discursively-bounded groups of cultural practice whose participants play different, interchangeable roles (speaker/writer, listener/reader, moderator/participant etc.) within the principles of a common discursive logic. So, a societal formation could be metaphorically described as a continuously edited text whose authors share common values and goals.
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.