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TechnéResearch in Philosophy and Technology

Official JOurnal Of the SOciety fOr PhilOSOPhy and technOlOgy

Joseph C. Pitt, Editor-in-ChiefIbo van de Poel, EditorDiane Michelfelder, Editor

Techné 15:3 Fall 2011 Rosenberger, Introduction

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Introduction

Robert Rosenberger The time is right for establishing greater collaboration between the philosophy of technology and the philosophy of education. As there continues to be an increased reliance on educational technologies in the classroom (especially educational computing), philosophical accounts of technology become increasingly relevant to the concrete practices of pedagogy. This special issue consists of a review symposium of an article by Norm Friesen which critically analyzes the roles of computers in the classroom. In particular, Friesen contrasts the experience of classroom frog dissection with that of computer-simulated frog dissection alternatives. The respondents have been invited to react to Friesen’s claims, and also to offer their own thoughts on the topic of computers in education. An appeal of this subject matter is that it is at once both specific and broad. There are the specific and practical problems of determining the appropriate educational roles for emerging computer simulations of frog dissection, and of evaluating the traditional practices of in-class vivisection. At the same time, as we will see in this volume, these specific issues immediately explode into more general philosophical concerns over the philosophy of pedagogy, technological agency, the phenomenology of technology, technological ethics, online political action, educational research methodology, human-computer interaction, and animal advocacy. I was first introduced to Friesen’s work on classroom computing as a blind referee for what is now the focal essay of this volume. I was struck by the potential opened up by the author’s framing of these issues and felt compelled to respond. Along with my referee report, I raised the idea with the editors for a symposium on this topic. Friesen also agreed, and with his identity as the author then revealed to me (we have met for the first time through this process), the two of us together began constructing the issue—and debating about computing and dissection… In the anchor piece to this issue, “Dissection and Simulation: Brilliance and Transparency, or Encumbrance and Disruption?,” Friesen utilizes ideas from the tradition of phenomenology to first articulate the experience of the hands-on dissection of a frog, and then to describe the use of an online computer simulation of frog dissection called “Froguts.” His analysis spells out the student encounter with the frog dissection process: the smells, the feeling of making the first incision, the discomfort. A clear contrast is then drawn with the experience of using the computer simulation: the mouse clicks, the on-screen images, the preprogrammed responses. Building on Albert Borgmann’s critique of “hyperreality,” Friesen develops an account of the limitations of virtual objects in education, an account elaborated further in his book The Place of the Classroom and the Space of the Screen (2011, New York: Peter Lang). In his response, Albert Borgmann puts his finger on the frustration that may accompany the increasing prevalence of information technologies in the classroom, and he relates this to a larger pattern in our relations to technology. According to Borgmann, in recognition of a “growing hunger for reality, for the commanding presence of the surprising,” reformers in multiple sectors of our lives are putting aside technological novelties in favor of practices that are healthier, or more environmentally friendly, or more economically viable, or otherwise better by some other measure. However, Borgmann argues, a deeper analysis is required. What is needed is reflection on the ultimate goals of reformation; can we devise goals which do not themselves reduce to the instruments of other goals? He writes, “once reforms are defended as instruments, they are


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entered into competition with the paradigmatic instrument of today, the machinery of technology, and whether they will always prevail is an open question.” Don Ihde’s response offers an analysis of the issue of educational dissection by placing it into a different larger frame of reference: its historical context. He points out that frog dissection itself is an outdated form of biology education; it is no longer representative of the everyday practices of contemporary science, practices which increasingly rely on computerized technologies such as imaging instrumentation. And if computer simulations strive only to reproduce traditional classroom dissection activities, then they will be at best similarly outdated. He writes, “today’s biology education, as with today’s scientific practices, takes up a wide set of variant instrumentally mediated perspectives, each producing different ranges of knowledges, which synthesized produces a much richer and robust result than the limited dissection/simulation example given.” Through consideration of examples such as “Nintendo” joystick surgery, and his own experiences of medical visitations, Ihde explores the embodied encounter with contemporary imaging technologies and their potential for integration into biology education. Estrid Sørensen provides an analysis of Friesen’s claims through a critique of his research methodology. She points out that there are consequences to his choice to account for frog dissection in terms of multiple reports and studies of actual student experiences on the one hand, and on the other to account for virtual dissection in terms of an abstract and generalized user. In Sørensen’s view, classroom learning involving computers is a social experience, one which includes active participation, and which consists of interaction among students, teachers, and the computer. She writes, “When instruction is accounted for, and especially when no human teacher is involved but it is the technology that is described as teaching, as is the case in Friesen’s discussion of the dissection simulation, the technology is granted much more agency, disregarding the ways in which learners might actively engage in different ways with this technology.” Building on observations made through her own studies, such as in her book The Materiality of Learning (2009, New York: Cambridge), she maintains that the experience of classroom computing can be more social, interactive, and dynamic than Friesen suggests. In Darin Barney’s contribution, the nature of politics itself is put under consideration, and its relation to human bodily experience is examined. Online computer simulation of dissection is taken to be one example of an experience of the virtual, and Barney draws out implications for our understanding of political action mediated by the Internet. He writes, “Online dissection does not represent actual dissection, it simulates it, and so too is there an important distinction to be made between the use of emerging media to represent actual political acts and situations, and the proliferation of simulated political activity online.” Through this analysis of what politics can and should mean, the possibilities for online political action are explored. If politics is understood to involve things such as “resistance and difficulty,” “the pain of our passivity and disempowerment,” and the “feel of injustice,” and if, as Barney writes, politics “takes guts,” then many current practices on the Internet that pass as political actions are open to criticism. In my own essay-length response, “A Phenomenological Defense of Computer-Simulated Frog Dissection,” I explore the potential educational value that classroom computer simulations of frog dissection maintain even after Friesen’s critique. While on the one hand I deeply sympathize with Friesen’s general project of articulating the substantial problems that accompany an overreliance on computers in the classroom (enough, in fact, to put together this volume celebrating and critically engaging his work), on the other hand I find problems with the specific example of frog dissection. I argue that the practice of frog dissection itself—the hands-on vivisection of a pre-prepared frog corpse—must be conceived not simply as an encounter with the real world to be held against any merely simulated imitation, but as itself a material practice open


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to the analysis of the philosophy of technology. This allows for a critique of the concrete educational limitations of frog dissection, and it additionally enables a brainstorm over the untapped educational potential for computer-simulated dissection once it is no longer restricted to simply mimicking traditional practices. In this way, those who defend the poor frogs on ethical grounds now find an unlikely ally: the phenomenology of technology. In Friesen’s reply, he weaves together many of the insights that emerge throughout this volume, and he positions them with respect to his overall account of classroom computing. And I am pleased to report that he directly engages some of the challenges that have arisen, especially those offered by Ihde and myself. We have a live debate on our hands. It is one with relevance to an array of general philosophical topics, and with direct implications for the specifics of classroom practice and for the future development of educational simulations. And I am happy to leave Friesen with the last word (for now!).

Techné 15:3 Fall 2011 Friesen, Dissection and Simulation

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Dissection and Simulation: Brilliance and Transparency, or Encumbrance and Disruption?

Norm Friesen

Thompson Rivers University Abstract The increasing use of online simulations as replacements for animal dissection in the classroom or lab raises important questions about the nature of simulation itself and its relationship to embodied educational experience. This paper addresses these questions first by presenting a comparative hermeneutic-phenomenological investigation of online and offline dissection. It then interprets the results of this study in terms of Borgmann’s (1992) notion of the intentional “transparency” and “pliability” of simulated hyperreality. It makes the case that it is precisely encumbrance and disruption—elements that are by definition excluded from simulations and interfaces—which give dissection its educational value. Keywords: simulation, phenomenology, pedagogy, intentionality, alterity Introduction “To live,” Edmund Husserl writes, “is always to live-in-certainty-of-the-world” (1970, 142). In the phenomenological tradition, this lived certainty is understood in terms of intentionality: our connection with the world around us as it is solidified in our plans, projects and categories. To inhabit such certainty is to comport oneself habitually and naturally, dwelling in Husserl’s “natural attitude” (Husserl, 1983, 56-57). In this connection, Merleau-Ponty has famously described phenomenology as an attempt to “slacken the intentional threads which attach us to the world and thus [bring] them to our notice…” (1962, xiii). Phenomenology, in this sense de-naturalizes, suspends habit, and in so doing, renders the world around us uncertain and even alien. My purpose in this paper is to carry out or enact such a slackening of intentional ties, focussing specifically on a particular set of educational experiences of habit and uncertainty, familiarity and de-naturalization. These are experiences associated with dissection in school contexts, specifically compared with those associated with online or “virtual” dissection exercises. In carrying out this comparative investigation, I work to show that the slackening of intentionality invoked by Merleau-Ponty is as much a part of the phenomenological method as it is a part of education generally. I base this investigation on van Manen’s descriptive hermeneutic phenomenology, which uses anecdotic and interpretive writing as means for "contextualization and amplification rather than... structural essentialization" (Hein & Austin, 2001, 9). Widely employed in the fields of nursing and education, van Manen’s phenomenology focuses first on the gathering, development and refinement of descriptions of lived experience (van Manen, 1997). Experiential and existential themes emerging from these short lived-experience accounts are then explored and developed in reflective, interpretive writing. Such description, reflection and interpretation is practiced in this paper not only through the provision of interview transcripts and descriptive passages gathered by the author, but also through the use of descriptive passages and quotes taken from some of the many articles on student responses to school dissection.


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1. Dissection The pedagogical practice of dissecting animals in school biology courses has long been associated with experiences, opinions, and debates of special intensity. Juliana Texley, an assistant school superintendent, observes:

“I Remember Biology,” parents often begin at their annual conference with the teacher. The odor and distaste the dissection experience evokes have been among the most pervasive memories of secondary school science for more than a century. But in the 1990s, environmental consciousness, curricular concerns, and political pressure on schools have changed biology... (1992).

Some of the factors that have changed biology have developed out of important legal cases concerning in-school dissection. In the American context, one of the most prominent of these was heard by the California Supreme Court in 1987. It began with Jennifer Graham, a 15-year-old California girl who refused to participate in a school dissection on ethical grounds. When school officials refused to accept a project on amphibian behavior as an alternative, the young student took the school district to court. According to one report, “Graham became something of a celebrity, often called ‘the frog girl,’ who had the courage to stand up to the schools in her defense of defenseless animals” (Johnson, 1997). Today, in response to legal challenges and a number of other factors, schools and districts in the US and Canada are much more responsive to students’ concerns and to other issues surrounding dissection. The issues that are now considered important are manifold— “rang[ing] from inhumane treatment of animals by the supply industry and the depletion of natural populations of affected species to concerns about the emotional responses of students who are ‘turned off’ to biology because of a dislike of dissection” (Haury, 1996). Many schools and districts now recognize the legitimacy of individual student’s wishes to opt out of dissections, with some institutions deliberately providing alternative assignments, and still others having dispensed with the activity altogether. My aim in this paper is not to focus on the range of complex legal and moral issues raised by dissection activities; it is instead to compare the experience of dissection as an online activity with its offline counterpart. In doing so, I pay special attention to the sensory and experiential intensity of this activity, looking at the educational significance of the convenience and methodical design associated with online dissection, and the often strong emotional responses associated with its counterpart in the classroom. 2. Body and Relation in Lab Dissection Given its vivid and controversial nature, it is not surprising that there are a range of readily-available accounts of dissection in both school and university science classrooms. Already, we have a kind of compressed experiential description in Texly’s reference to parents’ recollections of working with “that terrible-smelling frog.” Accounts of classroom dissection typically follow a common sequence of events, beginning with a sensually intensive initiation and ending with a range of possible outcomes. In the course of this sequence, there are experiential moments of particular prominence that reappear with remarkable frequency. One such moment is the experience of an initial encounter or sighting of the animals to be dissected. Students typically notice them as they walk into the classroom, spotting “flattened rats in a jar” (interviewee), “little dead pigs lying in the sink,” “a jar of pickled animals,” or a creature


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simply “tossed... into a plate” (quoted in Solot & Arluke, 1997, 34). A second moment in the dissection that stands out in even greater experiential relief is the act of touching and above all making the first incision into the dead animal or carcass. One ethnographic study of classroom dissection explains:

The initial incision… the transforming cut and the only one made into a body that bears the obvious markers of “animal”… is frequently the hardest one for students to make. Even some students who had never dissected predicted that “opening” the animal would be the hardest part (Solot & Arluke, 1997, 35).

