Finally, I can sit down and get to my class.  I thought the family would never be
settled.  It is quiet for the first time today.  Let me see … computer is on, modem dial-up, Netscape open, my bookmark to the class.  I wonder if anyone else is in the class space right now?  It would be great just to connect with someone.   Now, where am I supposed to go this week?  Oh yes, check out the syllabus for any changes.  Ok.  It is week two of the discussion.  Let me think.  Discussions are in… oh yes the plenary folder.  Oh there is week 2!  Let me see… four items have already been posted by classmates.  Let’s see what they have to say… Oh I like that one from Jane!!   I wonder what Jane is like?  I wish I knew more about her.  The introductions told me more about what-I-do than who-I-am.  Oh well, back to answering the question so I can get to bed.

What It Is Like to Be …“As” -- Heidegger

         The “what is like to be” is an ontological question embedded in lived experience.  Phenomenology provides a philosophical base to examine lived experience.  Heidegger (1996/1952) approaches phenomenology from the ontological perspective of Dasein.  Dasein is Being.  It is located in the actual.  It is not intentional nor the subject in a subject/object split.  It is embedded in the socio-cultural context.  Dasein can be viewed from either the available (ready-to-hand) or occurrent (present-at hand).  Ready-to-hand is ontologically prior to present-at-hand.  It is the everyday world of activity.  What is available is tools and methods.  I understand equipment “as.”  This understanding is not a mental or conscious understanding, but a seamless mastery of equipment use.  Production and recognition are the social practices contained in understanding.  Production is the practical activities and recognition is the competent use of the equipment.  Production is not a mental, reflective act.  For WCC to be “available” for students, both the use of the computer and the use of the WCC software would have to be seamless.  How many students who enter courses with WCC have ease of use with a computer?  If they find the computer “available,” is their interaction with WCC easier? Since socio-cultural context is foreign for most students, how does this effect the seamlessness of use?

        The present-to-hand is the natural physical world of objects.  It is from this perspective that the scientific method examines the world.  Assertion and deliberation are the social practices in occurrent.  I can assert or say something about an object.  Deliberation is an interpretation that emerges from a practical understanding.  Occurent has a reflective quality that removes it from the immediate lived experience of Dasein. The computer is distinct and separate as “occurrent.”  How do students experience available and occurent in WCC?  How is learning in a WCC effected?  If a student interacts with a WCC seamlessly, is interacting with others in the class easier?

Clothed “as” Flesh -- Merleau-Ponty

        While Heidegger locates Dasein in the actual physical lived bodily experience, it is Merleau-Ponty who grounds experience in the Flesh (Merleau-Ponty, 1964/1968).  Flesh is not used by Merleau-Ponty in a carnal sense, but as an element “in the sense of a general thing, midway between the spatio-temporal individual and the idea, a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being.  The flesh is in this sense an ‘element’ of Being” (p. 139).  The Flesh is already there.  It functions in ontology as a source, as “the formative medium of the subject object” (p. 140) and the “inauguration of the where and when” (p. 140).  If flesh is an ontological ground, how are students affected in a WCC where interaction with others lies outside of time and space?  Is flesh experienced differently in cyberspace?

        The percipient-perceptible is the term Merleau-Ponty uses to name the body as a perceiving thing, a body-subject-object. “It refers to the two ‘sides’ of bodily being: to the ‘intertwining’ or the ‘adherence’ of a self-sentient ‘side’ of Flesh to its sensible other ‘side’” (Cataldi, 1993, p. 61).  “Our body is like two leaves, from one side a thing among things and otherwise what sees and touches them” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968/1964, p. 137).  There is not a separation between subject-object.  I am both.  “The body sensed and the body sentient are as the obverse and the reverse, or again, as two segments of one sole circular course which goes above the left to right and below from right to left, but which is but one sole movement in its two phases” (p. 138).

        If the body is the ontological ground, situated but not separate from the context, how does one experience “being in” a context that is constructed within a computer? How does the sensed and sentient body unfold in a WCC?   How is my flesh, as Merleau-Ponty describes it, understood in relation to a collaborative space on a computer?  Students in a WCC experience their class both in an actual physical sense of sitting at their computer, but also in a sense that lies outside space and time in cyber-space.  What does it mean “to be” in a cyber-space?

Bodies “with” Technology -- Ihde

        Don Ihde focuses his phenomenological investigation on how we are engaged bodily with technologies.

