The Scholar The Scholar platform and the USP-UIUC Pilot Project (University of São Paulo and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Abstract

In this article I describe and analyze some aspects of the Scholar platform, based on the experience of a community of teachers, with the objective of identifying the skills of digital literacies of the group of teachers, in relation to the platform's functionalities. As a method, I used as reference the ethnography of Blommaert and Dong (2010) and the proposal of participant observation by André (2012). On the Scholar platform, we have virtual communities in which the practices and interactions of participants are recorded using resources such as updates, forums and surveys. I present data from the bibliography, document analysis, observation of interactions in forums, online questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and observation of the process of building a learning module. The research context was a virtual community composed of participants from a project, in which we had 29 members interested in taking the third edition of the course "(Multi) literacies and language teacher training", corresponding to Module I of the pilot project. The course took place over 5 weeks, in distance mode, with two synchronous meetings, one in the first and another in the fourth week. At first, I describe some aspects of the platform interface, directly related to interactions in the teacher community. In this stage, I tried to elucidate some epistemological assumptions of the environment. Then, I analyze the use of the platform in the context of the National Literacy Project. The survey data reveal that the skills of digital literacies to take the course were acquired with a low need for technical support. However, the use of artificial intelligence and project management and editing resources require further reformulation of pedagogical processes, such as peer review and evaluation.