What is an observatory?
An observatory is an essential instrument of public policy, as it allows monitoring, evaluation and creation of recommendations for public issues and agents. They are even more essential in a context of complex information and in scenarios of uncertainty and little institutional regulation.
Our objectives
The Observatory of technologies and AI in Education aims to bring debate about the present and future of Brazilian education from the perspective of new technologies. We are an independent project that aims to bring together all actors in the educational field to contribute to the construction of inclusive, supportive and intelligent public policies in the field of education, technology and society.
One of the main objectives of our initiative is to provide teachers, educators, managers and pedagogues at all levels with a reference portal on the rapid evolution of technologies in order to form public opinion capable of giving an opinion on future public policies in the sector. In this sense, a second objective is to establish a permanent forum for debate, where we can bring together initiatives from various parts of Brazil of good practices in the use of technologies in education and provide a voice for actors on the ground. Thirdly, we also aim to monitor, analyze and produce recommendations for public policies that aim to guarantee the values of free, quality and equity in Brazilian education. To efficiently fulfill these three objectives, the project aims to provide a critical reading of news, articles, data and relevant mappings to provide educational agents with basic information to interpret the environment in which we live.
We believe that the Observatory has three central challenges: informing without overloading education agents, selecting and synthesizing the vast amounts of information available, as well as checking sources and fake news - a pedagogization work; secondly, seeking to reach populations far from centers of power and eager for innovation, often reversing the expected role of technology and opening new horizons of thought; and, finally, serve as a forum for debate and meeting between different agents in the educational world, bringing together government, civil society, universities and schools, in order to influence public regulatory or democratization policies.
Our work methodology
Our observatory operates through Working Groups. Each GT produces syntheses of information on each topic, producing monitoring of the subject in question. The GTs will also produce an annual report on the topic and participate in or promote public forums to collaborate with public policies in the sector. Our idea is to integrate teachers and managers from various levels of education as much as possible to collaborate in GTs.