Full text
| |
| Author(s): |
Mariana da Rocha Corrêa Silva
Total Authors: 1
|
| Document type: | Master's Dissertation |
| Press: | Campinas, SP. |
| Institution: | Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Faculdade de Educação |
| Defense date: | 2007-08-23 |
| Examining board members: |
Dirceu da Silva;
Rosana Giaretta Sguerra Miskulin;
Anna Regina Lanner de Moura;
David Bianchini;
Agueda Bernardete Bittencourt
|
| Advisor: | Dirceu da Silva |
| Abstract | |
This thesis describes a quantitative and qualitative research which proposes, develops and validates a research instrument that investigates the student¿s perception about the characteristics of the constitution and management process of a virtual practical community. A virtual community of practice is defined in this work by joining characteristics of virtual learning communities and communities of practice, which are described in the literature. A fundamental aspect of a virtual practical community is its interactive dimension, which allows several ways of communication, interlocution and collaboration in forming shared knowledge and in the continuous formation of the involved parts. The bibliographical research about the characteristics and aspects of functioning and management of virtual learning communities and communities of practice enabled the elaboration of a Likert scale which was applied to students from the Specialization in Educational Management Course ¿ CEGE ¿ which is a mixed course (part face-to-face and part web based) that utilized the TelEduc environment as a support computational environment to face-to-face classes, offered between October 2005 and December 2006. The acquired data was submitted to an Exploratory Factor Analysis, enabling the reation of a measurements¿ model, which shows how variables or indicators are composed and what is the relationship between them. From this analysis, seven factors were found to represent the collaboration (Factor 1), the interaction (Factor 2), the activities which took place within the TelEduc environment (Factor 3), the face-to-face classes (Factor 4), the feedback to activities and discussions which took place in the environment (Factor 5), the technical aspects (Factor 6) and the overall organization of the course (Factor 7), as the most relevant characteristics of virtual practical communities, as perceived by the students. Furthermore, it was evidenced that the main characteristic of a virtual community of practice found in the CEGE course by the students was the collaboration, emphasized as the one which most contributed in the formation process of managers involved in the course (AU) | |