Jiménez-Cortés’ article turns asynchronous forums into a fine-grained observatory of expansive learning: rather than merely recording interventions, it models how conceptual connections are woven when a team debates, questions, and proposes. The author aligns Third Generation Activity Theory with the cycle of expansive learning actions and translates it into a situated analytic, Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA), to map 158 discursive units.
The outcome is not an inventory of utterances but a topology of reasoning: nodes representing actions (questioning, analyzing, modeling, examining, reflecting) and edges marking co-occurrences that carry pedagogical weight.
This cartography reveals four discursive profiles (empathic-conceptual, representative-conceptual, critical, and comprehensive-conceptual) that are not randomly distributed across teams or genders. Where some groups link “examine–reflect” and complexify the cycle, others stabilize “analyze–model” with less metacognitive return; where certain teams advance along a historical-genetic path, others move in a more empirical-present orientation.
Gender perspective here is not an interpretive ornament but a structural variable: team composition shifts the weight of connections and, with it, the type of cognitive agency that emerges when negotiating tensions between hegemonic pedagogical models and emerging designs.
Methodologically, ENA offers an intermediate measure between qualitative detail and quantitative synthesis, capable of showing how relations among actions shift when the dialogic context changes. Theoretically, the study extends the promise of expansive learning into the concrete terrain of digital education, offering a vocabulary for intervention: if we want more contrast and less inertia, we must design tasks that activate the semantic boundary; if we want deeper reflection, we must promote sequences that compel closure of the cycle after examination.
The conclusion is programmatic: sensitivity to gender and to the shape of discourse are not control variables but levers for redesigning the experience of learning in networks.
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How to Cite: Jiménez Cortés, R. (2023). Expansive Learning in Digital Environments: An Epistemic Network Analysis from a Gender Perspective. RIED-Revista Iberoamericana de Educación a Distancia, 26(2), 111–133. https://doi.org/10.5944/ried.26.2.36198
