A Webrádio como instrumento de motivação para as aprendizagens

Abstract

This study aims to assess whether by challenging students to produce their own content and publish them on a webradio they would feel more autonomous and willing to learn. There has been a growing and more effective commitment in mass communication, increasingly individualized, through mobile devices based on Internet services, offering flexible and standardized contexts in everyday’s life of young people. It is therefore normal that also in schools, classrooms, one calls on to these technologies and services to perform school work, feeding the existence of learning contexts generated by the students themselves. So it is important to examine how User Generated Contents (UGC) can motivate and predispose students to learn and build meaningful and contextualized learning. At the same time it is intended that students may appeal to the rules inherent to the production and spreading of content on a gradual basis: overall quality, creative effort, rigor and mastery of topics and computer tools whilst respecting the copyrights and the privacy of the personal information of individuals involved. The dynamism provided by the new social media tools and the so-called Web 2.0 is assumed as a window of opportunity for education. New relations with knowledge, with technology and with the world are emerging which leads to the need of redefining relations between people and rethinking the production of knowledge. The key involves the appropriation of information and knowledge production in collaborative learning. Knowledge built alone looses space, therefore personal training bets on the interweaving of meanings created by the individual's relationship with the world, with people, with things ... even virtual. Contemporary context is marked by the presence of information technology and communication. Communication is one of the most important activities of our time. The match of education with communication mediated by information technology reaches a great potential on social transformation in the sense of full citizenship, by that means providing an overall view. Today the educational process (extended to its social, cultural and economic issues) needs to understand and follow the social transformations, established by the new information and communication technologies, not only contributing to social inclusion, but also forming autonomous people, able of profiting from technology and the possibilities it offers. Among the contributions that social media and Web 2.0 can offer to education, the opportunity to create, produce, process, search, and disseminate information with extensive technological knowledge, is essential to provide extra motivation for learning, both individually and in groups, optimizing the pursuit of knowledge through activities that produce reflection on and about the use of new technologies. In this context the radio is, without any doubt, the more dynamic vehicle, inclusive and democratic, which allied with cyberculture, becomes a critical resource, the precursor of the most diverse activities, set on various situation fields. As a result of an evolutionary process of the media (from the conventional to the online format), the radio is more and more used as an interactive and collaborative interface in the building of a critical pedagogy of society, propitiating the creation of new processes of content production focused on individual development in all its dimensions. As a means of recreation and propagation of such content, internet enables the media to act as never before, free from pre-designed patterns, free from concessions and structural bonds. Internet transforms radio into a free media content production and turns its professionals into "activists" for digital inclusion. Resources built by students will be transmitted through a webradio which, supported by the publishing of podcasts, may be heard from any mobile device or computer with internet connection. As also mentioned above, as far as the democratization of media type communication is concerned, both for the construction of resources and the way of acceding them, expensive software or devices will not be required, which will facilitate its use in and out of school, moving towards the foundation of a local repository of audio features.

Date of Award	20 May 2014
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	José Reis Lagarto (Supervisor)