Présentation (en français)

Ce travail est la synthèse des résultats d'une recherche visant à favoriser une compréhension approfondie se rapportant aux bonnes pratiques d'enseignement développées dans les campus virtuels de la formation supérieure de l'Argentine.

En partant d'une analyse critique-interprétative des propositions d'enseignement dépliées par les enseignants dans les hypertextes, nous identifions des persistences et des récurrences dans les pratiques de production des matériaux dans les campus virtuels. Ce travail nous a permis de penser encore une fois à l'importance des dimensions d'analyse pédagogique de ces nouveaux scénarios symboliques, même en reconnaissant que ceux-là se trouvent fortement signifiés depuis leurs implications technologiques et de communication.

En plus, nous avons fait des avancements dans la construction de nouvelles catégories théoriques: des configurations didactiques hypertextuelles, des propositions didactiques pour l'interactivité et narratives hypertextuelles de savoir tendant vers une interprétation didactique de ces propositions nouvelles depuis une perspective misant sur la recherche d'une plus grande compréhension pour son amélioration et non pas d'explications totalisatrices.

Mots-clés : campus virtuels de la formation supérieure, configurations didactiques hypertextuelles, l'interactivité, narratives hypertextuelles de savoir, bonnes pratiques d'enseignement.
PEROSI, María Verónica

Presentation (suite en anglais)

In the last decade we have witnessed, and also starred, a steep and increasing wave of novel technological developments: hypertexts, Internet, virtual settings and videoconferences are just some of the examples. We are aware that they all have an impact on everyday, academic and educational life, producing deep cultural, social, epistemological, political and also pedagogical transformations. We believe it is possible to build new interrogatives for teaching, re-updating old debates regarding education for technological changes, education for media, education for production and conveyance of knowledge and technology.

Throughout our research we have analyzed more in deep the problems arising out of teaching processes in electronically affected environments and of the pedagogic - didactic possibilities they may engender. We have focussed, on the one hand, on the recovery of didactic issues in these technological developments and, on the other hand, on the search for an opening related to topics and problems that may currently be involved in the construction of the field with respect to the teaching theory.

Theoretical searches and methodological approach

We have studied those didactic practices involved in hypertextual developments of teaching, both at higher level and professional training fields, drawn at the virtual platforms of the University of Buenos Aires and the Virtual University of Quilmes. Both virtual campuses have been built on the basis of valuable research, them being: a) university proposals of knowledge access, b) proposals which are framed within educational project developments of Argentinean universities, c) proposals within public universities and d) proposals which have had a substantial social impact, both in regional and national scopes, expressed, for example, in the number of students enrolled.

In the frame of these contexts of meaning and in line with our research aims, we have developed an approach orientated to sensibly account for those teaching practices favoring knowledge construction in relation to studied proposals. This approach is inscribed in a theoretical conceptualization line specific from the field of didactics, which recovers for the study of teaching practices the dimensions of the new agenda for the didactics of higher level (Litwin, 1997) and offers a new approach to the effects of implications for didactic knowledge construction, whereas, it is didactics as a theory of teaching practices the one which is currently questioned due to the repercussions of the new technologies in those practices.

We understand that the research we are presenting may be framed within the critical - interpretative approach (Shulman, 1989; Erikson, 1989) and the type of the theoretical improvement produced as a conceptual invention (Shulman, 1986), since it attempts at accounting for synthesizing and interpretative conceptual developments regarding certain aspects of the practices, which, despite involving empirical work, imply inventive leaps that do not directly derive from the results.

On the other hand, we have noticed from the beginning of this research that the study of the impact of modern technologies on teaching engenders several concerns of political, cultural, philosophical, technological and pedagogical nature. We understood that, therefore, the categories of analysis stemming from these and other fields of knowledge like psychology, linguistics, sociology, etc., were not merely slaps or applications but rather quite valuable gears to generate derivations, even when they were not constitutive of the field of didactics, which could enable us to apprehend the complexity of the act of teaching.