Whether a student make the incision him or herself, or whether anther does it instead, students’ comments give special emphasis to the embodied and specifically visceral character of this moment. For example, here is one account in a study of the “high school dissection experience” of a fetal pig:

The first day, I thought I was just gonna be sick when Linda was actually slicing this pig open. I felt nauseated... I don’t handle blood and that kind of stuff very well. I was very glad that it didn’t have blood in it. If it was a pig that had just died and had blood, I would not have been able to handle it... (Barr & Herzog, 2000, 64).

Other interviewees describe the act of “touching a dead pickled rat” as “the grossest part” of the dissection, also saying that the “first cut into” the animal, in which a liquid, presumably formaldehyde, “spurted” out, was particularly “gross.” The body in these cases becomes manifest experientially in a way that is rather forceful and direct. It is, in effect, subject to a kind of sensual assault—one that extends from the sight of the animal to the sound and the tactile sense of the first incision. It also includes the smells of formaldehyde, which “refuse to leave your hands” as one interviewee says, and of rotting flesh, which was said to “get a little riper with each passing session.” Also not to be overlooked are impressions and feelings of the “gut” as expressed through terms or phrases like “gross,” becoming “sick,” or “nauseous.” 3. Body and Relation in Online Dissection A virtual frog dissection provides a number of points of conspicuous contrast to the classroom or lab activities presented above. Such a dissection might begin for example with the student clicking on a link on a course website: “Frog Dissection: try the demo at froguts.com.”1 In the case of this specific simulation, the student would first wait for the software to load, and would then be greeted with pleasant musical tones, and an animated homepage advertising a number of demo simulations. Choosing the appropriate option, an image of what appears to be a life-size bullfrog fills much of the browser window—with a row of small buttons provided on the right. Underneath, text instructs the student to “press the pin button on the toolbar” so that the frog can be secured. When selected, a box of pins appears on the right, in place of the buttons. The student would then click and drag these pins one by one to spots on the frog’s arms and legs that are marked with small red “Xs” (inserting them with a double-click). When they land in place, they make a dull percussive sound. Next, a red, line running up and down the length of the frog’s abdomen appears. The student is instructed to “make 3 incisions along the dotted red line.” This is achieved by clicking and then dragging the cursor along the red line marking the frog’s glistening and smooth but mottled underbelly. Any sense of unease that one might feel at taking a simulated scalpel to this simulated surface would be in conflict with the absence of other sensations: No unpleasant sounds or unusual feelings of resistance or elasticity, no moist


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membrane to puncture and incise—only the frictionless gliding of the cursor across the computer screen.

Figure 1: Frog dissection

Such a “virtual” scenario of dissection illuminates aspects of the lived body that are rather different from those of the in-school dissection. The manifold sense impressions that assaulted the students in the previous descriptions are either absent or very much muted in this virtual exercise: There is no smell of formaldehyde or rotting flesh; there is no need to fear that blood or any other liquid might come “spurting” from the creature being dissected. Also, instead of first seeing the animal “lying in the sink” or “flattened” in a box or jar, the first experience with the frog occurs while waiting for it to load in the browser window. Handling and even cutting into the animal, furthermore, is a question of clicking on the correct button (the scalpel) and gliding it, in effect, across part of the screen. Naturally, there is much more to a dissection than viscerally unpleasant and indelible sights, smells and other sensations. There are well thought-out and articulated reasons for its inclusion in science and biology curricula, such as knowledge of “the structure and function of organs”


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(Jordan School District, 2004) and safe selection and use of dissection “apparatus and materials” (Sackville High School, 2008). However, speaking experientially, impressions of disgust, nausea and repulsion initially seem to overwhelm other, less visceral and more intellectual aspects of the in-school dissection. As mentioned above, this barrage of sense impressions is registered in specifically visceral terms, in the stomach, in the form of feelings of nausea and sickness—the word “viscera” referring to the lower abdomen or “bowels regarded as the seat of emotion” (OED, 2007). A related term, “gross” –meaning “plain, not delicate” or “uncleanly or repulsive in quality” (OED, 2007)—is also prominent in accounts of lab dissection, appearing no less than three times in the remarks quoted above. In more formal accounts, the term “squeamishness”—and its related meanings of nausea, sickness, queasiness and disgust (OED, 2007) – is repeatedly used to characterize student impressions of, and reactions to, dissection experiences (e.g., Barr & Herzog, 2000; Solot & Arluke, 1997). And “squeamishness” refers not only to a condition of the stomach, to the state of “being affected with nausea or qualms;” but it also corresponds to distinctly less visceral terms such as “disdainfulness,” “reserve,” or to “the quality... of being highly or excessively fastidious or dainty” (OED, 2007). What is significant in these definitions is clear evidence of a connection between the mind and body, intellect and viscera. Defined in terms of “qualms,” “reserve,” or “fastidiousness,” words such as gross, visceral or squeamish can refer to an overwhelmingly embodied feeling on the one hand; but on the other, they can also designate a more mental or intellectual state or position of defense, discomfort or unease. A profoundly uncomfortable or disquieting situation or experience, in other words, can be registered in terms of a deeply felt disgust or repulsion, and at the same time, can take the form of intellectual disquiet or be articulated in terms of moral qualms. Consider one undergraduate student's testimony in which he criticizes the ethics of dissection by recalling a particularly “sick feeling” that he associates not only with the literally visceral aspects of laboratory dissection, but also with less literally “gutsy” matters as well:

I feel a sick feeling thinking about those labs. The same sick feeling I felt as a child when I saw a dead frog, shot by a neighbor kid in my creek.... The same sick feeling I felt when I found that [an old railroad landmark] in Tolono had been bulldozed. And the same sick feeling I felt when I saw a pedestrian struck and killed by a car in Phoenix …during a spring break trip (Hassler, 2000).

The acts and the ethical implications of destroying a historical landmark, witnessing an accidental death, and dissecting a frog are obviously very different; but what is important in each case is the feeling of lived body that this student associates with each, and his reference to this recurrent feeling to justify an ethical and intellectual position against dissection. This further emphasizes the connection between embodied sensation and intellectual conviction, between feelings of the “gut” and impressions and decisions of the “mind.” In an article on the “guts” and learning, Robyn Barnacle observes the following about the “viscera” and knowledge:

recognition of the emotionality of the gut is evident in everyday expressions, such as gutless, which refers to a lack of courage, or a fearful gut. In addition, both the notions of ‘gut reaction’ and ‘gut instinct’ treat the gut as a site of specific responsiveness to the world, the former in an immediate, unreflective sort of way, and the latter, conversely, as a particularly fine-tuned and insightful form of intelligence (2009, 26).

The gut provides us with ways of knowing that can be instant and immediate, but also subtle and insightful. For example, in the descriptions of dissection provided above, there is experiential evidence of a kind of communication, connection or relation between bodies: Cutting into the soft belly of an animal, or witnessing the injury or death of a pedestrian are illustrative of a kind of


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experiential relation that can exist between our body and those of others–even when those “others” are mammals or other creatures. And although these examples of incision and even death are extreme, this kind of connection and relation can be said to exist in more commonplace and everyday contexts. This is a relation that is closely related to empathy, specifically as it is defined as the “project[ion of] one's personality into (and so fully comprehending) the object of contemplation” (OED, 2007). This experiential aspect is the embodied or corporeal correlative to intersubjectivity, and is designated intercorporeality. 4. Distantiation, Care and Risk As the dissection progresses, it moves from an initial and explicitly intercorporeal encounter with the body of the animal and its tactile and olfactory characteristics, and becomes an exploration of its internal anatomy and physiology. As this transition occurs, a different set of experiential elements are foregrounded. At the same time, the experience of intercorporeality, as an empathic connection between bodies in the dissection experience remains an important but more implicit factor. One student interviewed for this study explains:

The rat that we were dissecting had its tongue jammed out of its mouth and had clumps of fur sticking everywhere; it kind of looked like Bill the Cat from the cartoon “Bloom County.” So my lab partner and I named it “Bill the Rat.” The fact that the rat looked like a cartoon character made the dissection easier to deal with.

Similar techniques of distantiation, de-humanization or “de-animalization” (as Solot and Arluke 1997, 35 put it) are apparent in other accounts. For example, Barr and Herzog report that some “students cover[ed] the face of the animals they were dissecting,” with one of these students explaining:

Every time we’ve worked on it (the pig) the face was covered. I couldn’t cut the face. I could watch, and once the face was cut it didn’t look like a pig anymore, and I could deal with that because it looked like—you know—a scientific experiment to me (2000, 59).

In the place of a strong intercorporeal link between the dissected animal and the student doing the dissection, a different relationship between the two is gradually emerging. Instead of being marked by a visceral, acutely empathic response, concerns of a more intellectual manner come to the fore:

As these changes take place, the viewer’s gaze is directed toward the newly exposed organs. One student observed, “You opened it up and the pig just like flapped down. You didn’t see [the animal] when you looked at it. You didn’t see the pig, you just saw like insides.”… One student, who expressed ambivalence about the prospect of dissecting, said, “I couldn’t physically open it myself... but once it’s open then I can look” (Solot & Arluke, 1997, 35).

Although the smell of formaldehyde and rotting flesh certainly remain, they no longer combine with the sight of the animal’s body to simply repulse students, making them squeamish, or “grossing them out.” Instead, a different set of sentiments and impressions become possible. These include feelings of curiosity, a desire to explore and experiment, or in some cases, the emotional response of outright fascination. As one interviewee puts it, a kind of “conflict developed” for her “between the intricacy of the internal organs of the rat on the one hand, and its stinking and revolting body on the other.” The interviewee also describes what was revealed in the rat’s insides as a kind of “marvel: all of these little body parts, fitting and working neatly together like a sort of beautiful wet machine.” Barr and Herzog say they “heard comments like


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“God, his liver is like a mushroom or something. His heart’s kinda tough. Feel that,” and “look at that. Ooh, its got a weird texture” (2000, 63). Reflecting a more playful curiosity—or simply greater bravado—Barr and Herzog also report that:

On one occasion… boys in a group cut out their pig’s intestines and stretched them almost completely across the room, inadvertently demonstrating the extraordinary length of the viscera to the rest of the class (2000, 61).

