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environments are popular regarding the interactions
and communications they potentiate, with strong
impact in the support of teaching and learning
practices in HE, and changes in the roles adopted by
teachers and students, into more student-centred,
reflected on activities involving collaboration,
interaction, connection between users and content,
sharing, consuming and producing. The idea of a
disruptive change in teaching and learning practices
is considered by some authors, while others state
that technologies are used in HE, but teaching forms
have not changed. The difference of scale of the
documents reviewed, the contexts to which they
refer and time-frame of their development offer us a
clear view of the wide view upon approaches made.
To systematize the richness of the information
collected as a whole, a longer and exhaustive review
is needed.
One of the main objectives of the TRACER
project is to characterize, as stated earlier, the
adoption and use of CT in the PPHEI, in order to
understand which tools are used, if they are mostly
used as support for already existing technological
processes and structures of teaching and learning, or
whether their potential is being used for innovation.
To achieve this objective, an exploratory study will
be held based on the results of an online
questionnaire, addressing key elements of the HE
institutions, so that an overall institutional view of
CTs used and their support mechanisms (social,
academic, logistic) is unveiled. An information
visualization tool will serve the purpose of giving
visibility to the collected data, making sense of a
vast quantity of information. The aim is to contribute
towards making information of interest to
institutions and users, available and up-to-date,
facilitating and potentiating research in the area.
5 FINAL CONSIDERATIONS
As this literature review has revealed CTs have a
confirmed use in HE. The use of social Web tools
and environments is a trend in teaching and learning
practices in HE, placing challenges to teachers,
students, and institutions, at the level of the
interaction, production and delivery of educational
content. The ubiquity of web2.0 tools revealed a
strong relation to the idea of disruptive changes of
more traditional forms of education in HE. Despite
this, it is possible to conclude that HE is using social
web tools as a support for already existing
educational processes and adding them to
technological structures of teaching and learning
previously used. The change in the roles played by
teachers and students may also be disruptive of more
traditional ways of learning; although its use is not
always potentiated for innovation. The expectation is
for teaching and learning practices to change along
with an effective integration and innovative use of
CTs in education. Keeping up-to-date with the
information related to the adoption of CTs by HE
and to its' impact on the teaching and learning
practices, has become more and more difficult due to
the vast and fragmented publications, leading to the
need of serious and expedite systematising. That is
the ultimate goal of the online information
visualization tool proposed by the ongoing project.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to all the members of the project TRACER
for their contributions. Thanks also to FCT, the
Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology
for financially supporting the project under reference
PTDC/CPE-CED/113368/2009 COMPETE:FCOM
P-01-0124-FEDER-014394.
REFERENCES
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Armstrong and Franklin, T., J., (2008). A review of
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Blin, F., and Munro, M., (2008). Why hasn't technology
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Brown, S., (2010). From VLEs to learning webs: the
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Crook, C., Cummings, J., Fisher, T., Graber, R., Harrison,
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