We believe that analyzing the ways in which knowledge is built within the frame of the technological features of these hypertextual settings along with the ways in which expert knowledge accounts for the developments of a certain field proves essentially relevant to understand good hypertextual teaching practices. The concern about problems related to epistemological, technological and didactic perspectives have therefore become central analysis dimensions as well as structuring features of these good hypertextual teaching proposals.

Results

We have distinguished specific manners in which didactic proposals are drawn in hypertexts, which we have categorized as hypertextual didactic configurations. They are teaching practices which culturally transcend the impact of the new technologies, didactically rebuilding the contents. They account for didactic networks particular of hypertextual cultural ways in which knowledge is affected. They are characterized by their tri-dialogic nature among the specific way of outlining a teaching proposal, the particular way of approaching a field of knowledge and the peculiar cultural way in which teaching is inscribed as from the recognition of the hypertextual setting.

These three aspects -technological, pedagogical and epistemological- come together involving each other and are rebuilt by an assisting set of expertise from teachers, -with respect to technology, teaching practice and disciplinary field, respectively- for the development of a particular didactic construction. In this sense, we understand that these hypertexutal didactic configurations account for a set of loans assisting the writing and edition of a teaching proposal technologically outlined in an hypertext. A teaching expertise, which may be defined either in individual terms (i.e., a person) or in joint terms (i.e., as a product of teamwork among experts in different fields) implies that the technological ways of production become transparent (i.e., they do not act as restraints of the proposal) against a teaching proposal taking hold of technology and didactically rebuilding the hypertextual cultural device.

From the recognition of the teaching expertise interplay, we understand that the three aspects withdrawn for the analysis of the hypertextual didactic configurations interact -that is to say, they tolerate and critically rebuild each other- and get mutually involved in order to generate potent re-meanings from the point of view of the teaching proposal. These re-meanings are detected and expressed in different ways in which teaching proposals of activities and contents are conceived and developed within the frame of these virtual settings. In this sense, we recognize the meaning of interactivity as a didactic construction and the construction of hypertextual narratives of knowledge.

The idea of interactivity as a didactic construction implies the recovery of the specific ways in which teachers relate with these technologies and the ways of production that technology engenders from a communicational and technical point of view. We have recognized three models: the model of simplification, the model of articulation and the model of synthesis.

These models emerge in three possible ways in which the tri-dialogic character is drawn in the construction of the interactivity proposal:
i) providing for transparency as an interaction technological interface -which puts at stake the user's activity.
ii) as a pedagogic knowledge construction tool -which puts at stake the teaching activity
iii) as a synthesis cultural device -which puts at stake the means of access to knowledge, its constitution frame seen as a didactic proposal rather than an exclusive property of the technology.

On the other hand, knowledge hypertextual narratives allowed us to understand the ways in which teachers present knowledge within the frame of these settings. They imply particular and specific ways which provide for the expression of didactic techniques in which pedagogic knowledge of the contents is rebuilt from the recognition of hypertextuality. In that sense, persistence of these dimensions enabled us to recognize two significant ways and six narrative forms from which teachers draw the following constructions:
i) knowledge hypertextual narratives by centralization from:
a) image and specific treatment of contents,
b) problem report and resolution, and
c) the case and dilemmas in a knowledge field.

ii) knowledge hypertextual narratives by centralization from:
a) the expert reconstruction of relations in a field through independence and interdependence of textual elements and,
b) thematic deepness and links.

Conclusion

We recognize that regained experiences in this research account for the ventures and searches that, at different public universities in Argentina, prove effective as provisional construction instances of didactic experiences and, also, as genuine spaces of democratization of knowledge. In this sense, we consider them valuable and risky from the point of view of the opportunities they may offer in current adjustment and crisis contexts and with respect to the ways of understanding the interrelation among technology, culture, knowledge and education.

Furthermore, we understand that these advances imply provisional ways of understanding teaching topics and problems in the beginning of the new century. By no means are they exhaustive nor do they pretend to become structures at risk of being retorted. They just attempt at offering a possible interpretation frame, from which it should be possible to rethink teaching practices within the frame of these new technologies.