Schools as Organizations - A Semiotic Approach towards Making Sense of Information Technology

Low cost educational laptops have the potential of transforming educational practices in the public schools from developing and emerging countries. However, in order to be effectively incorporated into schools’ daily practices, technology has to make sense to the people that constitute these schools. This paper reports on the initial activities with the members of an elementary public school in Brazil, facing the challenge of constructing meaning for a new digital artefact. Concepts and practices from Organizational Semiotics (OS) and Participatory Design (PD) were adapted as a methodological frame of reference for the analysis of structure and context. Preliminary results indicate that, although originally designed for the business and work domains, practices from OS and PD were suitable and revealed information that other approaches would hardly reveal, regarding a prospective use of technology in educational contexts.

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