Pincha La Burbuja®: A Research and Educational Lab for Critical Media Literacy and AI Education

Pincha La Burbuja® | Critical Media Literacy and AI Education

Pincha La Burbuja® is a transmedia educational platform conceived as an academic framework for research, educational innovation, and knowledge transfer, aimed at fostering critical thinking, media literacy, and metacognitive awareness in digital environments shaped by informational acceleration, affective polarisation, disinformation, and algorithmic influence.

The platform integrates generative artificial intelligence from a deliberate, pedagogically grounded, and ethical perspective, explicitly rejecting its use as a cognitive shortcut. Instead, AI is employed as a tool for critical accompaniment, discourse analysis, and reflective engagement, supporting the deceleration of impulsive digital practices, the promotion of active information verification, and the strengthening of analytical capacities among students and digital citizens.

Theoretical Framework

The design and implementation of Pincha La Burbuja® are grounded in an interdisciplinary theoretical framework integrating perspectives from communication studies, education, and cognitive psychology, including:

• Postdigital theory, critical transhumanism, and accelerationism, addressing the socio-technical conditions of digital speed, cognitive overload, and human–technology entanglement.
• Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), applied to the examination of power relations, polarisation, and identity construction in digital discourse.
• Inoculation Theory, oriented towards the prevention of disinformation and the development of cognitive resistance.
• Dual-process theory of thinking (Kahneman), with particular emphasis on the activation of deliberative reasoning (System 2).
• The revised Bloom’s Taxonomy (Churches), focusing on deep understanding, analysis, evaluation, and knowledge creation.
• Approaches to critical media literacy and digital citizenship education.
• Principles of human-centred education, aligned with UNESCO and European Union recommendations on the educational use of artificial intelligence.
• New framework of Critical Inoculation Theory.

Pedagogical Design

The pedagogical architecture of Pincha La Burbuja® is structured around narrative-based learning missions that position participants as active agents in the learning process. These missions are designed to:

• Activate critical and reflective thinking in response to viral and polarising content.
• Foster metacognition through the explicit justification of decisions and analyses.
• Limit impulsive interaction and encourage cognitive pause and reflective engagement.
• Develop the capacity to create informed, non-polarised, and socially responsible counter-discourses.

Learning is conceived as an active, contextualised, and situated process, in which uncertainty, error, and reflection constitute central pedagogical elements.

Technological Architecture

The platform incorporates generative AI through a supervised and pedagogically oriented design, rather than automated decision-making:

• Deployment of five specialised GPT-based agents (“Cyborgs”), each focused on a distinct analytical function, including discourse analysis, bias and fallacy detection, source verification, emotional analysis, and critical synthesis.
• Implementation of a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture, connected to a proprietary academic repository (Códex Subversivo), ensuring epistemic traceability, theoretical grounding, and transparency.
• A design explicitly oriented towards human oversight, critical reflection on AI behaviour, and systematic examination of system limitations, including bias, misclassification, and hallucinations.

Within this framework, technology does not replace human thinking but renders it visible, slows it down, and problematises it.

Domains of Application

Pincha La Burbuja® is conceived as a flexible and transferable environment, applicable to a range of academic and educational contexts, including:

• Undergraduate and postgraduate higher education.
• Initial and in-service teacher education.
• Media and digital literacy programmes.
• Educational and educommunication research.
• Interventions addressing disinformation, hate speech, and online polarisation.
• Critical AI literacy and the responsible use of generative artificial intelligence.

Research, Teaching, and Knowledge Transfer

The platform operates simultaneously as:

• An educational innovation environment, integrated into courses, seminars, and structured learning activities.
• A research infrastructure, particularly suited to the study of polarised discourse, affective framing, and interpretative errors in automated systems.
• A knowledge transfer tool, facilitating dialogue between academia, educational institutions, and society.

Through this integrated approach, Pincha La Burbuja® aligns teaching, research, and knowledge transfer activities with established criteria of academic quality and evaluation.

Interest in Academic and Institutional Collaboration

The Pincha La Burbuja® platform and its associated lines of work are conceptualised as an open academic framework for research and educational collaboration, focusing on the critical examination of post-digital communication, media literacy, and the responsible integration of artificial intelligence in educational and social contexts.

Within this framework, particular emphasis is placed on the development of interdisciplinary collaborations, especially among doctoral researchers across different strands of Education doctoral programmes, with the objective of consolidating a research and educational innovation group associated with the platform.

In addition, the platform seeks to establish collaborations with:

• Researchers in education, communication, cultural studies, social psychology, or related fields.
• Research groups working on media literacy, critical discourse analysis, and educational applications of artificial intelligence.
• Educational institutions and public bodies, including universities, teacher education centres, and educational administrations, engaged in projects related to educational innovation and knowledge transfer.

Potential forms of collaboration may include:

• Participation in competitive and non-competitive research projects.
• Joint development of educational materials, methodologies, and innovation practices.
• Co-authorship of peer-reviewed academic publications, particularly those based on educational experiences, empirical studies, or critical analyses derived from the use of the platform.
• Engagement in scientific dissemination and university–society knowledge transfer activities, including invited academic lectures and conference contributions.

All collaborations are grounded in an academic, ethical, and critical approach, with particular attention to methodological transparency, scientific rigour, and alignment with European frameworks governing education and artificial intelligence.

Academic Contact

Researchers and institutions interested in exploring potential academic or institutional collaborations may contact the project via the institutional email address provided on this website. Where applicable, collaborations will be formalised through appropriate academic or institutional agreements.