Virtual Ethnography In Education

Paper introduces, upon the context of gender-role divisions, current parental ethnotheories applied to childhood learning in the Czech Republic. It illuminates work-or-care dilemma women are still facing and pinpoints different life strategies that Czech families conclude from it. It introduces a new term cosmology of education, and relates to it theories of institution-centred learning and unschooling.

The continuous growth of distance education (DE) programs in all levels, powered by the development of new information and communication technologies (ICT), brings new challenges: how can educational research be made in non-presential, asynchronous settings? How can we scientifically approach student bodies formed by people who rarely even share the same hometown and only meet online in virtual learning environments (VLE)? How can we “observe” such groups’ interpersonal, pedagogical relations and their impact on learning? In countries like Brazil, where DE programs have grown vertiginously in few years, many researchers have made significant efforts to answer these questions coherently, efforts that demanded that some principles of traditional educational research be rethought with the help of local and international researches. Interesting methodological approaches to DE groups have resulted from these efforts, and we present and discuss one that has been constantly growing: the vi...

The continuous growth of distance education (DE) programs in all levels, powered by the development of new information and communication technologies (ICT), brings new challenges: how can educational
research be made in non-presential, asynchronous settings? How can we scientifically approach student bodies formed by people who rarely even share the same hometown and only meet online in virtual learning
environments (VLE)? How can we “observe” such groups’ interpersonal, pedagogical relations and their impact on learning? In countries like Brazil, where DE programs have grown vertiginously in few years, many researchers have made significant efforts to answer these questions coherently, efforts that demanded that some principles of traditional educational research be rethought with the help of local and international researches. Interesting methodological approaches to DE groups have resulted from these efforts, and we present and discuss one that has been constantly growing: the virtual ethnographic.