The Konrad Adenauer Foundation Mexico, Polilat, INE, USEM and CEPOS present the results of the Mexico Democratic Development Index 2021 (IDD-Mex 2021).
Guanajuato is one of the entities that lost the most value with respect to 2020, going from 5,031 points to 2,814; that is, a decrease of more than 2,000 points.
It is ranked 25th in the national ranking.
It obtained the worst score in its series in the IDD-Mex, as a result of declines in all dimensions.
Only in the Economic Democracy Dimension does it exceed the national average.
Celaya, Gto. (Thursday, March 10, 2022) - The Democratic Development Index of Mexico (IDD-Mex) is an index created to analyze strengths and weaknesses in the development of Mexican democracy, which allows political, social and economic leaders to have useful diagnostic elements to design specific policies that help achieve greater development in the country's states.
To disseminate the 11th edition of the IDD-Mex, the "Democracy Tour: Challenges and Evaluations of Democracy in Mexico" was held at the University of Celaya to present the results that the state of Guanajuato obtained in 2021 in the four dimensions of the IDD-Mex: Democracy of citizens, Democracy of institutions, Social Democracy and Economic Democracy.
The presentation of the IDD-Mex publication had a hybrid format so that the remote audience had the opportunity to follow the live broadcast from the Facebook page of both the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (https://fb.watch/bHcvvUboF2/), as well as the University of Celaya (https://fb.watch/bHcpof_jgm/).
The IDD-Mex report, prepared with official data from the states and with the perception that citizens have of the climate of rights and freedoms that characterize democracy in their communities, cannot but reflect the impact that this "partial halt to life" has on the system of social, political and economic relations in democracy; as well as on the climate of rights and freedoms of individuals and families; on the functioning of institutions that provide basic services for social and labor dynamics; on the investment climate; on the productive system, among others.
In the case of Guanajuato, as a consequence of the setback, it changes its development rating from medium to minimum, dropping more than 2,000 points in its overall rating.
After four years of decline, it reaches its worst record in terms of Citizens' Democracy and although it has never deserved extreme negative evaluations, the trend of the curve and the latest results set off an alarm signal, which should provoke a reaction on the part of the state leadership to elaborate and implement better strategies for building citizenship and respect for rights and freedoms.Democracy of Institutions suffers a strong setback, qualifying with minimum development, while social democracy remains at low development levels and economic democracy shows a rebound, qualifying with medium development this year.
This report is a wake-up call for the country's political, social and economic elites, since many of the opportunities for improvement identified here in each state can constitute a roadmap, not only for recovery, but also for initiating a sustained path of development for each community.
The IDD-Mex 2021 highlights Mexico's contrasts from an academic perspective, but it is also an appropriate instrument for political analysis, showing strengths and weaknesses, constituting an adequate tool for political, social and economic leaders to use as an objective diagnosis, as well as to outline and implement policies that allow for progress in human development and social and economic equity.
To download and learn more about this edition, visit www.idd-mex.org.
Konrad Adenauer Foundation
The Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS) is a German political foundation with a Christian Democratic orientation. With our work we seek to guarantee and promote democracy, peace, freedom and welfare in Europe and the world. In Mexico, the KAS office has been working for more than 40 years. Contributing to the consolidation and deepening of democracy as a political system and form of coexistence so that people can live in freedom and dignity.
SMEs are highly represented in the Colombian market; in the Cundinamarca region alone, 42% of businesses are small and medium-sized enterprises. But how do these companies survive in the market?
Research by Angelica María Borrego Espitia, researcher of strategies used by small and medium enterprises in Cundinamarca Colombia.
Sustainable value in SMEs
A problem that has been noticed in the region of Cundinamarca, Colombia, is that only 30% of the micro, small, medium and large companies survive the first five years after being created, which caused a lot of curiosity in locals and that is why it was decided to conduct an in-depth investigation. This research conducted by Angélica Borrego as her master's thesis at the Universidad Militar Nueva Granada under the direction of Professor Yefri Manuel Pascagaza Corredor shows us the different strategies used by the same SMEs, strategies that help us understand how they have maintained a stable place in the market of Cundinamarca.
