The Contribution of Virtual Education to Social Inclusion with the Consolidation of a New Conviviality

ABSTRACT This article discusses some of the approaches implemented as socio-educational public policies- which have failed- aimed at strengthening social inclusion to encourage a substantive conviviality, an alternative to the existing one, which is included under the new comprehensive framework of Social Studies of Science and Technology in their relationship to the construction/application of scientific-technological knowledge through electronic distance education programs, specifically in Latin America. This field is linked to public policies/actions, when recognizing critical alternatives to the linear model of technological innovation (to replace it with the situated and distributed, systemic-holistic, and socio-technological interpretation), stressing the particular conditions of production and use of knowledge for the region, with the articulation of ICT, mainly to renovate and incorporate virtual higher-level educational proposals. So, this article contributes to the deepening not only of the ‘new sociology of science and technology’, but also to different lines of inquiry which affect the programmes of electronic distance education today, characterized by a consumerist scientific-technological boom within global controversy. The practice of a substantive reflexivity will result in not only a new meaning of the concept of social inclusion for a new conviviality within global social systems traversed by ICT, but also in the analysis of proposals that will overcome the socio-educationa