Contemporary society increasingly demands the use of digital tools in different areas of life, including in the teaching and learning process. The virtuality generated by cyberspace was even more evident in the current pandemic context, which caused the interruption of classroom classes and imposed a new educational model based on online education methodologies. Teachers had to adapt and reinvent their pedagogical practices and teaching methodologies in a virtual learning environment, often without guidance and without essential digital skills to promote quality learning. In this context, this chapter presents an excerpt from a bibliographical study that aimed to understand how distance education can contribute to promote the development of digital skills. Here, the results regarding the development of digital teaching skills are portrayed, with the indication of references and models that can be used to enable training proposals in this regard in addition to contributing to a reflection on the lack of institutional policies and programs for training teachers for online teaching.
TopIntroduction
I'm stuck in the network
like fish caught
It's zap zap, it's like
It's Instagram, it's all very well thought out
thought is cloud
movement is drone
the monk in the convent
Wait for the advent of God by iPhone
(By Internet 2 – Gilberto Gil)
The excerpt above was taken from the song “Pela internet 2”, by Gilberto Gil, a new version of the song “Pela internet”, also composed by him, in 1996, being the first song broadcast live over the internet in Brazil. “Pela internet 2”, composed in 2018, updates several of the concepts presented by the original song, with numerous novelties disseminated by the World Wide Web in an interval of just over 20 years. The choice of this piece of music to introduce this chapter is related to the intention of giving relevance to how deeply contemporary life is shown to be intertwined with digital technologies. The words of singer Gilberto Gil are wise when he affirms that we are “stuck in the net”, because, in fact, contemporary society is deeply intertwined with digital technologies and dependent on the virtual world.
The virtuality generated by cyberspace was even more evident in the current pandemic context, which required government authorities around the world to adopt emergency public policies in order to reduce the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The measures of social distancing suggested by the World Health Organization (WHO), from March 2020, caused the suspension of in-person classes in most countries, which imposed a new educational model, facilitated by digital technologies and based on the methodologies of online education, designated as emergency remote learning (UNESCO, 2020; Reimers & Schleicher, 2020; Reimers et al., 2020). Among the many challenges, teachers had to adapt and reinvent, from one moment to another, their pedagogical practices and teaching methodologies in a virtual learning environment, often without guidance and without essential digital skills to promote quality learning (Vieira & Silva, 2020).
In addition to discussions on the pedagogical effectiveness of this model, emergency remote teaching did not reach a large part of the students, who lack the necessary equipment and structure to access the classes and materials available, and to carry out the proposed activities (Camacho et al., 2020), which may have represented a significant discontinuity in their learning process. This reality may cause, in the near future, an even deeper gap of inequality of opportunities between these students and those whose families were able to bear, by their own resources, the demands generated by remote emergency education.
In addition to the educational context, the various other areas of everyday life stand out, which have been increasingly dependent on access to information and communication technologies (ICT), which, on the one hand, facilitate the performance of tasks day-to-day practices such as financial services, shopping, research, bureaucratic services, on the other hand, further limit the access of individuals who are not digitally competent. This fact reinforces the need for public policies aimed at developing the digital skills of citizens in general (and not just students and teachers), as well as programs that facilitate access to the equipment and services necessary for the enjoyment of such technological possibilities.
In this context, this chapter presents the results of a bibliographical study that aimed to understand how distance education (DE) can contribute to promote the development of digital skills. For the study, the authors considered the hypothesis that distance education is a powerful tool in the development of digital skills, since it uses the digital environment as a means to carry out the teaching-learning process, that is, as the code that can, hypothetically, be used to promote learning about the code itself, in this case, about the use of the digital medium.
Thus, considering distance education as an educational modality that crosses borders (the historical borders of limiting access to knowledge), it was assumed that this can represent an opportunity to overcome the limitations found by millions of people across the world that still do not have access to ICT and its languages. Overcoming this shortage, which tends to grow in an increasingly digitized society (given the forced digitization process experienced in this pandemic period), may represent another step towards the full exercise of citizenship.