The objective of Angélica Borrego's research was to analyze the strategies used by small and medium-sized companies in Cundinamarca to create sustainable value.
According to the data obtained in the research, the creation of sustainable value is based on the following points:
Innovation
Sustainability
Business Model
Co-creation
Value
Sustainable manufacturing
Human capital
Emerging synthesis
Circular economy
These comprise: sustainability, creation value and sustainable creation value.
By checking this information we can see that this research has a descriptive quantitative approach and its design is non-experimental-transactional, which means that it is a non-probabilistic method by convenience. Angélica Borrego says that for the collection of data a questionnaire of closed questions was carried out together with a judgment of experts and to assess the validity all this was applied in some participating SMEs in Cundinamarca Colombia.
Study results Survey results
Finally, the researcher commented on her conclusions and recommendations, which were:
Medium-sized companies are the best performers when it comes to implementing strategies for sustainable value creation
Efforts must continue to be made to achieve representative improvements in terms of sustainability.
Small companies need to work with greater dedication and adapt to current trends.
Trends are the key to creating strategies if you want your SME to remain competitive and sustainable over time.
The companies that are the subject of this study must redefine their strategies
You should always think about introducing new factors to create value, this will help your company a lot.
Last Thursday, May 13, 2021, we received at the University of Celaya during our activity "Science Dialogues" Dr. Rocio Boza Calvo from the Faculty of Education of the Universidad Hispanoamericana de Costa Rica, who shared with us the development and results of her analysis of the effectiveness of the implementation of the simulation strategy in education according to the perception of the facilitators involved in the process, from the second quarter of 2016 to date.
Would you like to know the most important details of this research? We present them to you!
The objective of this research is to demonstrate the effectiveness of simulation as a methodological strategy used in different courses of the curriculum of the Faculty of Education of the Universidad Hispanoamericana. This simulation strategy consists in that each professor in his course chooses thematic contents that have been addressed in the classroom and plans with the accompaniment of professional actors a scenario or also called profile that is as close as possible to the educational reality in classroom or educational center contexts, with the objective that the student faces these situations and puts into practice the theoretical knowledge acquired in the courses.
Fields of application of simulation
Simulation is a didactic strategy that allows an approach to professional reality.
Traditionally it has been used for:
- Training and education
- Communication and sales
- System design or improvements.
- Systems management
In disciplines such as:
- Engineering
- Medicine, biology, ecology.
- Social and economic sciences
Research process
In 2016, a qualitative study was conducted in the second half of the semester of the same year, at the Universidad Hispanoamericana. University that has formalized simulation in education and that has been applied in six courses of the curriculum of the different careers of the Faculty of Education, among which are:
- Learning disabilities
- Language disorders 1
- Group techniques
- Evaluation techniques in English and Spanish
- General Didactics 1
- Teaching English 3
Each of the courses where simulation is carried out as a teaching methodology contemplates in its program that the student's participation and performance in such activity has a value of 20% of the final passing grade of the subject.
Throughout the term, starting in week 7 according to their schedule, two simulations must be carried out. They have 18 trained teachers who have become facilitators to implement it.
In order to know the effectiveness of the methodology we were working with, a qualitative research was carried out by sending a questionnaire to each of the professors who implemented this methodology throughout the course they taught. It should be noted that one of them left the institution, another is no longer part of the faculty of education, another is the simulation coordinator and preferred to avoid bias and the remaining 4 did not send the survey in the time in which they were requested.
Eleven questionnaires were collected and served as a sample for the qualitative analysis.
Main results
The teachers who responded to the questionnaire report that by using simulation, students develop critical thinking, in situations that actually allow them to test what they know, what they can do and how they think it should be done. Many simulations develop decision-making skills, a very important aspect of thinking and problem solving.
All the interviewees mentioned as positive aspects the ambience of the space, the professionalism of the actors, and the technology used (Learning Space). These positive aspects are the product of a joint effort and work.