A pig’s small intestines, it should be noted, form a tiny ball together with the large intestines, but when they are uncoiled they can stretch to 20 feet or more in length. Whether the act of uncoiling this organ across the length of a room is judged to be in bad taste or as a legitimate experiment, it is certainly a type of improvisation that would have no direct equivalent in an online dissection. It is also worth noting that this kind of activity brings with it a special kind of risk, since it may not be entirely neat or tidy, it is not reversible if done in error. As one student reports, “the rat got kind of mutilated,” and sometimes the “organ or part that the instructor would point out would no longer be there.” The online dissection provides a similar emphasis on the work of accessing and exploring the deceased animal’s viscera, but at the same time, of course, it provides many points of contrast. Following the incisions into the belly of the frog, the dissection software described above proceeds by showing the student a pair of scissors. The student is asked to “cut upwards with the scissors through the muscle tissue.” After clicking on the scissors a few times text pops up advising the student to “twist the scissors to avoid cutting the heart under the ribs.” Yet another icon appears and when selected, it causes the scissors to slip over to one side, allowing the student to continue cutting. Clicking and dragging through a few more steps, the internal organs of the frog gradually begin to appear. Then the cursor abruptly turns into a magnifying glass, allowing the student to zoom in on the animal’s abdomen. A label appears for each organ as the magnifying glass passes over it. Clicking on each of the labels causes the organ’s name to be added to a list in a small notebook page that has appeared on the right side of the simulation window—making the whole process remarkably seamless and uninterrupted.


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Figure 2: Organization of organs

Emotions and impressions of various kinds are manifest in the simulated dissection, as they were in the descriptions of classroom dissection. But their substance and intensity are rather different. In the simulated dissection, what appears as remarkable is the responsiveness of the interface, the ease and convenience with which the dissection steps can be negotiated. One instrument replaces another almost magically, and they function together seamlessly. The user glides and clicks on the mouse as one dissection instrument is automatically replaced by another, and as labels hover over the dissected animal’s body—to be recorded in a notepad with a mere mouse-click. 5. Computer Use as a Relational Strategy The ease with which the user can exchange one tool for another in the online dissection can be seen as a significant pedagogical advantage, as a convenient, carefully-integrated set of interactional possibilities or affordances that allow the student to focus on the anatomy of the frog rather than on the mechanics of the dissection tools. However, it is worth reflecting briefly on precisely what is asked of the student when she engages with different tools in the classroom dissection, and similarly, what is required in engaging with the screen, keyboard and mouse in the simulation. According to Robert Rosenberger, engagement with different kinds of offline tools involves the adoption of what he refers to as different “relational strategies” (2009). To engage with a particular technology, Rosenberger explains, is to “embody” that technology in particular ways. Referring specifically to the example of using a magnifying glass, Rosenberger writes:


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To embody a technology, one…must comport one’s body in a certain manner. I use the term relational strategy to refer to the particular configuration of bodily habits, intentions, and conceptions that make it possible for a person to take up a particular stable relation [with a given technology]. For example, for a person to use a magnifying glass to enlarge text on a page, she or he must possess a particular relational strategy for embodying the device… This relational strategy involves certain conceptions of the magnifying glass, and certain bodily comportments and habits regarding its operation (emphasis in original, 2009, 176).

Just as the use of a magnifying glass to examine a specimen or to enlarge text on a page involves a particular strategy of positioning and aligning the given object, the body and the eye, the use of scissors in dissection requires a rather different set of approaches for coordinating forces and movements applied through the fingers, hands and arms. Similarly, engagement with a computer involves its own kind of comportments and habits: the face of the reader/writer and that of the screen must meet or “interface” at a prescribed angle, almost as parallel planes. Additionally, to do anything more than reading or watching the screen, both hands must also be kept on or near the keyboard and mouse. The computer can be remarkably fixed and inflexible in its demands on the comportments and dispositions of those engaged with it. Even in portable or hand-held incarnations, engagement with the computer is generally both “hands-on” (with a keyboard or other interface) and “face-to-face” (with the screen).2 Writing on the topics of “new media” or “virtuality,” some have used the metaphorics of “imprisonment” to refer to the way that the computer confines its users to the specific relational strategy of screen, the mouse, keyboard and other devices. In The Virtual (2003), Rob Shields, for example, explains how this technology “both liberates and incarcerates” (p. 11); and in The Language of New Media (2001) Lev Manovich, speaks of “the imprisonment of the body” realized in using computer technology (p. 105). Physical maladies associated with extensive computer use provide a different kind of evidence for these charges of incarceration at the hands of the computer. From “Blackberry-” or “gamers’-thumb,” through “work-related upper limb disorder,” to “carpal-tunnel syndrome,” these maladies are known collectively as “repetitive strain” or “repetitive stress” injuries—highlighting the very “repetitive,” narrowly-defined nature of embodied engagement with computer technology. One significant historical precursor for the experience of the relational strategies represented by the fixed arrangement of keyboard and screen is provided by the technology of the typewriter. Writing in the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty describes this experience, simultaneously situating it in a discussion of habitual and embodied “knowledge:”

It is possible to know how to type without being able to say where the letters which make the words are to be found on the banks of keys... If [this kind of] habit is neither a form of knowledge nor an involuntary action, then what is it? It is a knowledge in the hands, which is forthcoming only when bodily effort is made, and cannot be formulated in detachment from that effort… When I sit at a typewriter, a motor space opens up beneath my hands, in which I am about to ‘play’ what I have read (2002, 166-167).

When we sit at a keyboard (and monitor), to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty, a space of action and of vision open up in front of our hands and eyes. This is a highly habitualized terrain, one that is intricately sub-divided in space and layered in time: Through hundreds of individual keystrokes, and acts of scrolling, clicking and dragging, this type of engagement seems similar to a process of weaving and reinforcing a complex web of habit, perhaps best described as a combination of many interconnected of relational strategies.


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The comportment or relational strategy required by a computer is different in (at least) one important way from those elicited by other tools and instruments such as pins, magnifying glasses or scissors: instead of allowing the individual to undertake one task each requiring different relational strategies (such as fastening, magnifying, or cutting) the computer allows users to undertake the widest range of tasks with one relational strategy. And in doing so, it requires only a single relational strategy. Cutting, magnifying, fastening and many other types of work can be all be accomplished while seated in front of a screen, with hands at (or near) the keyboard and mouse. Unlike the earlier description of working with and switching between the magnifying glass, the writing pad and other dissection instruments, working with the simulation does not involve a change in disposition or mode of operation. There is no particular “relational strategy” that might involve “bodily comportments and habits regarding [any one instrument’s] operation” as Rosenberger says. Instead, the various activities comprising the dissection are all exclusively associated with those facilities, dispositions and habits that are part of using a computer. These skills have no more obvious relation to the activity of dissection than they do to myriad other activities that can be undertaken using computers and networks like composing, browsing, clicking or dragging. And for someone who has mastered these generic interface skills, the online dissection can indeed seem remarkably seamlessness. Corresponding to the different relational strategies (or sets of these strategies) associated with each instrument in the dissection is a particular type of “care” or attention that each elicits. The online exercise instructs the student to take care to turn the scissors onto their side “to avoid cutting the heart under the ribs.” However, this particular instance of being “careful” and attentive involves a mere mouse-click. No one mouse click or keyboard stroke, of course, is necessarily more gently or skillfully executed than any other—at least as far as computer software is concerned. Further reducing the need for a particularly attuned care or caution is the fact that the simulation provides “back” or “undo” buttons or commands, allowing any one action to be immediately reversed. In fact, with the online dissection, there ultimately seems to be no chance of making an error with the incision or with any other part of the dissection activity overall. Taking “care” to avoid these types of errors is simply a matter of clicking and dragging in the ways and in the places that the simulation allows and points towards. In the classroom dissection, irreversible errors, of course, can be made, and things can go seriously wrong. As mentioned earlier, parts of the dissected body can be cut or removed incorrectly, rendering further steps in the dissection process impossible to perform. There are other aspects of the dissection that require special care: The razor-sharp scalpel can do damage to living, human flesh as easily as it can slice the body of the dissected animal. And gloves and goggles must be worn to protect students’ hands and eyes from the preservative chemicals which are also deadly poisons. Different acts of incision, probing and exploration require different levels and types of dexterity and facility. One act of incision or act of probing can indeed be very different from another, in its quality, its effectiveness and its care. And there is no way to simply undo a particular action or decision: In keeping with its natural origins, the body of the rat, pig or other animal cannot be the subject of any sort of “undo” command. It cannot be “refreshed,” “reset,” or “rebooted.” 6. The Virtual Dissection: Pliable, Discontinuous, Brilliant The experiential possibilities and limitations presented by simulated and in-school dissections may be further explored by looking specifically how theorists of technology have enumerated and described the qualities of “virtual” “hyperreal” and “microworld” objects and settings. For example, Rob Shields describes how such virtual objects and spaces


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have an elusive quality which comes from their status as being both nowhere and yet present via [technology]. …they also have duration but strictly speaking, neither history, nor a future. Of course there is a history of virtual spaces and of the technologies that make [them] possible… But inside a virtual space itself, there is only the immediacy of the scenario displayed (2003, 51).

Virtual objects, in other words, are not “worn out” or “used up;” they are not abandoned to decompose in a landfill. Unlike the formaldehyde-soaked carcass and organs of a dissected animal or a dulled scapel or pair of scissors, virtual objects do not have to be “disposed of” once they have outlived their usefulness. They can be endlessly minimized, closed, reopened and refreshed. In this sense, virtual objects can be said to occupy a kind of placeless space, to inhabit a kind of timeless present or “immediacy.” Augustin Araya uses the term “microworld objects” to describe other properties of these virtual things and spaces (1997). He characterizes simulated objects as lacking “certain kinds of functional and physical properties; for example,” he says, “they cannot malfunction nor break in the sense that real objects do.” Although these objects, like the computer technology on which they rely can freeze up or disappear from the screen, they generally cannot be “broken” or “mutilated” in ways that go beyond the preconceived limitations of software designers. In the online dissection, for example, the user is simply not allowed to cut or explore the frog carcass in the wrong way. The only type of malfunction or breakage that can occur is instead a completely different kind: the computer could lose power or the browser or the operating system can crash. In a critique of “hyperreality,” philosopher Albert Borgmann characterizes virtual contexts and objects as being (among other things) “pliable,” “brilliant,” “discontinuous and disposable” (1992, 87-102). Borgmann describes hyperreal objects as being pliable specifically in the sense that they can be “entirely subject[ed] to…desire and manipulation” (1992, 88). This pliability is perhaps most vividly illustrated in the online dissection in the ease with which the virtual frog can first be sliced open, its organs revealed, then inspected with a magnifying glass, and finally noted with pencil and paper. As mentioned earlier, no one tool or task in these activities requires a particular disposition comportment or effort that would differ from any other. Borgmann describes the discontinuous and disposable characteristics of hyperreal objects and environments specifically in terms of their relationship to their context:

To be disposable, hyperreality must be experientially discontinuous with its context. If it were deeply rooted in its setting, it would take a laborious and protracted effort to deracinate and replace it. Reality encumbers and confines (1992, 95-96).

The description of classroom dissection above is rife with examples of encumbrance and confinement: this begins with the persistent odor that is a part of the preserved animal’s “context,” and extends to the irreversible incisions that might render certain organs absent or unidentifiable. Neither the process nor the product of physical dissection lend themselves to discontinuity or disposability in the sense that Borgman associates with the hyperreal: the toxic remains of the dissection are also all too persistent, and present particular challenges for safety, cleansing, and disposal.3 By way of contrast, undo and redo options or buttons on the virtual dissection are not so much convenient features as they are intrinsic properties for this virtual world—a world in which an object can be refreshed, rebooted or shut down simply at will.


