Big Data and Knowledge Generation in Tertiary Education in the Philippines

This exploratory study investigates the use of a computational knowledge engine (WolframAl-pha) and social networking sites (Gmail, Yahoo and Facebook) by 200 students at De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde, their “friends” and their “friends of friends” during the 2009 through 2013 school years, and how this appears to have added value in knowledge generation. The pri-mary aim is to identify what enhances productiveness in knowledge generation in Philippine Ter-tiary Education. The phenomenological approach is used, therefore there are no specific re-search questions or hypotheses proposed in this paper. Considering that knowledge generation is a complex phenomenon, a stochastic modelling approach is also used for the investigation that was developed specifically to study un-deterministic complex systems. A list of salient features for knowledge generation is presented as a result. In addition to these features, various problem types are identified from literature. These are then integrated to provide a proposed framework of inclusive (friendly) and innovative social networks, for knowledge generation in Philippine tertiary education. Such a framework is necessarily multidisciplinary and useful for problem-solving in a globalized and pluralist reality. The implementation of this framework is illustrated in the three parts of the study: Part 1: Online lessons, discussions, and examinations in General Psychology, Introduction to Sociology, and Life and Works of Jose Rizal, for the author’s stu-dents in De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde; Part 2: Facebook Report analytics of students and teachers, their friends and their friends of friends via WolframAlpha; and Part 3: Social Network Analysis of the people and groups influencing the courses’ scope-and-sequence in the new Gen-eral Education Curriculum for Tertiary Schools and Institutions in the Philippines.

[1]  Robin Cowan,et al.  Network Structure and the Diffusion of Knowledge , 2004 .

[2]  J. Reidenberg.  Yahoo and Democracy on the Internet , 2001 .

[3]  R. Cowan.  Network models of innovation and knowledge diffusion , 2004 .

[4]  Alexander Ardichvili,et al.  Motivation and barriers to participation in virtual knowledge-sharing communities of practice , 2003, J. Knowl. Manag..

[5]  M. Crossan.  The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation , 1996 .

[6]  Radu Calinescu,et al.  Large-scale complex IT systems , 2011, Commun. ACM.

[7]  Joseph B. Berger,et al.  Multi-layered cross-cultural challenges: the case of a new American for-profit college in the Philippines , 2014 .

[8]  John E. Hunter,et al.  Tacit Knowledge, Practical Intelligence, General Mental Ability, and Job Knowledge , 1993 .

[9]  Jasjit Singh,et al.  Social Networks as Drivers of Knowledge Diffusion , 2003 .

[10]  Keith Goffin,et al.  Tacit Knowledge, Lessons Learnt, and New Product Development , 2011 .

[11]  M. McPherson,et al.  Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks , 2001 .

[12]  M. Polanyi.  Chapter 7 – The Tacit Dimension , 1997 .

[13]  Harold Maurice Collins,et al.  Tacit Knowledge, Trust and the Q of Sapphire , 2001 .

[14]  Vaibhavi N Patodkar,et al.  Twitter as a Corpus for Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining , 2016 .

[15]  Education for All and International Cooperation for Education Development: Ongoing Implications for National Policy in the Philippines , 2013 .

[16]  Dinesh Kumar Saini,et al.  Software Failures and Chaos Theory , 2012 .

[17]  Fikret Berkes,et al.  Evolution of co-management: role of knowledge generation, bridging organizations and social learning. , 2009, Journal of environmental management.

[18]  P. Bordia,et al.  Validation of the career adapt-abilities scale and an examination of a model of career adaptation in the Philippine context , 2013 .

[19]  Mark S. Granovetter.  The Strength of Weak Ties , 1973, American Journal of Sociology.

[20]  Zygmunt Bauman,et al.  Education in Liquid Modernity , 2005 .

[21]  K. Fernandez,et al.  Counseling in the Philippines: Past, Present, and Future , 2012 .

[22]  Eric W. T. Ngai,et al.  Empirical examination of the adoption of WebCT using TAM , 2007, Comput. Educ..

[23]  P. Engelbrecht,et al.  Understanding teachers’ attitudes and self-efficacy in inclusive education: implications for pre-service and in-service teacher education , 2012 .

[24]  Stacy Huey-Pyng Shyu,et al.  Sustaining Higher Education Reforms: Knowledge and Policy Implications Learned from Thailand. , 2012 .

[25]  Ikujiro Nonaka,et al.  The knowledge-creating theory revisited: knowledge creation as a synthesizing process , 2003 .

[26]  David W. DeLong,et al.  Lost knowledge : confronting the threat of an aging workforce , 2004 .

[27]  Michael DeSchryver,et al.  Moodle vs. Facebook: Does using Facebook for Discussions in an Online Course Enhance Perceived Social Presence and Student Interaction? , 2009 .

[28]  Samer Faraj,et al.  Why Should I Share? Examining Social Capital and Knowledge Contribution in Electronic Networks of Practice , 2005, MIS Q..

[29]  Cliff Lampe,et al.  The Benefits of Facebook "Friends: " Social Capital and College Students' Use of Online Social Network Sites , 2007, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[30]  I. Nonaka,et al.  How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation , 1995 .

[31]  Songqing Chen,et al.  Analyzing patterns of user content generation in online social networks , 2009, KDD.