At the one extreme of the continuum lie those relations that approximate technologies to a quasi-me (embodiment relations).  Those relations that I can take into my experience that through their semi-transparency they allow the world to be made immediate thus enter into existential relation which constitutes my self.  At the other extreme of the continuum lie alterity relations in which the technology becomes quasi-other, or technology ‘as’ other to which I relate.  Between lies the relation with technologies that both mediate and yet also fulfill my perceptual and bodily relations with technologies, hermeneutic relations. (Ihde, 1990, p. 107)

        Embodied relations with technologies represent the case where “I take the technology into my experiencing in a particular way by way of perceiving through each technology and through the reflexive transformation of my perceptual and body sense” (p. 73).  An example of this type of relation is wearing eyeglasses.  In this relationship with technology, not only is my bodily sense extended, but “I see not just with my eyes but with my whole body in a unified sensory experience of things” (Ihde, 1990, p. 77).  Computers extend our ability to gather information and to learn outside the confines of geographic region and time.  Does WCC transform students’ perceptual and body sense?

        The second set of technology relations are hermeneutic which Ihde (1990) views as a “special interpretive action within a technological context” (p. 80).  This kind of activity calls for special modes of action and perception, modes analogous to the reading process.  "A hermeneutic relation mimics sensory perception insofar as it is also a kind of seeing as _______; but it is referential seeing, which has as its immediate perceptual focus seeing the thermometer [i.e., equipment]” (p. 85).  This is the difference between what is shown and how it is shown.  Hermeneutic transparency “allows the partial symbiosis of myself and the technology is the capacity of the technology to become perceptually transparent” (p. 86).   What are the hermeneutic relations students encounter in a WCC?   Do students achieve a level of hermeneutic transparency?  Is this transparency similar to Heidegger’s description of the seamless use of equipment?

        WCC is a text-based technology.  Students interact through textual statements.  Ihde (1990) suggests that readable technologies “extend hermeneutic and linguistic capacities through the instruments, while the reading itself retains its bodily perceptual location with or towards technology" (p. 88).  He suggests that when representational isomorphism disappears into a printed text “there is not isomorphism between the printed word and what it ‘represents,’ although there is some kind of referential ‘transparency’ that belongs to this new technologically embodied form of language … Textual transparency is hermeneutic transparency not perceptual transparency” (p. 82).

        The computer interface of the WCC becomes the means through which I interpret.  However, the action of reading locates me bodily either with the computer or outside, directed toward the computer.  It is not unusual for students to “be” in front of a computer, sitting in a chair, located in a room. Can text within a WCC provide students with the experience of “with” technology?  Are students drawn from a perceptual sense of self, separate from the computer, to a self “with” the technology?  Is this sense of “with” a seamless use of the technology or could it be a perceptual leap into a computer space?  Does text have the ability to draw students to perceptually be “with” the technology?

        Narrative creates a place through textual description.  I can see, smell, touch, hear and almost taste a scene when it is well written.  I loose track of my body, located in a chair reading.  I find myself whisked away into another world.  It is as if I am in the world created by the story.  Ihde (1990) suggests that through hermeneutic relations “we can read ourselves into any possible situation without being there” (p. 92).  Is it possible to create a textual world that brings students together in a WCC place—to be with the technology?  If it is possible, how would it shift their bodily sense of themselves?

        The third set of technology relations Ihde (1990) suggests are alterity relations.  Alterity relations are quasi-otherness, “stronger than mere objectness but weaker than the otherness found within the animal kingdom or the human one” (p.100).  It is a relationship that is both similar and competitive with us. “Alterity relations may be noted to emerge in a wide range of computer technologies that, while failing quite strongly to mimic bodily incarnations, nevertheless display a quasi-otherness within the limits of linguistics and, more particularly, of logical behaviors ….The computer's genuine usefulness still belongs to the borders of its hermeneutic capacities” (p. 106).  How is quasi-otherness experienced by students in a WCC?  Has the ability to use the computer as a neural extension of self to communicate with others, a metaphor McLuan suggested (1964/1994), expanded and changed the human relationship to the computer?

Eros and inFORMation in Cyberbeing --Heim

        Michael Heim believes that at its ontological base the lure of the computer is erotic.  “We feel augmented and empowered.  Our hearts beat in the machines.  This is Eros …On the primal level, Eros is the drive to extend our finite being, to prolong something of our physical selves beyond our mortal existence.  We seek to extend ourselves and to heighten the intensity of our lives in general through Eros” (Heim, 1993, p. 87).  Heim uses Gibson’s Neuromancer to describe the erotic nature of cyberspace, a computer matrix.  “In the matrix things attain a supervivid hyper-reality.  Ordinary experience seems dull and unreal by comparison” (p. 86).  For Heim, there is a close philosophical connection between the Platonic notion of knowledge and the information systems matrix of cyberspace.  Both approaches to cognition first extend, then renounce, the physical embodiment of knowledge (p. 88).

