Virtual Internship as mediatized experience. The educator’s training during COVID19 emergency

The work presents the multimodal study on the didactic solutions adopted for virtual internship of the Degree Course ‘Educational Sciences’ at the Giustino Fortunato University in response to the COVID19 emergency. It focuses on how the internship - assumed as an ‘active mediation device’ – has been reshaped in virtual form – i.e., it has been ‘mediatized’ - and set objectives of investigation as: the effect of specific LMS sources, the interactive web seminars taken within the e-tivities structures, on educational skill, such as the professional thinking that is explicit in the design of interventions; the use of iconic means in the simulations of cases and problems. The synthesis of two different types of analysis and documents - verbal interaction-exchanges on webinar transcriptions and iconic mediators used to illustrate the simulated case – shows that: a. if virtual internship provides targeted e-tivities on specific skills, it would be useful for building of professional thinking and skills; b. specifically, web seminars - interactive between mentor and mentee and supported by explanatory means, such as images - can have an effect in the simulation of problematic cases and, in this way, exercise the design skill of intervention.