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Borgman describes the “hyperreal” quality of brilliance in terms of an “absence of noise” and a heightening of an object’s “attractive” features. The “truly brilliant reality,” Borgman says, “would exclude all unwanted information,” resulting in an experience in which only those aspects of explicit relevance are provided. In the online dissection, or nearly all encumbering physical and intercorporeal aspects of the activity are removed; what remains is indeed brilliant in Borgmann’s sense, from the X’s and dotted lines that appear in the places for fastening and incision to the appearance and disappearance of instruments, labels and other visual prompts. 7. Educational “Brilliance” The inclusion of “brilliant” features in virtual contexts—and the systematic exclusion of all forms of encumbrance and confinement—is remarkably consistent with the way that virtual instructional simulations are actually conceptualized and designed. The tasks and activities to be included in such a simulation are analyzed and selected in terms of how they might contribute to the attainment of specific educational objectives or learning outcomes. Those parts of the task or activity relevant to the educational objectives are included or even heightened in the design, and those elements that are deemed irrelevant or unnecessarily confining and encumbering are excluded. Such a selection of elements is considered as a part of “instructional design,” a field that works to “design… learning experiences” so as to maximize their instructional effectiveness and efficiency (Dede, Whitehouse, Brown-L’Bahy, 2002). Practitioners in this field sometimes reference a quasi-mathematical formula that captures the processes of inclusion and exclusion specifically from a design perspective. For example, Jacobs and Dempsey explain:

The supposition we make is that one only needs to simulate those events or characteristics that allow the learner to perform in a proficient manner when performing in the operational environment, i.e., the real world. This representation of the characteristics of simulation has been characterized by Gagné (1962), and later by Clariana in the following formula: Simulation = (Reality) - (Task irrelevant elements) (Jacobs & Dempsy, 1993, 200; Leemkuil et al., 2003, 93; Chandra & Sharma, 2004, 106).

A simulation, in other words, is a representation of the reality of a task or activity, with only those elements included and represented which are required for the attainment of predetermined learning outcomes, or predefined measures of learner proficiency. All other elements and components are to be be subtracted or eliminated in order to maximize instructional efficiency. As mentioned earlier, educational outcomes typically associated with dissection include “knowledge of [the animal’s] internal anatomy,” “skills and processes [for working with] primary data” (Scholl, 2007), and the “practice [and] understand[ing of] dissection [as] a method of scientific investigation” (Mondragon, 2005). It is precisely by eliminating those elements which do not explicitly or directly contribute to the attainment of these goals—and by including and heightening those elements that do—that the online dissection simulation is designed. Its design and operation instantiates this in a way that is very deliberate, rigorous and systematic. Using Borgmann’s terms, it excludes “noise” that would “encumber” and “confine”—from the persistence of the animal’s body to the insistence of the smells emanating from it. And it includes those features such as labels, pins, scissors and a magnifying glass only when their presence is instructionally and practically desirable. The end product, then, is one which is as “pliable” and accommodating of “discontinuity” and “disposability” as possible; it is as fully deracinated from


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any environment—laboratory or otherwise—as design will allow. In short, the simulation can be said to be “brilliant” in a way that is specifically instructional or educational. But does this completely capture and exhaust the pedagogical significance or value of the dissection activity? 8. Dissection: Interface, Encumbrance or Upheaval? To begin to answer this question and bring this paper to its conclusion, it is important to reflect specifically on the different origins of the objects or bodies being dissected. A virtual object typically develops, or rather, is developed on the computer screen through the actions and interactions of instructional, technical and graphical designers, and other experts. In this process, as already indicated, all aspects of the simulation are developed and coordinated according to specific, enumerated instructional objectives. The original development of the organic object dissected in the lab, of course, occurs very differently, taking place through “natural” processes of (re)generation rather than through specialized acts of production. It occurs not in a workplace or on a computer screen, but in the warm and wet darkness of a body. This can be the body of the animal itself, or the womb of its mother. This development, in other words, occurs through a kind of propagation and differentiation of elements of flesh and bone—through processes of gradual folding and unfolding, shaping and reshaping of proliferating, living matter. Of course, this process does not revolve around explicit, educational objectives, but occurs for its own “reasons” (if they can be called that). To summarize, the virtual object is designed by someone for explicit human (educational) purposes, whereas its physical counterpart develops on its own for purposes that are (at best) implicit and are not directly reducible to instructional human ends. As something developed by experts for explicit, human ends, the simulation exercise differs in other ways from the in-school dissection. Like any other piece of software, students engage with the simulation via an “interface.” This refers to the means by which the various components and tools of the simulation are accessed and manipulated. A quick look at the language used in the literature of interface design reveals some interesting patterns related to phenomenology. This vocabulary includes words such as “seamlessness,” “transparency,” “translucency,” “playability,” “learnability,” “flow” and “intuitiveness”—all of which designate desirable design attributes for interfaces (e.g., see: usabilityfirst, 2010). This vocabulary makes it clear that one of the goals of interface design is a kind of comfortable certainty and familiarity. And this type of experience, moreover, is clearly resonant with the kinds of terms Husserl uses to describe intentionality. Intentionality, as mentioned at the outset, refers to the everyday purposes, plans and categories that connect us with the world around us. It renders this reality familiar, enabling us, as Husserl says, to “live in certainty of the world,” and in this sense sustain the everyday, commonsense “natural attitude.” Terms such as seamlessness, transparency and flow all suggest that the person engaged with an interface or a computer (whether working or playing) should be able to become familiar with its features and functions in a manner that is easy or “intuitive.” The smooth operation of and interaction with the interface is thus rendered clear or “translucent.” Further, the interface is then also able to provide a virtual domain in which an individual is able to operate in an uninterrupted, intentionally-directed “flow”—a flow that is said to represent a deliberately maximized or “optimal experience” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). Computers and particularly their interfaces, in other words, are designed to anticipate and facilitate what we want to do, when we want to do it. In the dissection exercise, as a very simple example, scissors appear precisely when an incision is required, and a magnifying glass takes their place when closer inspection is needed. This smoothly flowing motion from one tool to another is intended to provide students with an experience of uninterrupted transparency and seamlessness: a sustained but prereflective assurance of “living-in-certainty-of-the-world.”4


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Attempts to simulate experience of encumbrance and inconvenience on the computer highlight further important differences that separate online dissection from that undertaken in school: In particular, and as already indicated above, each involves rather different experiences of care. The warning in the frog dissection simulation to carefully “twist the scissors to avoid cutting the heart under the ribs” is a simple, specific example. What the simulation actually requires at this point is a mouse-click that is no different—no more “careful” or skillful—than any other. To simulate this type of care, and the encumbrance and confinement that it presupposes, is to work against the very logic, design and purposes of the computer and its interfaces. Attempts to simulate encumbrance, and confinement—and other experiences like deprivation or deprival5—end up being experienced as either trivial or futile. They are seen as arbitrary or unnecessary irritations, rather than as challenges inherent to the task itself. If a more significant disruption takes place in the online dissection—a browser or operating system crash, for example—such a disruption would not be proper to or draw attention to the dissection exercise. It would instead draw the student’s attention to the computer or the simulation software, and perhaps also to the artificial nature of the simulation itself. In this sense, the simulated dissection can be said to confront the student not with something different, other or unusual, but with an interface and mode of engagement that is likely all too familiar in a media-saturated lifeworld. The simulated dissection is unavoidably presented in a way that is carefully designed to reinforce rather than undermine the natural attitude or Husserl’s sense of living “in-certainty-of-the-world.” In other words, the “intentional threads” that Merleau-Ponty says always connect us with the world around us are in this case taut or very tightly drawn –with no excess available to encourage awareness of self or of one’s epistemological situation. If the simulation can thus be said to confront the student with more of the self-same and familiar, then the classroom dissection can be described as presenting him or her with that which is not the self, with that which is “other.” It is a situation in which the intentional threads are slackened, and as a result, they are readily brought to our notice. The “other” according to phenomenologist Bernard Waldenfels is something that is manifest as a kind of disruption of the self, its world, its plans and intentions. Waldenfels goes so far as to describe it as an “upheaval,” and he adds: “As far as such upheavals are concerned, one can only yield to them or withdraw from them” (2007, 30). One could say that this choice between yielding and withdrawing captures the situation faced by the students in the in-school dissection exercise. The purpose of drawing distinctions between the virtual and the “real” in this way is not to enter the fray of arguments directly for or against animal dissection. Instead, I am attempting to broaden the factors or criteria considered in such arguments—and in doing so, to say something about the nature of pedagogy and pedagogical experience. Like all experience, pedagogical experience is about an encounter between self and world. This experience can have the character of an upheaval or disruption, or it can be planned and optimized in advance, down to the finest detail. Both of these types of experience—experiences of inconvenience, encumbrance, or disruption and of familiarity, pliability, flow, and brilliance—are important in education. For example, the attribute of “brilliance” that Borgmann ascribes to the hyperreal can be seen as being of significant pedagogical value (as the above reference to “educational brilliance” already suggests): The elimination of irrelevance or noise, and the foregrounding of that which is relevant or important is—with good reason—an indispensible part of lesson planning and instructional design processes. In many contexts, “educational brilliance” and the associated phenomena of flow, transparency and learnability makes sense as a pedagogical goal. But we should not conclude from this that such experiences represent the sum total of what is desirable for education. Opacity, disruption and upheaval—rather than always requiring withdrawal or protection—need to be studied and cultivated as educational experiences. Experiences that are emphatically embodied, mediated affectively and viscerally, are intrinsic to what it is to know, to


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judge, to sense, to learn and to educate. At the same time, it is evident that these experiential elements cannot always be captured or engaged through systematic categorization and planning. By definition, disruption and upheaval are mutually exclusive to processes of systematic planning—and run against the grain of the interfaces through which planned instruction is increasingly delivered. Opacity, encumbrance and disruption—with the unfamiliarity and uncertainty they imply—are instead disclosed only through a slackening of the figurative threads of intention, categorization and planning. As a rigorous means through which these threads can be loosened and the grip of intentionality relaxed, phenomenology takes valuable first steps in bringing this experiential realm into focus. References Araya, A. A. (1997). "Experiencing the World Through Interactive Learning Environments." Techné:

Journal of the Society for Philosophy and Technology. 3(2). http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/SPT/v3n2/ARAYA.html

Barnacle, R. (2009). "Gut Instinct: The Body and Learning." Educational Philosophy and Theory. 41(1): 22-33.

Barr, G., & H. A. Herzog. (2000). "Fetal Pig: The High School Dissection Experience." Society & Animals. 8(1): 53- 69.

Borgman, A. (1992). Crossing the Postmodern Divide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chandra, S.S., & R. K. Sharma. (2004). Sociology of Education. New Dehli: Atlantic Publishers. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row. Dede, C., P. Whitehouse, & T. Brown-L’Bahy. (2002). "Designing and Studying Learning Experiences that Use

Multiple Interactive Media to Bridge Distance and Time," In Current Perspectives on Applied Information Technologies, Vol. 1: Distance Education, C. Vrasid & G. Glass (eds.). Greenwich, CT: Information Age Press, 1-30.

