Questões de Concurso

Text 2 – Computers

(Text adapted from History of Computing. Retrieved from

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~mitra/csFall2006/cs 303/lectures/history.html)

When you hear the term computers, it’s difficult to imagine different devices from a laptop or a small desktop. Believe it or not, they weren’t always like they are today. They used to be very large and heavy, sometimes as big as an entire room. Some technology professors historically define computers, as “a device that can help with computations”. The word computation involves counting, calculating, adding, subtracting, etc. The modern definition of a computer is a little wider, because in our day and age, computers store, compile, analyze and compute an enormous amount of information. Ancient computers were very interesting. Actually, the first computer may have been located in Great Britain, at Stonehenge. It is a man-made circle of large stones. Citizens used it to measure the weather and forecast the change of seasons. Some specialists say that another ancient computer is the abacus. It was used by the early Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians to count and calculate. Even though they are no longer in use, certainly, these early devices are fascinating. Computers are embedded in our history and some people say that we are completely dependent of them. No matter the complexity of the task, easy or difficult, some people can’t do anything without them. Do you contest or share this opinion?

Text I

Nurturing Multimodalism

[…]

New learning collaborations call on the teacher as learner, and the learner as teacher. The teacher is a lifelong learner; this is simply more apparent in the Information Age. In instances of best practice, collaborative learning partnerships are forged between and among teachers for strategic, bottom-up, in-house professional development. This allows teachers to share in reflective, on-going, contextualized learning, tailored to their collective knowledge. This sharing also includes the learner as teacher. ELT typically employs learner-centered activities: these can include learners sharing their knowledge of strategic digital literacies with others in the classrooms.

The digital universe, so threatening to adult notions of socially sanctioned literacies, is intuitive to children, who have been socialized into it, and for whom digital literacies are exploratory play. Adults may find new ways of communicating digitally to be quite baffling and confronting of our communicative expertise; children do not. Instant messaging systems, such as MSN, AOL, ICQ, for example, provide as natural a medium for communicating to them as telephones did for the baby-boomer generation. It is not fair for the teacher to treat Information and Communication Technologies as auxiliary communication with learners for whom it is mainstream and primary.

Learning spaces are important. Although teachers seldom have much individual say in the layout of teaching spaces, collaborative relationships may help to encourage integrated digitization, where computers are not segregated in laboratories but are interspersed throughout the school environment. In digitally infused curricula, postmodern literacies do not supplant but complement modern literacies, so that access to information is driven by purpose and content rather than by the media available.

Adapted from: LOTHERINGTON, H. From literacy to multiliteracies in ELT. In: CUMMINS, J.; DAVISON, C. (Eds.) International Handbook of English Language Teaching. New York: Springer,2007, p.820. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/226802846_From_Literacy_to_Multiliter acies_in_ELT