The most outstanding issue in terms of aspects to be improved is the sound and the transfer of venues to carry out the simulation. It should be noted that the respondents seemed to answer focusing on recent events and did not answer evidencing everything that occurred throughout the strategy implementation process.
Conclusions and recommendations
It is important to make it clear that although simulation allows the future teacher to get closer to reality. It will not always be able to represent or reproduce in its entirety situations that are generated within the educational centers, hence the component of using professional actors is perhaps the option that most reduces this disadvantage that several researchers have pointed out.
Professional actors are hired for the simulations considering that they have dramaturgical training and a trained capacity for reproduction that facilitates performance in an educational activity, focused on learning objectives and at the service of students in professional training.
An important factor provided by the adequate preparation of actors is the increase in the level of realism of the simulation scenarios.
Another very important factor is that the teachers attending the education courses must be active teachers with work experience so that the scenarios or profiles are as real as possible and in line with the current context.
To develop science outreach skills, 4th semester students of the Communication and Audiovisual Media degree at the University of Celaya participated in the Science Dialogues activity. In this activity, students chatted with researchers from different areas of knowledge and various universities in Mexico and Latin America to learn about their research projects and then publish a note to disseminate these projects to an international audience.
Invited guests include the following researchers:
Dr. Avid Roman-Gonzalez, CEO of BE Tech, UNTELS Lima Sur, Universidad de Ciencias y Humanidades, Peru.
Dr. Gustavo Illescas, Professor-Researcher, Faculty of Exact Sciences, Universidad Nacional del Centro, Tandil, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Rocío Lorena Boza Calvo, professor and researcher at Universidad Hispanoamericana, Costa Rica.
Dr. Yohanna Milena Rueda Mahecha, Universidad Uniminuto, Colombia
The team of students and Dr. Josman Espinosa Gómez from CETYS University, Mexicali Campus
Angélica Borrego Espitia and Oscar Robayo Quevedo, thesis students advised by Dr. Yefri Pascagaza of the Universidad Militar Nueva Granada, Colombia.
María Fernanda Acosta Romo and Marco Antonio Chamorro Lucero, researchers of the Universidad Mariana in Colombia.
Some of the notes that resulted from this activity will be published in this blog and others were published by the authors directly in their social networks and professional portfolios. We invite you to discover them.
In November 2019, the 10th Research Forum of the University of Celaya was held, in which 81 research papers were presented by students from all undergraduate and engineering programs.
The objective of the event is to disseminate the research protocols and reports carried out by undergraduate students of the University of Celaya in their search to generate solutions to problems in an ethical and successful manner.
Each student team presents both a poster and a short presentation of the results of their research work. At the end of their presentation, the teams receive feedback from the Evaluators Committee made up of research experts in different disciplines of knowledge. This experience strengthens learning and encourages students to put into practice the skills of socialization and dissemination of the scientific knowledge they have generated, in addition to having developed the necessary skills to design, implement and evaluate a scientific research project.
In this way, the cycle of research subjects closes each year with all our students. This contributes to the formation of people who research and interpret their environment and thus generate ethical and successful solutions to local, regional, national and global problems.
This year, the Biomedical Engineering students, in addition to their poster and oral presentation, presented the prototypes of the innovative technology they developed and evaluated with their research, some examples are: technology for color detection, scanning and digitalization of organs, Measure Tracking System (MTS) and distance from one point to another with LabVIEW.
The works carried out are also the beginning or continuation of projects developed in other subjects, thus contributing to transversal learning.
In addition, the papers evaluated as the most significant are selected to receive support and to be presented at specialized congresses in their disciplines.
Congratulations to all student researchers, see you at the next Forum.
Every day we consume information in a wide variety of media: mass media, social networks and what we hear "by word of mouth". We are well aware that much of the information we receive is not from reliable sources, yet we continue to consume such information (or misinformation) and, in the worst cases, to spread it. Why do we continue to believe implausible, illogical claims without evidence to back them up? The 4th semester students of Communication and Audiovisual Media of the University of Celaya various projects have been carried out to explain these phenomena.