Froguts.com. 2003. Froguts, http://froguts.com/ Froguts.com 2009. Froguts, http://froguts.com/flash_content/index.html Gagné, R. M. (1962). Psychological Principles in System Development. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston. Hassler, F. (2000). Student Choice for Dissection Alternatives, Experience Notebook.

http://www.dissectionchoice.org/notebook.html Haury, D. L. (1996). Alternatives to Animal Dissection in School Science Classes (Report No. EDO-SE-96-08),

Columbus, OH: Clearinghouse for Science Mathematics and Environmental Education (ERIC Document Reproduction ServiceNo.ED402155), http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/contentdelivery/servlet/ERICServlet?accno=ED402155

Hein, S.F., & W. J. Austin. (2001). "Empirical and Hermeneutic Approaches to Phenomenological Research in Psychology: A Comparison." Psychological Methods. 6: 3–17.

Husserl, E. (1970). Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Husserl, E. (1983). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. New York: Springer.

Jacobs, J. W., & J. V. Dempsey. (1993). "Simulation and Gaming: Fidelity, Feedback, and Motivation." In: Interactive Instruction and Feedback, J. V. Dempsey, & G. C. Sales (eds.). Englewood Hills, NJ: Educational Technology Publications, 197-227.

Johnson, D. (1997). “Frogs’ Best Friends: Students who won’t Dissect them.” New York Times, May 29. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D00E5DF123AF93AA15756C0A961958260.

Jordan School District. (2004). “4th Quarter Biology Project ‘Pig Dissection.’” http://edublog.sedck12.org/media/blogs/UTIPS/BioPT_C.doc

Leder, D. (1990). The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Leemkuil, H., T. de Jong, R. de, Hoog, & N. Christoph. (2003). "KM Quest: A Collaborative Internet-based Simulation

Game." Simulation & Gaming. 34: 89-111 Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge & Paul. Mondragon, J. (2005). Jordan School District Amphibian Curriculum: Frog Anatomy.

http://www.sf.adfg.state.ak.us/Static/Region1/amphib/PDFs/student.pdf OED [Oxford English Dictionary]. (2007). Oxford: Oxford UP. http://www.oed.com/ Rosenberger, R. (2009). "The Sudden Experience of the Computer." AI & Society: Knowledge, Culture, and

Communication. 24: 173–180. Sackville High School. (2008). Specific Curriculum Outcomes: Oceans [Grade] 11.

http://www.sackville.ednet.ns.ca/CurriculumDocuments/SCOFilesScience/OCE11SCO.pdf Scholl, C. (2007). General Template Rat Dissection Years 11-12.


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http://education.qld.gov.au/curriculum/area/science/docs/temp-rat11-12.doc Shields, R. (2003). The Virtual. London: Routledge. Smith, P. L., & T. J. Ragan. (1993). Instructional Design. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc. Solot, D. & A. Arluke. (1997). "Learning the Scientist's Role: Animal Dissection in Middle School." Journal of

Contemporary Ethnography. 26: 28-54. Texley, J. (2009). Educator Testimonials. http://www.animalearn.org/eduCntrTestimonials.php Texley, J. (1992). “Doing without Dissection.” American School Board Journal. 179(1): 24-26. Usabilityfirst. (2010). Usability Glossary. http://www.usabilityfirst.com/glossary/main.cgi Van Manen, M. (1997). Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy, 2nd ed.

London, ON: Althouse Press. Waldenfels, B. (2007). The Question of the Other. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong. Notes 1. This diagram and the multipart description for froguts.com combine characteristics of two versions of the online dissection simulation: one version was openly available in 2002-2003, and a second “demo” version was accessed 2008-2009. The descriptions of student experience of the simulation are developed from the author’s own engagement with the software during the two aforementioned time-frames (2002-2003 and 2008-2009). 2. Some exceptions are presented by adaptive and speech recognition interfaces, many of which allow differently-abled users to engage in a range of relational strategies. 3. At the same time, it is important to note that the animal in this dissection has itself been deracinated or uprooted from its own context—natural or otherwise. However, for this radical de-contextualizing to have been successful, a laborious and protracted effort is required: the animal’s body has to be drained of its natural fluids, and these have to be replaced with strong preservatives; the body needs to be kept in a sealed container, and once the dissection has begun, further steps need to be taken for its preservation. 4. Indeed, as one phenomenological study (Leder, 1990) shows, the world of our own internal organs is generally experienced in either a manner that is shadowy and indirect, or in extreme emergencies, where our experience of them is essentially life-threatening in its danger and immediacy. This represents a new “context” from which this carcass now cannot easily be deracinated. 5. An example of other experiences difficult (if not impossible) to simulate is provided in Marc Prensky’s essay on “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants.” In it, he encourages the development of simulations for all types of curricula, even for subjects as problematic as the holocaust: “Create a simulation where students role-play the meeting at Wannsee, or one where they can experience the true horror of the camps” (2001, 6). The inability of simulations to render deprivation, encumbrance and confinement—along with experiences of risk and care—would clearly standing in the way of approximating the “true horror” of the camps.

Techné 15:3 Fall 2011 Borgmann, Response to Friesen…

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Response to Norm Friesen

Albert Borgmann University of Montana

Abstract Friesen has presented an articulate and detailed account of the injuries of virtualized education and a convincing brief for the value of education that is face-to-face and engaged with tangible reality. Keywords: Virtualized education, ambiguity of technology, ambiguity of reform, engagement with reality. Norm Friesen has written an exemplary paper—well-crafted, diligent, and substantial. There is at last some dismay in the national conversation of the United States about the distracting and shallowing effects of information technology. But that dismay is in part based on impressions and in part on survey data. Impressions can be valuable clues, and social science data are needed to test and undergird philosophical analysis. But that’s not enough. Impressions by themselves are fuzzy, and survey results alone are colorless. What Friesen has produced is a description of the effect of information technology that is articulate and colorful. It rests solidly on a thorough examination of what happens in classrooms, and it turns on a case that is striking in its contrast of actual and virtual reality. Some of Friesen’s theoretical substructure is less helpful than it might have been though its deficiencies did not do any damage to the substance of his paper. Husserl’s conception of intentionality became increasingly abstract as his phenomenology became transcendental. The “Crisis” essay was in part a return to concreteness, but that turn did not pivot on Husserl’s intentionality. Hubert Dreyfus’s conception of practice would provide much more congenial support for Friesen’s concerns. But in the main, I want to build on Friesen’s paper and use it as a basis for a discussion of an ambiguity that haunts the current dismay about information technology and in fact about technology more generally. It’s an ambiguity that is constantly in danger of being resolved in the wrong way and thus to allay the current distress in an equally distressing way. One of the things that are so helpful in Friesen’s paper is his demonstration that the use of information technology in the case of dissection is itself ambiguous. There is the loss of engagement in virtual dissection, so memorably described by Friesen, but then there is also the gain of not having to kill a lot of animals and of not offending the real and honorable sensibilities of pupils. This two-sidedness alerts us to the need to avoid summary appraisals of information technology and to recognize both that there are clear cases on either side of the divide that virtual dissection straddles and that judgments become more difficult the nearer to the divide a particular phenomenon is located. Of course, no matter how far down on the virtual slope of distraction and wasted time a cultural phenomenon may be found—twittering, texting, friending, video gaming—there will be intrepid defenders who claim that the region in question is in fact hospitable to social interaction and mental improvement. But there is now wide-spread doubt and countervailing evidence and, most


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important, a growing hunger for reality, for the commanding presence of the surprising, and unfathomable things and events that Friesen describes so well. In the wider reaches of this hopeful development you find appreciation for the irreplaceable value of face-to-face instruction, a call to return to real or actual food, and the advocacy of walkable urban environments. In education, there are moreover demands to enforce rigorous teaching to ambitious standards. The disturbing ambiguity that settles on these laudable tendencies becomes visible when reformers feel called upon to explain or defend these proposals. Why should we do all these things? The answers most often resort to health or sustainability—the health of persons, the health of the economy, the health of the planet. In these justifications a gap between means and ends begins to open up—reforms are the means, health is the end. To begin with education, we need to reform it to be able to compete and to restore health to our economy. Eating real food makes you healthy, and shortening the food miles slows the ailments of the planet. Walking to the store, the courthouse, or the post office is good for cardiovascular health. But once reforms are defended as instruments, they are entered into competition with the paradigmatic instrument of today, the machinery of technology, and whether they will always prevail is an open question. What’s worse is the gauzy end that remains unchallenged by the prominence of the means. The end, the goal, the purpose of it all? Isn’t that obvious? It’s prosperity when people have good jobs and can afford the good things in life, a nice house with a three-car garage, a big family room with a large plasma screen, . . . My suggestion is that behind the reform of wholesome means there lurks the unwholesome life of consumption. It’s a disparity that lines up well with the division between real and virtual dissection that Friesen has marked so incisively. Friesen concludes his article with a determined rejection of instrumentalized education—a commendable move. But here is a second instance where the philosophical support he has used has not served him as well as it might have. To reject the conventional instrumental view of education that is so easily commandeered by technology is a good thing, but rejection can mean rebellion or replacement. Rebellion in the name of disruption and upheaval may be a helpful beginning, but it is not enough, and it is less than that if it is extended to the teachers, the pupils, and the parents as a choice between yielding or withdrawing. What’s needed is an invitation to a richer alternative that can take the place of instrumentalized and virtualized education. Education, childhood, and adolescence are no doubt instrumental and preparatory with a view to adulthood and maturity. But they are more than that; they are also final in harboring times and stages of our lives that are captivating and memorable in their own right, full of charms and pains that provide a backdrop for the rest of our lives. What Friesen shows so impressively is that to virtualize education is to flatten and impoverish the depth and wealth of education. His description of real dissection is best understood as an invitation to a life that is engaging, invigorating, and profoundly enriching. It’s a lesson of wide and urgent significance.

Techné 15:3 Fall 2011 Ihde, Dissection and Simulation…

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Dissection and Simulation: A Postphenomenological Critique

Don Ihde Stony Brook University

Abstract In the lead article dissection is juxtaposed to simulation, but the problem is the example set on both sides is antiquated. I argue that a dynamic set of imaging technologies uses as in science documentaries is far superior to either the the 18th-19th century notions of biological education illustrated is what is needed. Keywords: dissection, simulation, instrumental phenomenological variations. A postphenomenological critique of both dissection and simulation draws, on the one hand, from ‘science studies’ and on the other ‘philosophy of technology.’ Science studies raises the question: what practices are used to produce scientific knowledge? And the philosophy of technology in turn raises an analysis of what technologies are used to produce this scientific knowledge? From both perspectives, it is also recognized that science practices, involving technologies, must first transform natural objects into scientific objects. And this transformation applies equally to both dissection and simulation. Unfortunately, in the cases examined in the leading article, both dissections and simulations describe and deal with practices which are highly limited and out-of-date.

In the pedagogical dissection practices described, appealing both to secondary school student responses and to parental memories, the high school labs included use specimens which are dead and chemically preserved with formaldehyde, and with smells, secretions and odors from a decaying specimen. No wonder the practice is perceived as distasteful. As indicated, such a model for dissection is quite old, indeed, I would claim this dissection model is at least an 18th or 19th century model of biological knowledge based upon necessarily ‘dead’ objects. Older philosophy of biology recognized that part of the transformation from a natural to a scientific object included the passage from life to death. What is learned is a set of identities of organs—heart, liver, kidneys, etc.—as related to relative positions, shapes and appearances. This is how the frog or other specimen is transformed into a scientific or anatomical object. This does produce a limited type of scientific knowledge, but it is a statics limited to dead objects and which objects are usually considered distasteful to contemporary students. And even insofar as the function of organs is concerned, this is not derived from the dissection, but from the added—usually verbal or textual—commentary. (I, myself, deplore the waste of specimens in the hundreds of thousands in the large laboratories which still practice the outdated statics model in secondary schools.) Unfortunately, the simulation version of an online dissection is likewise modeled upon a rather poor virtual imitation of a dissection. It is cast in something of an entertainment mode with music or dialogue, in a set of simulation movements which entail mouse clicks or keystrokes which are nothing like the embodiment moves of classical dissection—the dissector is instructed not to cut into the heart which is under chest cavities, not by skillfully utilizing hand motions, but by self-consciously making the right ‘click.’ Moreover, whereas the smells and liquids are now gone, the model remains limited to a virtual statics depiction. In this sense the simulation is an impoverished virtual statics.


