quinta-feira, 18 de novembro de 2010

CMAPS

CMAP TOOLS - UMA FERRAMENTA A MAIS

O Cmap Tools é um software disponível para a criação de mapas conceituais. Estes mapas ajudam a organizar as ideias e pensamentos em esquemas gráficos que servem para organizar e representar o conhecimento, podendo ser usado em todas as áreas do conhecimento.
Aqui neste blog criamos um mapa conceitual sobre o uso das novas tecnologias na sala de aula, baseado no texto "Planning Pedagogy for i-mode: Learning in the Age of  'The Mobile Net'.

Wrap up on New Technologies and Teaching

Our conclusion on the texts read and the tasks performed during this module on New Technologies and Language Teaching is that any education system should enable productive use of prior experiences and consider the learner´s trajectory of what is popular among their ages.
Children and adolescents are becoming multimodal, schools are print oriented, though; generating alienation of pupils and what schools have to offer.
As children grow old, they take control of their interest and become more self determining.
This group agrees with Elaine Millard (2006) on the multimodality of communication processes and accessible methods through technologies.
An interesting metaphor that Millard (2006) describes is between education and cooking: in cooking the homogenization of ingredients results in transformation— in education, possibilities for new meanings; newly designed and redesigned in particular moments of meaning making.
A new literacy kind of teacher must bear this blending of elements in mind, when preparing the class plan.
Our experience as teachers and students have proved families´ role as a relevant factor to be considered.
Families have accommodated to the school system, and leave all the “traffic of information” to educational institutions, while this group sees the flow of this traffic of information as a two-way-street. School practices should not be dominated by teachers or disregarded by families.

Paula B.

References
http://www.webartigos.com/articles/3050/1/A-Educacao-E-As-Novas-Tecnologias/pagina1.html

http://www.atica.com.br/entrevistas/?e=169

Ana Aranha, Revista Época, 23 de Abril de 2007
MILLARD, E. Transformative Pedagogy: Teachers creating a literacy of fusion. New Perspectives on Language & Education, 2006.

