Andreia Inamorato dos Santos
Hiya,
Just thought I should say a few words about me, so you can have some sort of idea of who is the person behind the posts! Well, I am originally from São Paulo, Brazil – a lovely (and busy, poluted, overcrowded) city in the southeast of Brazil. Ok, but there are also many good things about São Paulo: world’s capital of international cuisine (yeah, it’s true!), brilliant nightlife and lots of cultural buzz.
In São Paulo I did my first degree in Languages (Portuguese and English) and then moved on to studying for a post-graduate diploma in Teaching at Higher Education. After that, I did a Masters of Arts in English Laguage and English and American Literatures (quite broad the name of this degree, but my research focus was on the media discourse of language schools in Brazil, using French Discourse Analysis as the main analytical framework). I took this MA at São Paulo University (USP) and it was quite a good experience to join that crowd – famous for being the intellectual elite of the country. Not that I consider myself one of them, but I have certainly learned a lot from them! Anyway, after that I moved to the UK, two days after defending my master’s dissertation…
And here is where my second life, in the UK, starts….
Yeah, I always say that the one who lives abroad has two lives (or three, four, five depending on the number of places they have lived in for a considerable amount of time). In my case, the most important bit of my life is there, in Brazil: my family (parents, cousins, uncles and aunts, all of them!). So, of course, my life in Brazil is still very much active, although mostly over the internet and by telephone. I go to Brazil around every 6 months, which is not too bad…
So, when I moved to the UK in 2001, I registered at the Open University, where I am until now. I live in Milton Keynes, where the main campus of the OU (OpenUniversity) is based. At the OU I studied for another masters degree in here, but this time a Masters of Sciences in Research Methods for Educational Technology . Then I moved on to a PhD in Educational Technology, which I hope I will finish by the first semester of 2008. My PhD research is entitled the Discourses of Teaching and Learnign Online – and I again use discourse anlaysis as my main theoretical framework for data analysis. This time, though, instead of focusing on French Discourse Analysis, I use Critical Discourse Analysis, which seems to be more popular in the UK than the former. I also work full time as a Research Fellow in the OpenLearn project of the Open University, which is one of the main reasons why I keep this blog. I am really fascinated about the potential of open educational resources and do join the group of ‘visionaries’ that devote their time and energy to this cause :-)
Andreia :-)
