality).
2. Research is conducted from a new more integrated and participative approach.
3. Within the framework of an integrated approach there are many actors provided with this action tool.
Besides, research in this project implied the real and concrete presence and interrelation of Research, Action and Participation, which is precisely its essence, as it is a research approach and methodology applied to the study of human realities. In this sense, the contributions arise from many different parties that are interested in the development of action research.
The academic education and the experience within a specific discipline make possible for the researchers —acting based on the characteristics of their particular fields— to take decisions regarding what will be approved to be worth researching. Beyond the researchers’ education and the profile of their own specialization, its psychological nature, the labor and academic situations, and their personal demands, it is expected, within an interdisciplinary framework, that the subject of study be approached by the researcher with the support and approval of the disciplinary integration of other points of view about the same research subject.
In this proposal it is considered of main importance the creation of an environment that favors economic diversification and social consolidation in the fields of land planning and environment, culture and life quality, human resources for education, technology and local work force, by applying the results of a project network that make the communities take part in a network of actions and efficient activities consisting of indispensable and interdependent processes of value production of different kinds, that is a local productive network.
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