Abstract
This chapter aims to reflect upon methodological aspects that emerged from research carried out in HE institutions and focused in digital education and its specific sociocultural and pedagogical characteristics. It presents and reflects on cyberspace as a recent educational terrain highlighting its cultural traces. Then, it discusses and analyses ethnographic practices, taking into consideration mainly the characteristics of digital educational settings in regard to the modes of communication and interaction in virtual groups, the structure of virtual networks and its asynchronous communities. Important issues that are reflected upon are i) the participant observation in itself, which takes on different characteristics in digital contexts, namely in regard to what should constitute contextual elements in transnational asynchronous communities that exist online, and ii) the virtual network, its nature, structure and time of existence and the challenges it poses to the researcher, in regard to both the mobility that he/she experiences while doing research and the changes of perspectives that differs from one to another node of the network.
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Moreira, D. (2020). Virtual Networks and Asynchronous Communities: Methodological Reflections on the Digital. In: Wieser, C., Pilch Ortega, A. (eds) Ethnography in Higher Education. Doing Higher Education. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30381-5_11
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