Darryl Cressman

Feb. 11, 2005

Learning Spaces - LIDC Presentation

In the previous presentation, Ted Hamilton spoke about examining online educational technology from a critical social perspective; primarily his research focuses on the embedded social & institutional influences that help co-determine the form and function of educational technology. This analysis represents a significant shift away from the ‘evangelical model’ of understanding online education – a shift that I would also like to further explore by reviewing the potential of employing the methodology of phenomenological hermeneutics for examining online education. Whereas Ted presented a critical alterative to the evangelical model, I will present the phenomenological approach as investigating questions of experiential differences involving the apparently banal use and experience of using online education and the possible significance or meanings drawn from investigating this experience. Much like Ted’s presentation, this will lead to questions that are not asked through other investigative methods because the potential results do not fit into a linear, or quantitative, model of interpretation.

Answers to questions concerning the actual experience are often implied or pre-answered in most studies of online learning. Usually an implicit appeal is made to a broadly cybernetic, information-theoretical framework, appealing to the roles of sender, receiver and channel, and often appealing to some notion of "feedback." Instead of just assuming that a message is sent by one party and received/acted upon by another party, what we want to accomplish in this project is to examine the actual experience of being a part of this communication process. How are these messages received? What is it like to sit at a computer and ‘chat’ with the instructor? What is the experience of replying via a keyboard to questions as opposed to answering verbally? And, probably most important, how does the experience itself differ from being in a physical classroom surrounded by human students?

The actual research that will be occurring within the Learning Spaces project will be focused on understanding the experience of being involved in the process of online education. By approaching online education from a phenomenological perspective, the focus of this study could be understood as an inverted model of most examinations of online education. Instead of examining and seeking to explain the technology or the potential effects of employing computers for educational purposes, we will relegate what is often the central object of study, the technology and educational models, to the periphery in order to focus on the human experience of interaction and online education. The primary object of study then, from a phenomenological perspective, is the human experience of actually using online education.

Understanding experience as the direct contact or interaction we have with our lifeworld necessitates using a method like phenomenological hermeneutics, and specifically it necessitates understanding the experience of our lived world. This experience, often amorphous and elusive in its particular manifestations and contours, can often be grasped through the use of heuristic devices. One of these is to understand this experience or world in terms of four lifeworld themes, or existentials. These can be used as a way of a examining experience with tthe goal of describing, and not explaining, the experience itself. Essential to this approach is to try to achieve direct contact with the world as it is experienced, not as it is conceptualized. Of course, this is not possible absolutely, but only as a matter of degree is abstraction and theorizing avoided. This is central to the phenomenological aspect of phenomenological hermeneutics, the "suspension" of explanation in studying experience, also referred to as "bracketing," or "reduction". The hermeneutic aspect of this method involves interpretation about meaning only after the experience has been described. This involves attempting to investigate all the various dimensions and meanings of the lived experience. These aspects, or dimensions, can be separated into four ‘existentials’ that serve as heuristic devices to assist in understanding the lived experience.

In his text “Researching Lived Experience”, Max van Manen identifies these heuristic devices as the four heuristic existential themes that pervade the life worlds of humans, regardless of their historical, cultural or social situatedness. These four themes, or existentials, are lived space (spatiality), lived body (corporeality), lived time (temporality) and lived human relation (relationality or communality). These four existentials of lived experience can be differentiated for the purposes of recording elements of experience, but they cannot be separated in the experience itself. Together, these dimensions form an intricate unity, the lifeworld of experience, our lived world.

In what follows I will explain in greater detail these four existential themes and draw examples from previous work to show how employing a phenomenological method can reveal different experiential dimensions then those revealed through other methods or interpretations of online education.

Lived Space – Spatiality

When we think of space, we usually think of distance and mathematical space. In this way terms like kilometres, yards and feet are very handy, but this quantification of space does not reflect the actual space that we inhabit and experience. Lived space is hard to put into words since the experience of lived space is in some ways pre-verbal - we rarely reflect on it, yet we still experience it. Think of how you experience space when entering a large building like a cathedral, bank or museum, or conversely the experience of being crammed in a corner of the subway during rush hour or stuck in a full elevator. In both of these cases, experience of space is an integral part of the experience of the situation.

Understanding the lived space of online education is similar to these examples of understanding the lived space of experience. Do users set aside a specific space for interacting with online educational programs? How does the experience differ if one is performing a task on a campus compared to experience of performing a task in the comfort of one’s home? What are the experiential differences of online education if the researcher attempts to understand the relation between lived space and use? What is the difference, because surely there must be a difference, between the actual physical space of the classroom and the space embodied by a person involved in a networked learning situation? How does sitting alone at a computer at your home compare to sitting in a seminar room with other students? By attempting to understand how space affects experience, the researcher can potentially highlight many key differences between classroom learning and online education otherwise neglected by conventional models of understanding online education.

Lived Body – Corporeality

This concept refers to the phenomenological fact that we are always already bodily in the world. Whenever we meet or interact with others in the world, in a sense, we meet that person first through his or her body. This lived body experience is not restricted to phenomenology; it is also reflected in other disciplines that examine the politically contentious issue of the body as the subject of someone else’s gaze. Being subjected to another’s gaze, the physical, bodily presence of the person may be experienced by feeling awkward, clumsy or a blushing response. How does this translate to online education? How do we experience our own bodies when interaction is physically attenuated or anonymous?

