From the standpoint of educommunication – defined as an area of social practice concerned with the nature of communicative ecosystems in which social subjects are inserted, aiming not only to ensure access to information resources, but also essentially to facilitate the alignment of the mastery of new tools with a public policy project that ensures the universal exercise of the right to expression, in a solidary society where citizenship prevails over the market (SOARES, 2011) – what matters is identifying the transformative potential established in the relationship between the new generations and the new technologies.
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As such, educommunication is not concerned with ICT itself and its interactive tools, such as Web 2.0, which is covered in other areas of applied social sciences. Instead it focuses primarily on the nature of the relations of social subjects that collectively appropriate them, whether the subjects be adults, children, or both working collaboratively with the same purpose. Thus, for educommunication the value of surveys such as ICT Kids Online Brazil 2012, for example, is to indicate the impact of evaluations that children and parents make on the ability of each group when facing the decisions that families, schools, and public policies need to make regarding Internet use, either from the point of view of opportunities or from the point of view of risks.
Accordingly, the survey itself becomes the material for a dialogue between the government, the educational system, parents, and young students. Understanding the reality in focus will produce the conditions to modify or create the desired scenario. In other words, educommunication does not ask about the reality of the equipment installed in schools or even about the type of training that should be provided to teachers and students – this is already part of the ideology presiding over modernization of education – but, essentially, how parents, teachers, and students should transform Internet resources into instruments that strengthen their relationships to advance the potential solidarity that the group can generate for the benefit of the whole educational community and society in general.
Definitely one issue that must be questioned is the tranquility on the part of parents and educators concerning their children’s/students’ involvement with new technologies, challenging the principle fueled by educational marketing – and adopted as a pedagogical argument by many uncritical adherents to technologies – according to which practical knowledge of how to use media tools inherently includes the cultural maturity required to use these digital tools as an instrument for personal and collective growth.
As such, and seeking other contributions, it is interesting to consider the following:
1) No one doubts that technologies, with their artifacts and contents, bring to 21st century education a formidable challenge: forming social subjects that have as part of their identities the ability to cope with the digital world and the symbolic universe constructed within it and, above all, the ability to act, individually or collectively, in social networks, beyond the expectations that the pre-established rules for the system of Internet governance have established as the most appropriate. As a result, what is expected is an increased attention from both researchers and educators to the social phenomenon of technologies in order to better understand them and thus be able to act positively and even innovatively. In the case of educommunication, innovation means just that:
media literacy, followed by a collective appropriation of the methods of production and the meaning of producing. Such careful attention requires a keen eye for the multiple mediations that are present in the constitution of the types of possible interactions between children and the new media.
2) One of these mediations can be channeled through formal education, through school – a public space par excellence. In this particular scenario, we hope to see increasingly connected children exploring the many applications and products of digital culture and acting as producers, authors, and coauthors of the cybercultural process. Moreover, we expect them to do so employing advanced technical skills, learned in the process of incorporating technological developments, in the very act of living and producing
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communally with the necessary support of their teachers and the indispensable solidarity of their colleagues.
3) From this educommunication perspective, the social relations, the playing, the studying, the researching, the listening to music, in short, the full gamut of technological immersion undertaken by young people – in and outside school, at home, at friends’ homes, or in LAN houses – will reveal to parents or legal guardians, in effect, what their children are doing and with what intentions. They will be able to identify that a new generation may be rebuilding the communicative order rigidly structured by the market system, a supposedly immutable inheritance. This will be apparent when, along with their desire to access and explore the Internet – which is characteristic of youth sociability – youngsters develop values that allow them to put their digital empowerment at the service of collective and higher causes.
4) What needs to happen for this utopia to make a difference between the traditional way of accessing cyberspace and the educommunicative mode appropriation of digital technologies? The answer is overcoming the dichotomous scenario in which children are introduced to the Internet world at the opposite speed of their parents or legal guardians’
adhesion to the new communicational logic, which prevents them from knowing exactly what to expect from their children in relation to the cyberculture world. In this case, digital literacy for adults, in this same educommunication line, becomes absolutely necessary.
5) The problem also affects the relationship between teachers and students. It is, in fact, a dichotomy that is evident every time one looks at the reality of most Brazilian schools in relation to the presence and pedagogical uses of the Internet in the process of formal education, as shown in the results of the ICT Education survey, also by Cetic.br (CGI.
br, 2012). Overcoming it requires moving beyond the introduction of digital tools in the school environment and the training of teachers and students in the practical use of new languages. Managing technological resources entails, first and foremost, thinking about the reasons to use them. In this case, the basic questions are “why?” and “what for?”. For such transformations to occur, public policies in the fields of education, communication, and culture that encourage critical and educational incorporation of digital technological resources, their cultural products, and the Internet as part of the educational process, especially in elementary and secondary schools, are absolutely necessary.
6) And the biggest challenge will be to design a social, democratic, participatory, and dialogic model for working with Internet contents as educational activities to understand and construct the world, starting with the school. This is not simply about inserting ICT in education from an instrumental approach, shaded by the moral representation attributed to the use of these technological resources, but primarily increasing the communicative coefficient of educational activities conducted by a joint action between masters and their disciples.
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REFERENCES
BRAZILIAN INTERNET STEERING COMMITTEE. Survey on the use of information and communication technologies in Brazil: Ict Households and enterprises 2011. São Paulo: CGI.br, 2012. Coord. Alexandre F.
Barbosa. Trad. Karen Brito. Available at: <http://cgi.br/publicacoes/pesquisas/govbr/cgibr-nicbr-censoweb- govbr-2010-en.pdf>. Accessed on: Feb 20, 2013.
. Survey on the use of Information and communication technologies in Brazilian Schools – Ict education 2011. Available at: <http://op.ceptro.br/cgi-bin/cetic/tic-educacao-2011.pdf>. Accessed on: Feb 20, 2013.
SOARES, Ismar de Oliveira. Educomunicação: o conceito, o profissional, a aplicação. São Paulo: Paulinas, 2011.
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TABLE 1
PROPORTION OF RESPONDENTS’ INTERNET USE
Age Internet use (%)
10 years 52
11 years 64
12 years 63
13 years 68
14 years 77
15 years 73
16 years 71