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Now, without denying that knowledge from a death based statics does provide some narrow kind of scientific knowledge, today’s biological knowledge demands much, much more and focuses much more primarily upon a dynamics. How does the circulation system work, the nervous system work, digestion, or even the living dynamics of frogs catching prey or behave in other life situations? In these cases the scientific knowledge produced is often produced through contemporary imaging technologies. I shall only selectively point to internal and external variants of these instruments. Today’s internal imaging relies upon micropscopic and laproscopic devices. For illustration here, I shall use my own experience of imaging technologies instead of high school biology examples. Colonoscopies entail a narrow tube device which has lighting, a wire-loop to remove polyps, and a full color display screen to show the inner surfaces of the intestine. The enterologist and (before the practice of anesthesia) the patient can see in full glowing color the intestinal interior. Similarly, in angioplasty the cardiologist (and the patient, who in this case must remain awake) can locate the obstruction for either balloon clearance or stent insertion. In the consultation process prior to my own heart surgery, the surgeon utilized a multi-screen display which showed what parts of the mitral valve needed repair, etc. The only device I myself missed using, was a pill sized camera which can be swallowed and which takes images all along the esophagus, stomach and intestinal track. Today I have a library of DVDs of “my case.” Now, while I have used autobiographical experience, these same devices can be used on living animals to produce dynamic physiological, neurological, and other knowledges. Moreover, the specimens remain alive. And, one can add an enormous other set of internal imaging processes such as MRI, fMRI, PET, CT, scaning devices. Granted, all these processes are expensive and high school labs cannot each have their own devices. But like me with my collection of “my case” DVDs, each high school lab can have high resolution imaging which produces the displays needed. Much can even be found on the internet and most without charge. Let us now switch to external imaging: example, a frog catching insect prey. Any ‘nature’ documentary can use high speed photography to depict a bullfrog, with speed too fast for human vision, to snag a fly or other flying insect with its rapid tongue motion. Or, even faster photography can show the flight trajectory of a humming bird as it does a courting display of dive-and-pullout for a watching female. And, as with the internal imaging, external imaging can depict the dynamics of courting, hunting, or other behaviors of living animals and DVDs are doubtless stored in high school libraries for classroom display. This is a different, imaging, transformation of what could be seen in naked eye compared to magnified and speed imaging, another variant upon nature-to-science object. My first point here is that today’s biology education, as with today’s scientific practices, takes up a wide set of variant instrumentally mediated perspectives, each producing different ranges of knowledges, which synthesized produces a much richer and robust result than the limited dissection/simulation example given. My next point continues the analysis of human-instrument interactivity, but this time in terms of a learning of embodied skills. To be sure, in both the antiquated dissection process and the virtual simulation process the student can learn skills—how to use the dissection knife, how to use the mouse and keys. But again these are narrow skills compared to the varieties of embodiment today available. For the moment switch to imagining the hi-tech skills which are contemporarily being used: my examples are robotic surgery and robotic military skills. The above angioplasty procedure is a common and simple example of robotic surgery. The surgeon manipulates a pair of “joystick-like” devices which eye-hand coordinating with the multiscreens showing the interior of the artery. This is what is frequently called “Nintendo surgery” because its model base—and skill


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design is more like that of computer games than traditional surgery. Only certain individuals can attain high skills with this new style of embodiment. Similarly, military robotics—say the piloting of a Predator surveillance aircraft in Afganistan, managed from a base in Nevada by a skilled operator sitting before a screen and again manipulating “joystick-like” controls , steers the craft over the targets predetermined. Here eye-hand coordination is focal, but it also is a form of embodiment which retains a number of analogue features with respect to intuitive or learned intuitive movements. It is very unlike the click which instructs the simulation dissector to avoid damaging the heart. Rather, the robotic, embodiment at a distance motions are part of contemporary science skills. This includes the time-space delay problems that controllers of the Mars Explorer encounter. Both embodiment skills and instrumental phenomenological variations would, in my opinion, enrich both the range and richness of secondary biological education. On my part, I was disappointed that Jennifer Graham, who suggested an imaginative alternative to the dissection example, was not granted producing a different slice of biological knowledge.

Techné 15:3 Fall 2011 Sørensen, Comment on Friesen…

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Comment on Norm Friesen’s: “Dissection and Simulation: Brilliance and Transparency, or Encumbrance and Disruption?”

Estrid Sørensen

Ruhr-University Bochum Abstract Friesen's comparison between classroom practices and digital dissection carries the flaws of treating the digital and non-digital learning materials differently when comparing. This reply paper argues for a symmetric comparison through a focus on the way in which comparability between digital and non-digital learning materials is established by the researcher. It is suggested that such comparison might have brought about a result more favorable for digital technology. Keywords: comparability, Bruno Latour, learning-materials, digital materiality, symmetry principle Comparing different media is important in order to gain an understanding of their specificities; what they do to our lives, to our ways of interacting, to our thoughts, feelings and bodily engagements. As any researcher engaging in comparison is aware, this endeavor often requires considerable intervention in shaping the objects of comparison to make them comparable. Comparability has to be created (Niewöhner & Scheffer, 2010; Sørensen, 2008). Creating comparability between digital media, tools and practices with their non-digital counterparts confronts us with particular difficulties: on the one hand, we have objects that are familiar, well-integrated in particular practices, and which to a greater or lesser degree are ‘domesticated’ (Smits, 2006). On the other, we have objects that are new and even foreign or strange, that do not fit well with habitual practices, but rather irritate these, requiring practitioners to change their ways of going about things, often as well requiring an adjustment in social relationships. In his paper Norm Friesen takes upon himself the task of comparing two objects which are different along these lines: classroom dissection and a digital simulation of dissection. As is unfortunately quite common when scholars compare digital and non-digital media, Friesen does not reflect on the way in which he creates comparability in his study. For this reason, and because I think a more symmetric comparison would have led to quite different conclusions, this will be the focus of my comment. Friesen starts out by describing the rich practices unfolding in classroom dissections. Based on interviews, the analysis provides much more than just insight into what is done during dissection. We get to know how children experience dissection, how several of their senses are activated, how they, in their struggle to cope with this emotionally and morally provoking experience make jokes, name dead animals, focus on limited body parts and bracket out the ‘whole animal’, etc. Through interview excerpts a sense of the particular personal investments in the classroom activities is conveyed. The dissection simulation is described solely on the basis of imagined generalized ‘users’’ engagement with the program. There is no reference in the paper to which ‘users’ were studied. However, regardless of who and how many were actually involved, alone the different textual depiction of, on the one hand, anonymous ‘users’ and on the other, specific children with personal utterances transports an impression of the simulation as sterile and “brilliant,” and of the classroom dissection as creatively and emotionally complex. Would it have been possible to convey a similar impression of the simulation if we were indeed confronted with transcripts of


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sounds of disgust children might have expressed while cutting and pinning the frog in the simulation? My experience with children’s use of digital programs tells me that it is very unlikely that they would go through the operations of the program in the rational and emotionally disengaged way in which Friesen describes the simulation: cutting the frog’s skin, securing body parts with pins, identifying organs, etc. These operations, presented in the account of the dissection simulation, are in my reading a discussion of instruction, while the account of the rich social practices of the classroom dissection reports for learning. Since Lave and Wenger’s (Lave & Wenger, 1991) seminal book on learning as participation, scholars of learning theory have been careful not to confuse the perspective of the instructor with the learners’ perspective. When indeed compared as if instruction and learning were similar activities something interesting happens to the way the involved learning materials are portrayed. Because learning is a process involving active learners participating in specific ways in the classroom, the technologies or tools applied—scissors, scalpel, pins, etc.—come to be depicted in Friesen’s example as of marginal relevance to the activity, as passive and in the power of their active, participating human users. When instruction is accounted for, and especially when no human teacher is involved but it is the technology that is described as teaching, as is the case in Friesen’s discussion of the dissection simulation, the technology is granted much more agency, disregarding the ways in which learners might actively engage in different ways with this technology. The asymmetric account of one situation as learning and the other as teaching leads to an asymmetry in the agency granted to the learning materials involved. What happens if we conceive of the dissection simulation as a learning situation involving active participating children? As I worked through the demo version of the froguts.com dissection simulation I tried to imagine how the 4th grade children involved in my own research would have reacted. I heard their “ugh,” “phew,” “yech” in my inner ear expressing their emotional reactions. But more important are the kinds of stories that I know from my computer lab studies that children share in front of the monitor. These stories would most likely paint a much ‘bloodier’ and ‘dirtier’ (and ‘noisier’ to use Friesen’s vocabulary) picture of the dissection activity than what you get from a disinterested account of what is displayed on the screen. When doing empirical research with children using computer programs it becomes evident that there are no such things as “hyperreal” “microworlds” without histories and futures, without place and intimacy. As a researcher for over a year of children and their activities with computers and virtual worlds in the computer lab of a Danish local school I have come to learn a lot about their social relations, experiences and dreams, sorrows and joys. The children were present in flesh and blood, and through their activities with the computers and stories around them, they came to relate a great variety of facets of their lives to the digital technology. Digital technology is always embedded in rich social practice. Especially in school, where they usually engage with computers in larger groups, children share their digital experiences while having them. Just as Friesen shows is the case in the classroom dissection, working with digital programs in school is most often a social activity for children. Accordingly, it is our task as social researchers to describe the rich social activities unfolding, just as Friesen has done in his discussion of the classroom dissection. To most social scientists it would have been obviously reductive had he described the activity as a matter of simple operations such as “cutting the skin,” “pinning the body parts,” and “removing the organs.” That it is still acceptable in the social sciences to present such accounts when it comes to analyses of digital media can probably be explained by a nostalgic and modern bias distinguishing what Heidegger calls “things” (such as scissors, knives or scalpels, and pins) from “objects” (such as machines, computers, and digital simulations) (Heidegger, 1982). As Latour explains, this bias is


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fundamental to our understanding of what counts as social, human and ‘good’ and what is regarded technical, alienating and ‘bad’ (Latour, 2004). This position is unfortunate, as it makes it difficult to investigate what kinds of sociality, emotionality and indeed reality actually unfold in our contemporary technicized world. We end up evaluating digital media on the basis of criteria given by non-digital ones, and accordingly we necessarily come to depict the former as a deficit version of the latter. This said, I want to close my comment by emphasizing the importance of Friesen’s endeavor of investigating what kinds of bodily and sensory engagements are involved in using digital media, such as a dissection simulation. I think this can very well be done by contrasting it to non-digital dissection, only such a comparison must be symmetric. In my comparison of traditional learning materials such as text books, blackboard, pen and paper etc. with a virtual environment in a school setting, I constructed comparability between the two by investigating in both settings how children, teachers and materials got mutually involved with each other, as well as what knowledge was constituted and what ways of being present these different involvements lead to (Sørensen, 2009). The children I observed were clearly bodily active—with much more than their hands, as Friesen describes. They rarely sat passively on their chairs while working on a computer. So, rather than asking how much bodily and sensory activity is involved, we should inquire how and which senses, and how the body becomes active when doing digital dissection. We should do just the same with digital simulation that Friesen does with classroom dissection. We should create comparability symmetrically. References Heidegger, M. (1982). The Question Concerning Technology: and Other Essays. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Latour, B. (2004). “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam: From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical

Inquiry. 30(2), 225–248. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Learning in Doing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Niewöhner, J., & T. Scheffer. (2010). “Introduction – Thickening Comparison: On the Multiple Facets of

Comparability.” In International studies in sociology and social anthropology: Vol. 114. Thick comparison. Reviving the ethnographic aspiration, T. Scheffer & J. Niewöhner (eds.).Leiden: Brill, 1–16.