Lived Time – Temporality

This concept refers to subjective time as opposed to clock time or objective time. Lived time is our temporal way of being in the world – our experience of time slowing down or time flying cannot be understood through quantified time. Online education can be evaluated by examining lived time – how fast or slow does time pass when the user is involved with online educational technology? Is this different from the temporal experiences of traditional classroom learning? Can the way that time drags on or flies by during a dull or interesting lecture be perfectly translated to online education? These are some of the questions raised when examining online education from a phenomenological approach.

Lived Other – Relationality

This concept refers to the lived relation we maintain with others in the interpersonal space, time and intercorporeality that we share with them. This can refer to others who are physically present and more importantly for this project, those whom we know indirectly – through letters, email or telephone. Online education offers a unique opportunity to examine this aspect of lived experience. How do we experience our relations with others when there is no body present? If someone commends your work do you may be inclined to attach specific physical features to that name; what if someone is critical of your work, is it a natural assumption to project negative physical traits to only a name?

When applying these dimensions of lived experience to online learning environments, phenomenological hermeneutics can reveal both the limits of conventional research and new possibilities of understanding this phenomenon. In what follows I will describe how Ted, Grace, and I were involved in an experiment where we used phenomenological hermeneutics to describe our experience.

Applying the Method – The Phenomenology of the Walkman

Under the guidance of Dr. Friesen, Ted, Grace and I partook in an experiment to better understand the phenomenological hermeneutic method of investigation through an exercise called the “The Phenomenology of the Walkman”. In this experiment we were asked to wear a walkman and record our experiences based on the methodological model described above. Although all of us participated in this individually, our written experiences often drew upon the same themes in relation to the four existentials described previously. The lived space that we inhabited during the experiment was often not a real space at all. While listening to a walkman, Grace Ted & I all felt ourselves experiencing spaces that were strongly coloured and shaped the music that we were listening to. Although we were all walking along city streets, we were all able to describe the spatial experience of being somewhere else, an experience triggered by the memories evoked by listening to songs that we naturally equated with other places.

Perhaps most interesting is how we understood the relational dimension of this experience. On the one hand, you immediately feel separated from others on the street. You inhabit a private world of sound in a public space. You are excluded from the sounds of traffic and urban noise and thus feel significantly removed from other people and general activity on the street. The opposite can also be true when spotting someone else with headphones on. You experience a sense of unspoken camaraderie with the other person although you will never find out if this feeling of camaraderie is reciprocal.

Using Breakdowns as a way of extending the Method

An interesting aspect of technology use that arises from this approach is the idea of technological breakdowns, or glitches. For example, you sit down to post a message in an online discussion What if the computer shuts down during your post? In what sense will your post cease to exist? Will your next post be identical to the one that was erased? Does the student necessarily plan for these events? What these questions are leading to is an example of how the online classroom is in many ways very different from a traditional classroom on an experiential level. Students engage in a lived experience at a computer that is very different from other lived educational experiences. In this way ‘breakdowns’ or ‘glitches’ reveal an experiential dimension that cannot be examined without looking at the actual activity of engaging in the online educational processes. By asking the question of how these breakdowns change the overall experience we are asking questions that concern the immediacy of actual experience and not an abstracted or conceptualized interpretation of the experience.

Accounts of technology use that focus on breakdown, rather than on the proper functioning of technology are indispensable for bringing the researcher from the abstract and conceptual - how things "should" work - to the experiential and concrete - how they "do" work --or do not work. As such, "breakdowns" designate any and all consideration of concrete experience of engagement with technology, including anecdotes or stories of computer use, language reflecting this use, and the informal, unplanned culture that arises around the everyday use of educational technology artifacts.

We can understand the concept of the breakdown in two ways: First, it can be understood in a simple manner – it either works and you interact according to prescriptive user manuals or it doesn’t work and thus it serves no function and cannot be understood. This approach is not very useful for any type of experiential understanding because it presupposes that the technology and the experience is predictable and easy to chart. As anyone who has ever interacted with any form of technology can attest, very rarely does the prescribed experience match the actual experience. People have to cope with and improvise their use of technology and they have to experience breakdowns, not as the shutting down of the system, but as a change in experience and a change in the technology. A second approach to making sense of breakdowns is found in phenomenological hermeneutics. By examining what happens when a program breaks down, certain embodied, temporal and spatial characteristics of the experience are revealed.

A breakdown can signal not the literal breaking down of technology and the educational process, but a change in both. What happens when two people --say an instructor and a TA-- log in to a WebCT course using the same id and password? Postings appear expressing different viewpoints --all, apparently, from the same person. Surely, this is not an experience that anyone has ever dealt with in a classroom; nor is it an experience described by those who apply a prescriptive model of communication to online education. But, it is a real experience that can occur in a variety of different forms and when described reveals different dimensions of meaning that pertain to an attempt to comprehend the experience from the users perspective.

Breakdowns, or glitches, are only one of the experiential dimensions that reveals itself to a phenomenological approach and thus provides a good example of the direction in which this project is moving in – a better understanding of the seemingly primary, yet often neglected, aspect human experience involved in the marriage between technology and education.