Online Memes, Affinities, and Cultural Production

The text explored social practices of propagating online “memes” as a dimension of cultural production and transmission. Knobel and Lankshear Defines memes like “(...) contagious patterns of “cultural information” that get passed from mind to mind and directly generate and shape the mindsets and significant forms of behavior and actions of a social group. Memes include such things as popular tunes, catchphrases, clothing fashions, architectural slyles, ways of doing things, icons, jingles, and the like”.
The current interest in memes and contemporary conceptual and theoretical development of the idea dates back to ideas advanced by the geneticist Richard Dawkins in 1976. In his book The selfish Gene, Dawkins proposed a substantial evolutionary model of cultural development and change grouned in the replication of ideas, knowledge, and other cultural information through imitation and transfer. His definition of “memes” posited actual biological changes in brain neurons when minds became infected with memes.
Dawkins (1976) identified three key characteristics of successful memes: fidelity, fecundity and longevity. Fidelity refers to qualities of the meme that enable it to be readily copied and passed from mind to mind relatively intact. Fecundity refers to the rate at with an idea or pattern is coppied and spread. And finally longevity assumes aoptimal conditions for a meme´s replication and innovation.
It is relatively recenty that the concept has been developed and accepted as having descriptive and explanatory power with respect to cultural development. Memes can be seen as a cultural phenomena and as new literacy practices, here we will try to consider what they might mean for literacy education and consequently, how memes operate in everyday life.
According to James Gee, affinity spaces are "characterized by the sharing of knowledge and expertise based on voluntary affiliations". Often but not always occurring online, affinity spaces have a goal of sharing knowledge or participating in a specific area, but informal learning is another outcome. Gee uses the concept of an affinity space to focus on learning, among various other features concerning learning in particular, affinty spaces instantiate participation, collaboration, distribution and dispersion of expertise, and relatedness.
The point is that the logic of new literacies embodies general features and qualities highlighted byGee´s account of affinity spaces. These features and qualities emphasize the relational and social aspects of any literacy practice and draw attention to various social and resource configurations within which and through which people participate and learn.
Talking about meme longevity, it certainly seems that the internet itself greatly facilitates it. The blogsphere, in particular, appears to be an ideal vehicle for transmitting memes, with weblogs now replacing email and discussion forums, as a primary way of spreading memes.
Three distinct patterns of characteristics are likely to contribute directly to each meme´s fecundity. These include:
• Some lelement of humor;
• A rich kind of intertextuality, such as wry cross-references to different everyday and popular culture events, icons or phenomena;
• Anomalous juxtapositions, usually of images.
Most of the memes in our pool seem to appeal to and draw on the creative energies of people who enjoy playful, absurdist ideas carrying little serious content and who enjoy homorous ideas carrying serious content which can be considered to be social critique and commentary. Wry and satiric humor is used to good effect in the memes that serve social critique, criticism or commentary purposes withing this data pool. Susan Blackmore, a prominent mmeticist argues that the “effective transmission of memes depends critically on human preferences, attentiom, emotions and desire”.
With respect to literacy education in schools, the social dimension of meming translates into focussing on practices that are larger than reading and writting, and which can be, ccording to the text, “captured by means of distinguishing between “big L” Literacies and “little l” literacies. The difference is that:
“Literacy, with “big L”, refers to making meaning in ways that are tied directly to life and to being the world. That is, whenever we use language we are making some sort of significant or socially recognizable “move” that is inextricably tied to someone bringing into being or realizing some element or aspect of their world. This means that literacy, with a “small l”, describes the actual processes or reading, writing, viewing, listening, manipulating images and sounds, etc., making connections between different ideas, and using words and symbols that are part of these larger, more embodied Literacy practices“.
A “big L” conception of new Literacies recognizes that everyday life is often amplified through the participation of and interaction with people one may never meet and, moreover, that in online spaces this interaction and participation may occur in ways never before possible.It also envolves people deciding how they will choose to read or interpret a meme.
When memes are examined as Literacy practices it is possible to see that they involve much more than simply passing on or adding to writen or visual texts or information. Rather, they are tied directly to ways or interacting with others, to meaning making, and to ways of being, knowing, learning and doing.
The importance of teachers having a “big L” Literacy mindset on memes can not be over-emphasized. Understading succesful online memes can contribute much to identifying the limitation of narrow conceptions of literacy and new technologies classrooms. It can also help with understanding new forms of social participation and influence in everyday life.
Meming is also a fruitful practice for educators to focus on when thinking about new forms of social participation and civic action in the wake of widespread acess to the internet and involvement in increasingly dispersed social networks. For example, memes can be used in classrooms to promote discussions bout each meme´s contagious qualities, the ideas they convey and why, who created each meme and how it has been dispersed. These can be dynamic resources for developing informed points of view on a range of social issues.
Lilian S.


references
http://www.webartigos.com/articles/3050/1/A-Educacao-E-As-Novas-Tecnologias/pagina1.html

http://www.atica.com.br/entrevistas

PEDAGOGY for I - MODE

Planning Pedagoy for i-mode: Learning in the Age of “the Mobile Net”

The text examined early initiatives in school and higher education settings, and suggested some principles and possibilities for pedagogy in the context of the mobile internet.
Everybody is familiar with mobile phones and their text message, camera and video capacities. Texting and photographing with mobile phones are common practices across diverse social and economic groups in coutries worldwide. Always on, large-sacale, ful internet wireless connectivity is just around the corner. In short, i-mode is imminent globaly and the entire internet has been becoming both personal and portable, that´s why the mobile acess to the internet has been becoming more and more an integral component in learning work.