Smits, M. (2006). “Taming Monsters: The Cultural Domestication of New Technology.” Technology in Society. 28, 489–504. Sørensen, E. (2008). “Multi-Sited Comparison of ‘Doing Regulation.’” Comparative Sociology. 7(3). Sørensen, E. (2009). The Materiality of Learning: Technology and Knowledge in Educational Practice. Learning in doing. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Techné 15:3 Fall 2011 Barney, Gut Feelings: Response to Friesen…

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Gut Feelings: A Response to Norm Friesen’s “Dissection and Simulation”

Darin Barney

McGill University Abstract This response considers how Friesen’s account of simulation helps us to think through the situation of politics under technological conditions. The alleviation of material and corporeal risks entailed in simulated dissection is compared to the manner in which emerging media technologies facilitate experiences of political participation that are evacuated of the burdens of engagement. This dynamic is finally attributed not to digital mediation itself, but to its operation under the sign of simulation. Keywords: simulation; politics; digital media; virtuality “It’s disgusting!” (quickly followed by “It’s cool!”). Thus declared my children, ages 9 and 12, upon having been enlisted into an impromptu experimental trial with the froguts.com online dissection simulation. Neither of them had ever dissected an animal before. It was striking how precisely their reactions to the simulation followed the affective trajectory from repulsion to fascination that Norm Friesen assigns to actual dissections of an animal’s preserved body in a classroom. What struck me most was how quickly it was all over. With the intuitive point-and-click virtuosity characteristic of their peers, it took the kids less than two minutes to complete the exercise of “eviscerating” the avatar (Can one eviscerate something that is bereft of viscera? What, exactly, were they doing to that thing?). The impression, I suspect, was superficial. Around the dinner table that night there was little talk of the operation that had taken place earlier that afternoon. It is nearly impossible to imagine that the same would have been true had they actually sunk a blade into some pickled creature’s flesh and peeled back its skin to reveal its innards for the first time. I think it is safe to assume this would have been a spontaneous and irrepressible topic of conversation, even as we passed the pork chops. As Friesen avers, nobody forgets the first cut. For all the reasons he lists under the auspices of the “sensually intensive encounter” that is a dissection—the shock of seeing the pale carcass; the agony and pleasure of the sound and feel of the inaugural incision; the gurgle and smell of the brine; the morbid curiosity satisfied only by probing the cavity; the strange identification with vital systems unexpectedly similar to our own; the nagging fear that, even though the thing is already dead, one wrong move could lead to serious trouble—the digital counterfeit could never be anything but impoverished and forgettable by comparison. Friesen’s arguments are so immediately convincing one wonders whether it was even necessary to make them. Surely—earnest school administrators aside—there is not a biologist alive who would deny that the pedagogical and experiential value of an actual dissection exceeds that of a simulation by many factors. And presumably none would contest that the superiority of the actual dissection accrues to precisely those qualities that Friesen assigns to the “transforming cut.” Simulation, they would likely say, is meant to supplement, not replace, actual dissection and, in its limited way, can contribute to the effective teaching of the biological arts. If fewer animals are raised for the sole purpose of becoming specimens, so much the better. Nobody is claiming that simulated and actual dissections are the same, or even equivalent. Surgeons will always need to be at least as good with a knife as they are with a mouse, and “turning off” certain kids to biology is arguably what compulsory exposure to actual dissection is really for: it separates those with a stomach for the trade from those who would be well-advised to take up another line.


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And so, perhaps Friesen’s careful illumination of the singular quality of actual dissection is just tilting at windmills…unless, of course, his arguments are not really about dissecting frogs at all, or at least not limited to this practice. By invoking Borgmann’s trenchant critique of hyperreality, Friesen signals that there might be more at stake here than a lost rite of passage. For Borgmann’s is not an account of this or that medium or tool but, rather, an indictment of contemporary technological experience as a whole, of which Friesen here presents simulated dissection as one particularly evocative example. This suggests the possibility that Friesen’s insights into the implications of normalized simulation in biological education might be portable to other domains in which the ethos of simulation also finds technological support and extension. Elsewhere, I have written about how certain applications of emerging media technologies relieve us of the constitutive burdens of community and art (Barney, 2004; Barney, 2010). Here, I would like to explore whether Friesen’s account of simulated dissection might help us to think about the circumstances of politics under contemporary technological conditions. By politics I mean something that exceeds what we normally think of when we hear that word. Politics happens when it falls to us to make judgments and to act. When politics happens, the shape and operation of power is exposed, and questions are raised about justice and the good life, questions whose answers cannot be given in advance, questions whose very undecidability calls upon us to make judgments and to act. In other words, politics is an excruciating and even pathological situation, to which a range of qualities can be attributed. These include: that political judgment and action tend to arise in response to a fundamental wrong (usually some form of inequality or a structural exclusion); that they are experienced as imperatives rather than choices (the form of their expression is: "Faced with the circumstances before me, I cannot tolerate abstaining; I have no choice but to make a judgment and take action"); that they nevertheless unfold contingently, under conditions of undecidability (where the outcome of a judgment cannot be given in advance) and unpredictability (where the outcome of action arising from those judgments also cannot be given in advance); that they are burdensome and, in particular, carry the burden of organization and work; that, in their unfolding, they reconfigure the horizon of possibility and impossibility (they are not just about gaining equality or inclusion on present terms, but reconfiguring the very terms of inequality and exclusion); and that they are therefore, essentially disruptive. Politics is thus a rare and exceptional thing. This does not mean politics is necessarily revolutionary—just that it is exotic in the precise sense of that word: it belongs to another country, a country to come—and that very little of what we associate with politics today actually qualifies as political, except in the sense that liberal-democratic “politics” formalizes a particular order and distribution of power. Inoculation against the pathology of politics has arguably always been a primary function of “normal” politics: most of what goes for politics in liberal-democratic contexts comprises a habit aimed at containing the possibility of politics itself. As Jacques Rancière observes: “Politics is the art of suppressing the political… Depoliticization is the oldest task of politics, the one which achieves its fulfillment at the brink of its end, its perfection on the brink of the abyss” (2007, 11, 19). In his book Political Machines, Andrew Barry attributes depoliticization directly to the normal operation of what goes by the name of politics in contemporary liberal democracies: “…one of the key functions of established political institutions,” he writes, “is to place limits on the possibilities for dissensus and restriction and on the sites in which political contestation can occur. What we generally term politics thus always has something of an anti-political impulse” (2001, 207). The genius of liberal democracies is that containment of the possibility politics is accomplished not via coercion but rather by consensus. According to Rancière, we live in consensual times, with consensus referring not to an agreement between people but rather to a collective resignation to the sense that “what is, is all there is”


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(2010, x). He contrasts consensus with another way of being in the world, a way of being that “lays claim to one present against another and affirms that the visible, thinkable and possible can be described in many ways. This other way has a name. It is called politics.” The relationship between emerging media technologies and the possibility of politics is, then, ambiguous. On the one hand, digital networks and the applications and appliances attached to them have provided activists and dissidents with powerful tools they can use to disrupt prevailing horizons of consensus and to organize alternative possibilities, both in media contexts that are normatively liberal and those that are openly authoritarian (see, for example, Goldfarb, 2006, and Benkler, 2006). On the other hand, critics such as Jodi Dean point to the role these same technologies have played in bolstering the regime of “communicative capitalism” under which politics becomes conspicuous by its absence (2008; 2009). As Dean describes, taken by the fantasy of participation, “people believe that their contribution to circulating content is a kind of communicative action. They believe that they are active, maybe even making a difference simply by clicking on a button, adding their name to a petition, or commenting on a blog” (2008, 109). For Dean, this passivity masquerading as activity “prevents actual action, prevents something from really happening.” In this respect, emerging media technologies function as a kind of fetish that compensates for what we experience more deeply as a profound lack – they relieve the pain of our of passivity and disempowerment by helping us to feel and believe that we are being active when really we are not. In language that resonates with Friesen’s account of the narrow (and narrowing) priorities of educational interface design, Dean describes a dynamic of “condensation” whereby:

The complexities of politics—of organization, struggle, duration, decisiveness, division, representation, etc.—are condensed into one thing, one problem to be solved and one technological solution. So, the problem of democracy is that people aren’t informed; they don’t have the information they need to participate effectively. Bingo! Information technologies provide people with information (2008, 112).

In this account, the fantasy of participation and the fetishization of its current technologies displace energy and attention from the more demanding burdens of politics by satisfying its less demanding counterfeits with relative ease or—to use Friesen’s Borgmannian terminology—“brilliance.” Thus, emerging media technologies culminate in a dynamic of foreclosure, whereby the advanced coding of communicative “participation” as political effectively excludes or forecloses more demanding forms of political judgment and action before they have a chance to happen. As Dean observes: “the political purchase of the technological fetish is given in advance; it is immediate, presumed, understood. File-sharing is political. A Web site is political. Blogging is political. But this very immediacy rests on something else, a prior exclusion. And what is excluded is the possibility of politicization proper…Struggle, conflict and context vanish, immediately and magically” (2008, 114). Just like with the digital frog. As Friesen puts it, “In the simulated dissection, what appears as surprising and also amazing or impressive is the responsiveness of the interface, the ease and convenience with which the dissection steps can be negotiated” (this volume). For someone with a cause to promote or a grievance to air, nothing could be easier than starting (or joining) a Facebook group. However, just as dissecting an actual frog takes resolve, care, and skill, nothing about actual politics is convenient or easy. The online simulation described by Friesen is designed specifically to relieve the user of the existential and material burdens associated with the practice being simulated, while heightening those elements that gratify the user’s “certainty-of-the-world.” The brilliant simulation, “designed to anticipate and facilitate what we want to do, when we want to do it,” takes the edge off our encounter with alterity and culminates in an experience whereby


