A comunicação educacional e a internet

Abstract

The objective of the present research was to investigate the use of the internet as a research tool by college students. For fundamental theory, we turned to the ideas of Paulo Freire concerning the dialogical character of education and authors like José Manuel Moran that have the same outlook that study the educational implications of the internet for the construction of collaborative and egalitarian learning cultures. As for methodology, it was of qualitative nature and had the data collection done by means of semi-structured interviews done in 2007 with the students studying the 4th module of the course of Technology in Marketing at a Higher Learning Institution in the north of Parana. The analysis had as focus the verbalization from the students regarding the following: access to computers, the ways of using the Internet and its use for academic procedures, and operating sites for school research, the individual interest in researching the Internet and the issues the students had researched on the net. As a result, it was found that students provide more attention to the networking of sites Orkut and MSN. Under the context of teaching-learning-study, the use of the internet limits the research of content of work proposed by professors, it appears as a replacement of traditional encyclopedia. From this analysis it is important to point out that both professors and students still suffer in need of a better understanding of the potential of the internet as a tool for collaborative learning.