The spatial objects of cyberspace proceed from the constructs of Platonic imagination not in the sense that perfect solids or ideal numbers are Platonic constructs, but in the sense that inFORMation in cyberspace inherits the beauty of Platonic FORMS…Filtered through the computer matrix, all reality becomes patterns of information. (Heim, 1993, pp. 89-90)

Cyberbeing: Caught Between--Mchoul

        Mchoul (1997) discusses cyber-being in terms of three aspects: techno modalities, the status of unique meta-technology, and the particular way of generating or producing occurrence.  Techno modalities are moral orientations towards technologies.  Idhe (1990) describes these modalities in terms of the questions and philosophical positions taken toward technology.  The positive modality for Mchoul is breaking-away and coming-together.  In this stance, individuals view new technologies as offering social advantages.  The computer, for example, is hailed as enhancing communication.   The negative modality characterizes technology as being set.  Ellul (1964) and Marcuse (1968) were two philosophers of technology who warned that the adoption of technology has negative social impact.  The computer is viewed as de-humanizing and alienating.  How does the moral stance of the students shape their experiences in a WCC?

        Mchoul’s second aspect of cyber-being is the status of unique meta-technologies.  This aspect describes how unique technologies produce totally new forms of technology.  The digitally-based computer has now influenced the production of a variety of technologies to digital processing (e.g., the digital cameras that depend on digital memory space not film).  WCC has become a more complex environment from its original starting point as a bulletin board.  As WCC systems become more complex, how will they effect “being-in” for students who use these systems?

        The final aspect of cyber-being is its generating or producing occurrent.  Occurrent in Heidegger’s philosophy is known through assertions-propositions because it is located in the actual “as.”  However, cyber-being is located between “as” and “as-if," and therefore de-assertionalizes the present-at-hand (occurrent).  Cyber-  is spectral (between actual and virtual). Mchoul names this presence-to-come.  It is as presence-to-come that occurrent is generated.  Margaret Morse suggests “virtual landscapes are liminal spaces—neither here not there, neither imaginary nor real, animate but not living and not dead, subjunctive realm wherein events happen in effect, but not actuality (Morse, 1997, p. 208).  What is the experience of presence-to-come in a WCC?

        When I “went to a class on the web” my experience has a mixture of the actual and physical (i.e., I am sitting in front of the computer, typing on my keyboard, looking at my computer screen, etc.) with the presence-to-come (the indefiniteness of possibility) in that I could choose a variety of ways to use the classroom that moved me and connected me to places I could not have expected.  My journeys on the web were always different and seemed to take on a life of their own.  It is this sense of presence-to-come that can be so dis-orienting.  Where am I?  Where are you?  What is this space? Who am I and who are you?  Are these questions felt from this ontological relationship of presence-to come? What is space in cyber-space?  How does it effect students and their experience in a WCC?

The Ontological Quadrivium--Levy

Levy (1998) suggests that there are four modes of being: the possible, the real, the virtual and the actual.

The real, substance, the thing, subsists or resists.  The possible harbors nonmanifest forms that remain dormant: Hidden within, these determinations insist.  The essence of the virtual, however, is as a way out, an exit: It exists.  The actual, however, as the manifestation of an event, arrives, its fundamental operation is occurrence. (Levy, 1998, p. 172)

        While Levy understands these four modes as different, they almost always operate together in concrete phenomenon.  For example in a WCC, I enter a conversation through my computer, web browser software, and the WCC software.  From a mechanical point of view, there is a dialectic between the possible and real.  The possibilities of the computer and software are being realized.  The electric current potentializes the text while I potentialize navigation through clicks of the mouse on hypertext links.  At the same time, I am actualizing a number of problems, ideas, interpreting the conversation, and writing my response.    In rereading my response and rewriting it, the virtual space is modified.  How do students experience these four different modes of being?  Does each feel different or are they so intertwined that they appear to be all the same experience?

        The transitions between the four modes of being are realization, potentialization, actualization, and virtualization (Levy, 1998).  Each transition or transformation is understood by Levy in terms of definition, order, causality, and temporality.  "Realization can be compared to material causality: It supplies a pre-existing form with matter… and it embodies a linear temporality, one that is mechanical, deterministic.  Realizing temporality consumes, it causes potential to fall" (p. 173).  Potentialization for Levy is formal cause.  It "produces order and information, it replenishes resources and energy reserves.  The potential difference "is at the same time form, structure, and reserve" (p. 173).  Actualization creates form.  Levy suggests it is efficient cause because "the laborer, sculptor, or demiurge, if it is a living and thinking being, can not be reduced to a simple executant, for it interprets, improves, and resolves problems" (p. 174).  Temporality is process.  It supplies a constantly reinstated adventure of meaning" (p. 174).  Virtualization is "the transition from the act--here and now--to the problem, to the knot of constraint and finality that inspires our acts" (p. 174).  It is final causality for Levy, the "why" of the situation.  Time in virtualization is eternity.  "To the extent that there are as many temporalities as there are vital problems, virtualization is displaced in a time that contains all time (p. 174).
 

How do students experience these transformation processes in on-line learning environments?  How does the design of the instruction effect students’ engagement in these processes?