Rogerio has interest in the symbolic expressions of information as manifestations of social time and space. He studied social sciences at Rio de Janeiro Federal University in 1997, learning ethnography from community video and grass roots internet organizations, and creating the interface for the website for the Brazilian Popular Video Association's catalog. https://web.archive.org/web/19991128160215/http://abvp.ong.org
He received a master's degree in Communication, Image and Information from UFF in 2000, researching the daily life of a group of video adolescents as producers of indenitary technology. He worked from 2001 to 2008 with information technologies for research and documentation in education at the Municipal Multimedia Company of Rio de Janeiro. He specialized in Gerative Grammar and Cognition Studies in the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro.
He was a consultant to the National Research Network in 2010 to diagnose the state of the art of digitization of collections and contents in the MinC system institutions. He concluded his PhD in Linguistics by UFRJ in 2015, showing that there are many ways of developing mathematical thinking. School belief in using algorithms as the only form of correct resolution prevents the perception of mathematics as a discursive and socially diverse practice. Such diversity can be observed in the various linguistically documented numerical systems.
Palavra Contada Project (counting word)
The project aims to build an open web platform for learning math through the construction of narratives. The central challenge is to realize that mathematics is a cultural practice done with and by language.
At the outset, the results of the doctoral research will be systematized in a database of predetermined questions. The purpose of this bank is to make available for open consultation on the web examples of discursive analysis. These analyzes will serve as reference to those interested in the elaboration of discursive thinking as a linguistic tool of mathematical learning.
My story is the search for the union of numbers and words. Look at the numbers and see their movement in the language transformations. I have a hybrid training and this gave me different points of view on the same subject. I realized that math had to be looked upon as a narrative. An example of how useful this can be is learning code. Writing code is the union of letters and numbers through a programming language.
In 2008, after 10 years working with media and education had decided to study anthropology again. It had been a year since I had known data visualization and ethnomathematics, so I chose to study, then, anthropology of education. When I realized that many people had advanced mathematical knowledge because they had symbolic tools that enabled them to do so, I decided to study the digital interfaces in mathematical learning contexts through their symbols. Softwares such as geogebra, learning geometry and the like were the focus of the research.
My project was rejected as anthropological by CAPES. After realizing that what I was researching then was "world views" about math culturally expressed in graphics, I went to study linguistics. I was observing in the language how people thought mathematics. For that, I went to study the Brazilian Mathematical Olympiad, OBMEP, which has between 18 and 20 million students for more than 10 years. With the help of mathematics teachers, I had as material the best grades obtained and the tests to analyze how the answers were constructed linguistically.
Searching for the difficulty of learning Portuguese and mathematics was what made me think that it is necessary to think of tools that help the diversity of looks about mathematics. The myth of opposing mathematics, inverse to language, has generated functional, numerical, and technological illiteracy.
One way of perceiving the connection of numbers with the language is in the verb to count. You can tell stories, you can count numbers. In both cases, there is a situation of structure, either of the narrative or of the logic, of describing something. Thus, the union of two disciplines taught traditionally in a separate way can be thought of in learning mathematics as a proper activity of using language, an exact but creative activity.
There are studies that show that the difficulty that most people have with numbers is linguistic in nature: names, verbs and adjectives in mathematics have their own uses and the meaning of these is often different from that used in Portuguese classes.
The current stage of the project is to create an online platform so that it is possible to try learning models that unify the teaching of Portuguese and mathematics from a practice of narrative construction.
There are still many points to be researched, among them, the code to implement the platform. People can collaborate with code. An initial idea is to use graphic libraries (SVG, D3) to produce a version that includes transformations of the problems in accordance with the desired narrative.
In an ideal scenario, the project provides a place where you can enter numeric operations and construct narratives to understand how to solve the problem. Or vice versa, you have a problem and can decompose the statement into parts to perform the numerical operations.
The major vision of the project is to contribute to Brazilian education, but more ambitiously for the way one looks at words and numbers in general.