Pedagogy and Online Writing
In
particular this research investigates how online seminar participants experience
dimensions of embodiment, virtual space, interpersonal relations, and
temporality. The project studies how communicating through reading-writing (by
means of online technologies such as web boards) creates conditions, situations,
and actions of pedagogical influence and affectivity in teaching and learning
relations. And the research explores how writing online shapes the experience of
personal identity, and how the communication through computer mediated writing
may affect trust, vulnerability, intimacy, strangeness, etc.
In
ordinary seminar situations the verbal interactions between teacher and students
(and among students) tend to be characterized by modes of temporality,
spontaneity and language use that differs radically from the ¡°discussions¡±
that students engage in through writing on a conference board. For example, the
online seminar participant who communicates his or her views through writing has
the time and opportunity to compose a text in a reflective manner. Web boards
allow the participant to add material from other places, paste in quotes, rework
a piece of writing, download text from the internet, and integrate it with his
or her own text before posting it on the ¡°discussion¡± board. Second, the
process of reading-writing tends to encourage, under certain pedagogical
conditions, a reflective attitude, but also a preparedness to be open and
vulnerable.
Some
scholars have debated (philosophically and theoretically) issues such as the
lack of physical presence, the more formal nature of writing, and the impersonal
nature of the message boards in the process of computer mediated communication.
But it seems that no research to date has explored empirically and
phenomenologically how people actually experience pedagogical presence and
influence in online seminars through web board writing.
Participants
from different countries) are engaged in series of online seminars (about
qualitative research). An specially developed website serves as resource for the
inquiry: see <http://www.phenomenologyonline.com>. The seminar activities
are designed to produce different modalities of reading-writing and interacting
by means of a web board. Natural, experiential, and reflective discourse data
are solicited, collected, analyzed and integrated in this research. The
phenomenological research methodology is especially suited to explore the
experiential dimensions of writing practices (van Manen 1991/97). Special
techniques, involving a variety of empirical and reflective methods, are used
for articulating, describing, and interpreting the complexities of the
experiences of reading and writing online (for example, see van Manen 2002).