Letramento informacional digital: um estudo de caso do comportamento de busca e seleção de informações realizado por professores em formação

Abstract

The quick increase of available technologies, especially those connected to the Internet, has led to significant changes in the way individuals access and assimilate knowledge. The school, a space made of different individuals, does not remain invulnerable to these changes, having to adapt to the new trends. In this scenario, we aim to carry out a case study about the information search and selection behavior in a digital environment, that is, practices related to Digital Information Literacy, of those who will act, in the near future, within the classroom, the teachers in training. In order to meet this objective, we developed records and analyzed the data from it. The record-collection phase was consisted of two stages: the achievement of a semiexperimental activity and semi-structured individual interviews applied to a group of ten undergraduate students from the Universidade Federal da Grande Dourados (UFGD), who was attending the first semester of the course of Letras (Languages and Literature), in the year 2017. We proposed a thirty-minute activity, in which the participants had to undertake the search, through the Internet, for information related to two keyterms (Road cycling and Mountain biking) and construct an infographic to synthesize the information found. At the end of this task, we interviewed each one of them, in order to confront the answers with the empirical evidences coming from the data analysis of semi-experimental activity. Through Camtasia Studio 9 software – an app that creates audiovisual records of the computer screen and the external environment – we have followed each step of the participants during the activity. In order to conduct the investigative procedure, we have used as theoreticalmethodological basis the search information stages presented by Shankar et al. (2005), from the model created by Ellis (1989), namely: Starting; Chaining; Browsing; Differentiating; Monitoring; Extracting. The study evidenced behaviors marked by the superficiality of search and generality of information. Academics were restricted to activity command, selecting content, mostly, from questionable origin sources, such as the wikipedia.org website, whose essence is collaborative. Along with questions related to information selection, research has pointed to the misappropriation of the discourse of others through the use of Ctrl + C, Ctrl + V. In addition, the data have indicated the significant absence of the differentiating stage (comparison) among different sources. In general, the considerations presented reflect specific search and selection behaviors, but can serve as reference to future research or even to scholars interested in rethinking teaching techniques/methodologies to train students who can act ethically and accurately while searching and selecting content.