[pt] Este trabalho procura olhar para as tecnologias educacionais – especialmente aquelas com Inteligência Artificial (IA), a grande promessa da atualidade – a partir de questionamentos críticos, evitando a ideia de neutralidade que comumente é atribuída a elas, inclusive na literatura acadêmica. O objetivo geral é analisar discursos sobre IA promovidos por empresas de tecnologia educacional (edtechs) que oferecem tecnologias voltadas para o ensino-aprendizagem. Os específicos são: 1) examinar como a IA é concebida nos discursos das edtechs; 2) investigar os papéis atribuídos às tecnologias nos processos de ensino e aprendizagem e 3) caracterizar as concepções de educação veiculadas nesses discursos. A Análise de Discurso Crítica foi o referencial teórico-metodológico que orientou as análises, partindo das categorias dos pressupostos, escolhas lexicais e modalidade. O corpus é composto de textos retirados dos sites e de dezessete postagens do Instagram de três empresas selecionadas: a Letrus, a Educacross e a Jovens Gênios. Nos discursos analisados, a IA é concebida como solução para diversos problemas educacionais e posicionada ora como sujeito, ora como ferramenta para a aprendizagem. A IA aparece com o papel de personalizar a educação, tornando a aprendizagem mais significativa e a educação mais objetiva e eficiente, baseada em dados, democrática e inovadora, além de capaz de suprir deficiências do trabalho docente. As empresas difundem uma concepção de educação baseada em desempenho, organizada por competências e habilidades, individualista, marginalizando a relação entre educador e estudante. Os discursos expressam um ideal de educação que valoriza a qualificação individual em detrimento das dimensões de socialização e subjetivação, portanto distante de ideais de formação ampla e transformação social. / [en] This work seeks to address educational technologies through critical questions, avoiding the idea of neutrality that is commonly attributed to them, including in academic literature. The general objective is to analyze discourses on artificial intelligence (AI) promoted by educational technology companies (edtechs) that offer technologies aimed at teaching-learning. The specific objectives are: 1) to examine how AI is conceived in edtech discourses; 2) to investigate the roles assigned by edtechs to technologies in teaching and learning processes; and 3) to characterize the conceptions of education conveyed by these discourses. Critical Discourse Analysis was the theoretical-methodological framework that guided the analyses, starting from the categories of assumptions, lexical choices and modality. The corpus is composed of texts taken from websites and seventeen Instagram posts from three selected companies: Letrus, Educacross and Jovens Gênios. In the material analyzed, AI is conceived as a solution to various educational problems and positioned either as a subject or as a tool for learning. AI appears with the role of personalizing education, making learning more meaningful and education more objective and efficient, based on data, democratic and innovative, in addition to being able to overcome deficiencies in teaching. Companies disseminate a conception of education based on performance, organized by skills and abilities, markedly individualistic, marginalizing the relationship between educator and student. The discourses express an ideal of education that values individual qualification to the detriment of the dimensions of socialization and subjectivation, therefore far from ideals of broad training and social transformation.

This thesis describes the researcher’s journey as an online facilitator and reflective organization development (OD) practitioner as she explores how to nurture and cultivate space for learning and collaboration in an online community of practice. The research setting is a small group of mostly volunteers in a national health charity. The researcher adopts a reflective practitioner research approach engaging in a continuous process of story-telling throughout the thesis. She struggles with questions such as her own dynamic role as an outside facilitator, the role of technology, dilemmas of emergence versus design and discovery of purpose. Rather than arriving at a to-do-list for potential online facilitators, she discovers that hosting café style conversations, setting the online tables and enabling space for learning, collaboration and aliveness is more a matter of the facilitator’s capacity to listen, to be authentically present and to relinquish control.

This thesis describes the researcher’s journey as an online facilitator and reflective organization development (OD) practitioner as she explores how to nurture and cultivate space for learning and collaboration in an online community of practice. The research setting is a small group of mostly volunteers in a national health charity. The researcher adopts a reflective practitioner research approach engaging in a continuous process of story-telling throughout the thesis. She struggles with questions such as her own dynamic role as an outside facilitator, the role of technology, dilemmas of emergence versus design and discovery of purpose. Rather than arriving at a to-do-list for potential online facilitators, she discovers that hosting café style conversations, setting the online tables and enabling space for learning, collaboration and aliveness is more a matter of the facilitator’s capacity to listen, to be authentically present and to relinquish control.