There is an online game called Bad News. In this game you assume the role of a fake news writer and you must create the most eye-catching fake news to get as many (fictitious) followers as possible with catchy headlines based on the didactic and funny explanation that is integrated in each level of the game. The creators of Bad News are a multi-disciplinary group of researchers, journalists and media experts who analyze the phenomenon of misinformation, created this media literacy tool in conjunction with other educational programs. What they are looking for is that by allowing the user to experience how fake news works, resistance to it increases.
Inspired by the well-known game Bad NewsThe challenge for the students of Communication and Audiovisual Media was that in a couple of classes they had to come up with a creative way to explain the phenomena that influence the distortion of the information we consume on the Internet and social networks. Their results are presented below:
Fake news: The phenomenon of broadcasting and dissemination of fake news has had a great negative impact on democracy and different areas of social life.That is why studentsVictoria Rábago and Ángel Magueyal Zamarroni designed an interactive quiz in which the challenge is to identify whether the news that appears on the screen is real or fake news.You can take this quiz to identify how likely you are to believe fake news by taking the following quizclick here.
Churnalism: Students Lucero Ruiz Guzmán and María José Banda Amézaga invented a game in which they exemplify the results of churnalism. Churnalism is a practice that consists of copying and pasting textually the content of a page in many others. It usually happens in content blogs and even in the media that replicate the content found in other sources, without analyzing or adding original content. This is why when looking for certain information, definition, content, we usually find the same text (usually deficient) in multiple pages, because each page replicates the content of the previous one. The game created by Lucero and María José leads players to discover this bad practice, to invite them to think about it and avoid it. You can see the video of the game in action here.
Troll farms: Jorge Mauricio Flores and Erick Hernández created a video and a game in Kahoot to explain to the audience what troll farms are and how they work. On the Internet, more specifically in social networks and discussion forums, it is common to find trolls, i.e. profiles of people who tend to criticize, annoy or attack with comments profiles that express opinions different from theirs. Sometimes this work is carried out by bots. But there are also TROLL FARMSThese are companies that hire people to create fake profiles on social networks and make comments for or against according to the needs of the clients who hire them, disguising this activity as "public relations" actions.
Filter bubble: The search results and posts we see on our social networks are based on predictions made by algorithms based on our characteristics, preferences and previous online activity, this is why if you are planning your next trip abroad on your Instagram account you see ads for cheap flights. But it's also because of this bubble filter that when you consult information on the Internet you only find a part of all the existing information, since it is filtered according to your previous online activity, thus limiting you from seeing information or points of view other than your own, which in turn prevents you from seeing the whole picture. To explain this concept in a visual way, students Paulina Aguilar and Ana Laura Saavedra made this animation.
Resonance chamber or echo chamber: Constanza and Celeste made a short film with a lot of humor in which they show a conversation of a (fictitious) group whose members have a very deep-rooted opinion in their thinking and are not open to listen to other visions, as an example of the phenomenon called echo chamber. Note, the example was taken to the extreme and does not represent the opinion of the creators.
Clickbait: To exemplify in a didactic and fun way how pages are created whose purpose is to obtain the greatest number of clicks possible regardless of the quality of the content, students Andrea Rentería and Carolina Villegas designed a board game in which players must find the titles with the greatest potential to obtain clicks according to the classification of the content of the notes. The player who accumulates the most titles classified in the correct category wins the game.
FOMO Syndrome : To exemplify the syndrome called Fear of Missing Out, students Alexandra López and Arturo Centeno recorded a video as a "social experiment" in which they asked a group of volunteers to participate in a dynamic that reflects the feelings of missing out on something because they don't have it with them or can't consult their phone, with this activity carried out in a couple of classes, the students seek to disseminate and above all educate about the existence of these phenomena to promote more critical thinking when consuming information in our daily lives. We recommend that you share this content with all your contacts, in order to contribute to the fight against disinformation and become a more critical society.