Jeremy Roschelle points out a negative aspect in the use of mobile technology in learning:
“The most common [mobile] Internet applications can be quite problematic in classrooms. Schools, for example, have been tempted to ban instant messaging because it enables cheating and disruptive behavior. Further, attention is a teacher´s most precious commodity, and no teacher wants her students´attention focused on messaging with friends outside of class.
Consistently with this, none of the Roschelle´s case study applications require connectivity beyound the local classroom, nor does ay require a generic messaging capacity that would allowstudents to “pass notes”.
Rheingold argues that under conditions of the “mobile net” new kinds of smart mob behaviours will became incresingly prevalent and dominat withing everyday life and can be used in eduation: studies of adolescent practices that are mediated by mobile phones, for example game playing through physical and virtual spaces using mobile phones, PDAs, laptops and hom computers. Smart mobs are people who cooperate in ways never before possible because they carry devices that possess both communication and computing capacities. Even though the individuals who consitute a smart mob may not actually know each other, they are able to act together for shared purposes.
The tools of techno-networking are, precisely, excellent tools of social networking. Here we relate the positive points of the i-mode:
In i-mode, time and place become fluid and flexible. It added up to how people do their lives, being able to negotiate times and places on the run may be a key to reducing stress, making meetings more enjoyable, cosolidating relationships, and so on, as well as contributing to more functional values like being more efficient with time and other resources.
With all these, the tendency is that learning will incresingly move out of classrooms and into virtual and physical spaces for learners to make rich connections to people and non human resources:
“Learning is mobile in terms of space, i.e. it happens at workplace, at home, and at places of leisure; it is mobile between different areas of life, i.e. it may relate to work demands, self-improvement, or leisure; and it is mobile with respect to time, i.e. it hapens at different times during the day, on working days or on weekends”.
As we can see, things have been changing day by day and the schools have been facing waves of digital technologies. The end result is a masive amounts of “digital busy work, a lot of “old wine in new bottles”, to avoid this, the curriculum and pedagogy of the schools can not remain intact.
Its important to mention here some priciples and criteria for planning “pedagogy for i-mode”. First of all, curriculum and pedagoy must not be hostages to technological change at the level of artefacts and besides that schools can not simply find ways to accommodate new technologies to classroom, it could waste all the potential that new technologies have. Several educational principles and related criteria derived from a sociocultural perspective and to which are committed seem specially relavant for this subject. Theses are:
• The principle of efficacious learning: This envolves thinking of education and learning in term of human lives as trajectories through diverse social practices and institutions.
• The principle of integrated learning: Learning is integrated when the various bits of social practives that go together to make up a practice as a whole.
• The principle of productive appropriation and extension in learning: It involves looking for ways to reduce or ameliorate conflict between social identities during learning.
• The principle of critical learning. The student should learn critically, the fact that becoming fluent in Discourse is best achieved through processes of learning inside the Discourse.
Schrage goes on to argue that “the biggest impact these technologies have had, and will have, is on relationships between people and between organizations” From this standpoint, schools can consider how communication and compution technologies might be used produtctively in terms of new relationships that could be developed and mediated using these technologies, reather than in terms of information delivery or of doing old things in new ways. The knowledge-producing schools approach must be based on a view of education as a “whole of community responsibility”.

Lilian S.

O mundo mudou... e as escolas ?

“Imagine que um cidadão tivesse dormido um século e acordasse agora. O mundo seria uma grande surpresa para ele. Aviões. Celulares. Arranha-céus. Ao entrar numa casa, ele não conseguiria entender o que é uma televisão. Ou um computador. Poderia se maravilhar com uma barra de chocolate. Escandalizar-se com os biquínis das moças. Perder-se num shopping center. Mas, quando ele deparasse com uma escola, finalmente teria uma sensação de tranqüilidade. "Ah, isso eu conheço!", pensaria, ao ver um professor com um giz na mão à frente de vários alunos de cadernos abertos”. É igualzinho à escola que eu freqüentei”. (Ana Aranha, Revista Época, 23 de Abril de 2007)
Ainda segundo Ana Aranha, “Essa escola, tão bem organizada ao longo de mais de dois séculos, já não responde às necessidades do mundo. (...) O mundo de ontem era repleto de fronteiras, estático, separado por áreas. O atual é globalizado, dinâmico e conectado”.

Ipod, Orkut, Twitter, Facebook, e-readers... A disseminação da internet e de recursos digitais está promovendo uma revolução em vários aspectos da nossa vida. A Educação é uma das áreas mais afetadas, afinal os novos tempos exigem também novas competências e habilidades. Imersos em um mundo marcado pelo excesso de informação, agora os alunos têm de dominar muitas aptidões além do tradicional. Novos tipos de letramento são exigidos e hoje, os estudantes têm de interpretar imagens e códigos audiovisuais, não mais apenas textos verbais.
As transformações nas formas de comunicação e de intercâmbio de conhecimentos, desencadeadas pelo uso generalizado das tecnologias digitais nos distintos âmbitos da sociedade contemporânea, demandam uma reformulação das relações de ensino e aprendizagem, tanto no que diz respeito ao que é feito nas escolas, quanto a como é feito. Precisamos então começar a pensar no que realmente pode ser feito a partir da utilização dessas novas tecnologias, particularmente da Internet, no processo educativo. Para isso, é necessário compreender quais são suas especificidades técnicas e seu potencial pedagógico.
Visamos discutir aqui as possibilidades que o ciberespaço oferece para a criação de novos padrões de aquisição e construção dos conhecimentos, ao permitir o uso integrado e interativo de diversas mídias, a exploração hipertextual de um volume enorme de informações e a comunicação à distância.

Lilian S.