Establishing fundamental theories for internet atlas realisation with application in the Brazilian primary education system

摘要

This thesis addresses a research programme that aimed to provide an open standard methodology for publishing Brazilian local primary school atlases on the World Wide Web. It also aims to contribute to the use of computer laboratories provided to Brazilian primary schools by the Brazilian government. Using a local school atlas as the source of information, a Web-based prototype of the School Atlas of Rio Claro (SP) was developed in SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics). SVG is a vector-based standard for publishing interactive graphics on the Web validated by the Web Consortium. This prototype was tested with a group of Brazilian primary school teachers. The test was conducted with fourteen teachers, all of them were familiar with the paper version of the School Atlas. During weekly meetings, the participants took notes to discuss and reflect about the practices held in school with loca l maps. The main test carried out with teachers was to prepare a paper activity based on the atlas content. The idea behind this activity was to foster teachers to leave a passive role as mere users and interact with the product in a more active fashion. In order to enable them to take full advantage of simple digital tools they were briefly trained to capture screen, use image editing software (they were instructed on the use of Paint, an image editing application available in Windows), and to copy text from the atlas. The results demonstrated that the teachers were keen to interact with the product and, although reproducing some common practices of paper atlas use, they revealed a deep interest on the use of the Internet as a medium for education and the prototype itself. A second test was carried out with a group of atlas developers. They were given a time frame of two weeks to develop an SVG-based atlas using the methodology proposed in this research. They completed the task within the time frame propose d however they indicated that more specific training should be desirable; this finding indicates the need to introduce digital map publishing as a subject to be taught in geosciences undergraduate courses in Brazil. It is believed that open standard methodology proposed here can be applied to other cities also developing local atlases for early geographical education.