mental processes triggered by a learning situation, the strategies one’s mind needs to put to work in order for one to learn/understand a given concept or situation. Being aware of our own metacognitive processes is an advantage, for it makes learning and easier process. These are the most important processes currently investigated by Kucharski and Torres (2010 AU47: The in-text citation "Kucharski and Torres (2010" is not in the reference list. Please correct the citation, add the reference to the list, or delete the citation. ) in the research that is to become the first’s doctoral dissertation.
Published in Chapter:
Educational Research in Virtual Learning Environments: Possibilities for a New Ethnography
Marcus Vinicius Santos Kucharski (Universidade Tuiuti do Paraná & Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná, Brazil) and Patricia Lupion Torres (Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Paraná, Brazil)
Copyright: © 2012
|Pages: 22
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-762-3.ch005
Abstract
The continuous growth of distance education (DE) programs in all levels, powered by the development of new information and communication technologies (ICT), brings new challenges: how can educational research be made in non-presential, asynchronous settings? How can we scientifically approach student bodies formed by people who rarely even share the same hometown and only meet online in virtual learning environments (VLE)? How can we “observe” such groups’ interpersonal, pedagogical relations and their impact on learning? In countries like Brazil, where DE programs have grown vertiginously in few years, many researchers have made significant efforts to answer these questions coherently, efforts that demanded that some principles of traditional educational research be rethought with the help of local and international researches. Interesting methodological approaches to DE groups have resulted from these efforts, and we present and discuss one that has been constantly growing: the virtual ethnographic.