Dinamicidade e Adaptabilidade em Comunidades Virtuais de Aprendizagem: Uma Textografia à Luz do Paradigma da Complexidade

Abstract

The Internet has enabled various types of social practices that emerge, evolve, and change. Its users connect to the web for communication, fun, or other reasons reasons and many of these individuals are increasingly more online as learners, who, according to Moore and Kearsley(2007), may count on the possibility of virtual classrooms in which text, audio and video converge, in sole platforms of communication. I defend the virtual learning environments (VLEs) configured in these platforms (course management systems) should be considered virtual learning communities, which emerge from the agents actions in the environment. In order to do so, I investigate, through the lens of the Complexity Paradigm (HOLLAND, 1995; 1998; LARSEN-FREEMAN, 1997; LARSEN-FREEMAN; CAMERON, 2008), together with the premises of the Genre Theory, by Swales (1990, 1998, 2004), two VLEs defining them assystems composed of digital genres, regarding a VLE as a complex adaptive system. These VLEs were reconfigured from the platforms TelEduc and Moodle and used to teach the subject Digital Literacy, in the course of Language Arts at the Federal University of MinasGerais UFMG, during the second semester of 2007 and the second semester of 2008, respectively. I have tried to understand how the processes of dynamism and adaptability of the textual production would occur in a VLE throughout the activities of two academic subjectsof a graduation course, in a Distance Education modality. I have focused the emerging dynamics, in term of textual elements and discourse practices, which were prototypical or not and which would depict the possibilities and constraints of these environments when in use.The study constituted a descriptive research of qualitative nature and virtual ethnography (HINE, 2000) orientation. I have analysed the data by repurposing the proposal of textography given by Swales (1998), who refers to an analysis from the context of a discourse community.The analyses indicate that the textual production of the emerging discourse communities was influenced by the coupling of different layers of the digital support, the textual genres and the communicative purposes and, also, by the affordances which were perceived and acted uponby teachers and learners. The VLEs were formed in a process of co-adaptation among the agents and other building blocks belonging to these complex adaptive systems - marked by the modes of belonging of these agents, by the repurposing of the digital genres, according tothe emerging contexts, and by the effectivities upon the affordances - in the light of their communicative and pedagogical goals. I have concluded that the VLEs offer the opportunity for a pedagogical experience that should focus on meaningful affordances which can be offered to learners, so that the tasks which provide dynamism to the VLE may guarantee dynamics which are relevant to the intended learning process.