Perfis e práticas de integração do multimédia por professores de ciências: contributos para a construção de um espaço de afinidade

Abstract

The online platform "mCiências" is an affinity space that resulted from the project "Multimedia in science teaching: five years of research and teaching in Portugal". In this platform science teachers can share different educational experiences and multimedia resources, that fit in the context of social learning, where people with common interests can gather and form a participatory and collaborative community, which fits the concept of an affinity space. However, mCiências lacks and active and sustained community, this lack of involvement being one of the main reasons that lead to the decline of an online community. Measures were taken to make mCiências more dynamic, through a visual restructuring and the production of five videos that demonstrate the different aspects of the platform. To understand the teacher's profile who best relates to mCiências, six science teachers were interviewed using a qualitative research method. The results show that most of the teachers have a great focus on the integration of multimedia technologies in teaching, and how they operate these tools is quite diverse. Several teachers were also invited to participate in the platform, and a tutorial was developed about the publication process in mCiências. It should also be highlighted the concern about the credibility of online information, and therefore the contents need to be reviewed and validated. Some authors suggest some criteria for this process that evaluate the quality of the information, namely the precision, stability, objectivity, and validation of the shared resources.