DIGITAL LITERACY: THE HYPERTEXTUAL PRODUCTION INTO HIGHER EDUCATION

Abstract

ABSTRACT
Digital technologies have been, nowadays, introducing themselves as important tools to stimulate reading, writing and making students more engaged in the themes presented in the classroom. Blogs, that in the past where simply a virtual journal, have become used for multiple purposes, the educational blog had a significant growth in this usage by teachers and students in its pedagogical goals. The goal of this essay is to analyze the potential of the educational blogs in facilitating the student’s learning process during a undergraduate course by conducting a research-action in witch the objects observed where ten students and their blogs. Motivated by the teachers/researchers were asked to create their own blogs using the Wordpress platform in order to discuss the issues worked at the Hypermedia and Multimedia Systems during the whole second semester of 2014, the blogs were to be updated every week. Having as main theoretical assumptions the studies of Textual Linguistics, with Xavier, Marcuschi and Koch, mainly, Bakhtin’s Enunciation Theory and the Social Interactionism of Vigotsky, we approach the hypertext and its role in the digital literacy, as well the textual genres, pointing the blogs as a hyper genre and, finally, presenting the educational blog an its function in the learning process. As main results, it was observed that the students, after attending to the classes, reading de indicated bibliography and, afterwards, writing about the themes of this subject in their blogs, they appropriated with more depth on the curriculum contents, moreover they were stimulated to adopt a autonomous learning behavior, as much as they were able to write on their blogs about correlated but unsolicited issues. Further more, by a research made using a semi-structured essay, the students demonstrated the perception of their learning process using the blog. By this research, it is possible to identify the potentialities of the educational blog as a stimulating and facilitating tool in the learning processes, leading the students to a closer contact to the curriculum contents through the reading and thinking to the writing. Therefor, the conclusion is that the blogs had reached their goals and were able to favor the learning process of undergraduate students, and so, may be a genre to be used in the classroom since it receives the acceptance and interest of the students in using it towards their formation. For the teacher the role of mediator is sued, and, to technology the role of being an instrument for knowledge access and production.