Abstract:

The suitable education to current society is grounded on collaborative network-participation practices, feasibilised by the information and communication digital technologies. They enable us to work, share happy moments of life, and create co-authorship processes as well. All those aspects contribute to build our subjectivities, culture and knowledge. In our day-to-day, intimacy with more and more interactive technologies grows. From remote control to digital land TV, the viewer/user initiative is more and more stimulated, which provides the development of communicative practices with decentralized origins. Emission and reception cease to be dichotomic processes, as communication agents start to interchange functions and roles. Mass culture little by little cedes ground to a culture of communication, intimacy and action in virtual communities. Scientific, technological, cultural and behavioural transformations have crossed the school space. Collaboration, participation and co-authorship are fundamental elements for the creation of educative projects, inasmuch as the persons become more and more involved with spaces in which digital technology and their languages set the tone and pace for the concretization of educative actions. Education needs professors facing the challenge of being problem-formulating agents, causers of creative learning situations. This issue is even more urgent for Distance Education, inasmuch as most relationships between students and professors are carried out through didactic materials, either printed or online, and through communication devices allowing learning based on collective processes. The relationship between students and teachers in Distance Education is mostly carried out by didactic materials and communicational devices that feasibilise the collaborative learning. The didactic materials and the communicational devices planned to feasibilise the collective building of knowledge require a constant maintenance of dialog, and therefore demand from the managing team the building of an interactive and collaborative pedagogical design. When a content is structurally organized, it is decided for a thematic sequence, a hierarchic approach and relationship between the concepts. In this sense, the concept maps are interesting tools, as through diagram building it is possible to hierarchically represent the concepts and their relations. Once the theoretical and pedagogical fundaments for the use of concept maps are presented, some contributions are indicated for collaborative learning in the distance educational modality. Concept maps can serve as tools for the development of several learning promotion strategies. In this sense, this article aims at presenting such contributions that concept maps can bring to Distance Education based on collaborative learning. Then, the text is structured in two large blocks, one about the interactive pedagogical design, and another about the characteristics, theoretical fundaments and possibilities of strategic use of concept maps for learning.

Keywords:

Distance Education, Pedagogical Design, Conceptual Maps.