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the user “really only encounters herself.” Just as actual dissection exposes practitioners to a field of difference, resistance and difficulty (for, no matter how sharp the knife, the flesh still resists the initial cut), so too does actual politics expose us to differences that disrupt our certainties, thwart immediate gratification of our desire for convenience, and impose burdens of consideration, care, judgment and action that cannot be shed without draining the situation of its political character. In this light, the parallel between the demands of dissection and those of politics, and the consistency in how emerging technologies become available to alleviate these demands, are striking. As Friesen describes it, initiation into the moral universe of an actual dissection comprises “a profoundly uncomfortable or disquieting situation or experience,” one that “can be experienced in terms of a deeply felt disgust or repulsion,” an embodied, intercorporeal imperative (whether it is the imperative to stop, or to proceed) that one feels in her guts even before she articulates that gut feeling with “intellectual disquiet” or a “moral qualm.” Such experiences, Friesen says, interrupt our “living-in-certainty-of-the-world.” As I have suggested above, to be initiated into politics is also to be incorporated into an essentially disruptive situation in which the outcomes of the imperative of judgment and action cannot be calculated in advance. And, after decades of critical feminist thought that has rescued us from the masculinist prejudice which equates public action with rationality expressed in reasoned speech, it should no longer be controversial to associate political judgment and action with the gut feeling that injustice simply cannot be tolerated (see, for example Berlant, 1997, and Ahmed, 2004). Such gut feelings are provoked more readily by sensory apprehension of the situation than by intellection or persuasion. As Davide Panagia puts it: “Flavor—not speech—turns the mouth into an organ of political action” (2009, 3). It is when the disgusting taste, sight, smell, sound or feel of injustice turns our stomachs that we are given over to empathy and outrage, and thereby incorporated into a political event that might otherwise present itself as an imprudent wager. Thus Rancière locates the possibility of politics in “ignorant stomachs,” and its suppression in the “intelligent heads” whose task it is is “to explain to the population that nothing can be done except what our governments are already doing” (2010, 2). Politics, like actual dissection, takes guts (see Barney, 2011). In her work on bioethics in the age of new media, Joanna Zylinska follows Derrida in describing “the cut” as “a differentiation in the flow of life that cannot be subsumed within this life because it comes from ‘elsewhere’” (2009, 30). Political claims would seem to represent cuts of this kind: they are advenient not convenient; they come from outside or beyond an existing situation, disrupt that situation and cannot readily be subsumed by it (see Panagia, 2009, 151-153). If, by replacing advenience with convenience, simulation can render gutless the act of “cutting into the soft belly of an animal,” what might it do for the guts it takes to make political claims—that is, to make cuts—that are at least as scary? It goes without saying that emerging media can be used to prompt sensory, affective, intercorporeal experiences of the injustices inflicted upon others in a manner that inconveniently disrupts our certainties about the world and moves us to judgment and action. In these cases, emerging media comprise means of representing an actual situation into which we might be meaningfully incorporated. It actually happened that on December 17, 2010, a Tunisian street vendor named Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest his humiliation at the hands of state officials (Worth, 2011). That only relatively few people actually witnessed this act, or his subsequent death, or that many millions learned of these events via the internet, does not negate the fact that his story affected people such that many of them were moved to political judgment and action. This was clearly no mere simulation. Online dissection does not represent actual dissection, it simulates it, and so too is there an important distinction to be made between the use of emerging media to represent actual political acts and situations, and the proliferation of simulated political activity online. The difference is between those sorts of mediated encounters that call upon us to respond to the imperative of judgment and action by actually doing something


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gutsy, and those that enable us to evade that imperative by doing nothing at all, even as we console ourselves that by signaling our likes and dislikes, voting our approval or disapproval, and forwarding the link to our friends we are acting like people who care. Perhaps it as simple as this: you cannot be doing something if nothing is at stake. As Friesen describes, in contrast to the simulated dissection in which the previous condition can be restored after a slip of the mouse simply by clicking the undo button, “In the classroom dissection, irreversible errors, of course, can be made, and things can go seriously wrong.” The same goes for the adventure of politics. The primary meaning of adventure is “that which comes to us, or happens without design,” and among its secondary meanings is “the chance of danger or loss; risk, jeopardy, peril” (OED, 2011). This is what makes politics real, not whether it happens online or offline. When one is moved to political judgment and action, there is no telling where things might end up, and things could go terribly wrong. As Hannah Arendt suggested, the basic condition of political action entails the “predicament of irreversibility,” whereby one is “unable to undo what one has done” (1958, 237). For Arendt, the remedy for this predicament is forgiveness, without which there would be no home in the world for politics. The technological ability to undo an unfortunate act by pressing a button is not the same as forgiveness, because in tracing the wrong line on a picture of a frog, or signing the wrong online petition, there is nothing to forgive. When it comes to simulation—whether simulated dissection or simulated politics—forgiveness is unnecessary because nothing is at stake, and nothing could go seriously wrong. As Malcolm Gladwell observes, contrasting the “politics” of social networking with the organizational burdens and corporeal risks that characterized the U.S civil-rights movement, “Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice” (2010, n.p.). The question is not whether political activists can make good use of technologies such as Facebook in organizing and executing their attempts to disrupt and resist the prevailing consensus and to reconfigure the horizon of possibility, for it would be absurd to suggest that the mere use of online tools drains judgment or action of its political character. The question is what to make of the proliferating tendency to use these emerging technologies to support simulations of political judgment and action where nothing is on the line. “We cannot finally,” Albert Borgmann writes, “be citizens both of the hyperreal universe and of the real world” (1992, 97). This does not mean politics cannot happen online or that emerging media technologies cannot be used to pry open the possibility of politics. It does not mean that those committed to “real” politics had better steer clear of the Internet. A couple of days after he had tried out the dissection simulation, my 9 year-old son went online to watch streaming video of a performance of the song “Somalia” by the rapper K’Naan. The song tells of K’Naan’s upbringing amidst the violence and poverty of Mogadishu (“We used to take barbed wire/Mold it around discarded bike tires/Roll ‘em down the hill on foot blazin’/Now that was our version of mountain bike racin’”) and his dismay at the indifference to this situation he found upon escaping to Toronto where, as a refugee, he also lived amidst poverty and violence (“And when I told the world/None would bat an eye/They said,“Since you know how to kill/You should learn to die”). My son was moved. Perhaps it was the sound of the music; more likely it was the taste of injustice in his mouth, and the feeling it gave him in his guts. Whatever the case, there ensued several breakfast-table and bedtime conversations about Somalia and the wars there, about being a refugee, about poverty, race and violence in our own cities, and about K’Naan’s own prescription for all of this: an ethos of giving. These were not comfortable conversations, and it would have been far easier for me if we did not have to have them. But he would not let it go. He kept going back and listening to the song online. It seemed very real to him. Where this might lead is impossible to predict or control.


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The Internet is part of the real world in which the possibility of politics either will or will not unfold, and any dichotomy that categorically pairs offline with real, and online with unreal, misdiagnoses the reality of contemporary experience. Citizens of the real world are necessarily engaged with emerging media technologies, even as hyperreality—the reign of gutless counterfeits—also thrives in the environment supported by those technologies. In this environment, simulation and its ethos stand ready to absorb difference, burden, and resistance into the empire of convenience. To the extent this condition prevails, the possibility of politics will suffer and continue to be marginal to contemporary experience. This, however, might be exactly where politics belongs. For, if politics is an encounter with difference that prompts risky judgment and action which disrupts our certainty about the world, then it could only ever be of, and at, the margins of our experience. In temporal terms, we could say that politics is always to come. In this respect, we might therefore be forced to conclude that politics, whatever its technological situation might be from time to time, is essentially virtual: not simulated but potential. Reality will always nurture the potential of politics, even as hyperreality strives to starve it. References Ahmed, S. (2004). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge. Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Barney, D. (2004). “Communication versus Obligation: The Moral Status of Virtual Community.” In: Globalization,

Technology and Philosophy, D. Tabachnick & T. Koivukoski (eds.). Albany: SUNY Press, 21-41. Barney, D. (2010). “Terminal City? Art, Information and the Augmenting of Vancouver.” In: The Wireless Spectrum:

The Politics, Practices and Poetics of Mobile Media, B. Crow, M. Longford and K. Sawchuk (eds.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 115-128.

Barney, D. (2011). “Eat your Vegetables: Courage and the Possibility of Politics.” Theory & Event. 14:2. Barry, A. (2001). Political Machines: Governing in a Technological Society. London: Athlone Press. Benkler, Y. (2006). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven:

Yale University Press. Berlant, L. (1997). The Queen of America Goes to Washington City. Durham: Duke University Press. Borgmann, A. (1992). Crossing the Postmodern Divide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dean, J. (2008). “Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics.” In: Digital Media and

Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times, M. Boler (ed.). Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 101-121. Dean, J. (2009). Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. Durham:

Duke University Press. Gladwell, M. (2010-11-04). “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will not be Tweeted.” The New Yorker. Online

edition. Goldfarb, J. (2006). The Politics of Small Things: The Power of Powerlessness in Dark Times. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press. Oxford English Dictionary. (2011). “Adventure.” Online edition. Entry 2923. Panagia, D. (2009). The Political Life of Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press. Rancière, J. (2007). On the Shores of Politics. London: Verso. Rancière, J. (2010). Chronicles of Consensual Times. London: Continuum. Worth, R. F. (2011-01-21). "How a Single Match Can Ignite a Revolution." New York Times.

www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/weekinreview/23worth.html?src=twrhp. Retrieved 2011-04-15. Zylinska, J. (2009). Bioethics in the Age of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Techné 15:3 Fall 2011 Rosenberger, A Phenomenological Defense…

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A Phenomenological Defense of Computer-Simulated Frog Dissection

Robert Rosenberger Georgia Institute of Technology

Abstract Defenders of educational frog dissection tend to emphasize the claim that computer-simulated alternatives cannot replicate the same exact experience of slicing open a frog, with all its queasy and visceral impact. Without denying that point, I argue that this is not the only educational standard against which computer-simulated dissection should be evaluated. When real-world frog dissection is analyzed as a concrete technological practice rather than an assumed ideal, the particular educational advantages distinct to real-world dissection and virtual dissection can be enumerated and compared. Building on the work of John Dewey and Don Ihde, I explore the still-expanding advantages of computer-simulated dissection, and in this proper context of comparison it becomes clear that virtual alternatives are increasingly the more educationally beneficial option. Keywords: educational computing; simulation; progressive education; animal rights; animal advocacy; frog dissection; postphenomenology

Phenomenology has proven especially useful within the field of philosophy of technology for uncovering just how deeply the experience of this or that new technology lacks the depth of more traditional experiences, and thus how the new technology may not live up to its surrounding hype. By providing a conceptual framework for describing an individual’s experience, phenomenology lends itself readily both to the task of articulating the striking richness of our everyday experience, and to that of evaluating whether a newly-offered technologically-simulated event lives up to the comparison. Hubert Dreyfus’s critique of AI research is perhaps the most influential example of this line of cautioning, along with his more recent evaluation of distance learning and Don Ihde’s reservations about virtual reality (Dreyfus, 1972; Dreyfus, 2001; Ihde, 2002). Albert Borgmann’s multiple critiques of contemporary relationships with commonplace technologies, such as television and fast food, are also paradigmatic examples (Borgmann, 1984; Borgmann, 1992). It is because phenomenology lends itself so readily to projects that articulate the things that technologically-mediated experiences lack that here I want to offer an explicit corrective: I develop a phenomenological account of the distinct richness that is possible for computer simulation in the classroom context. In Norm Friesen’s anchor piece for this special issue of Techné, “Dissection and Simulation: Brilliance and Transparency, or Encumbrance and Disruption?,” he presents phenomenological descriptions of the experience of both traditional classroom frog corpse dissection and a computer simulation of frog dissection. While Friesen states explicitly that he does not intend to enter the debate over which is to be preferred, my suspicion is that due to the readiness of phenomenology to point out the wilt of simulated experiences compared to those of the real world, his piece provides stronger tools to the pro-corpse-dissection side. That is, by detailing the “sensual assault” of real-world corpse dissection in contrast to the “muted” experience of computer-simulated dissection, a reader may come away from Friesen’s descriptions with the impression that the depth and vividness of the experience of the dissection of a real frog corpse is so great that it presents an indispensible pedagogical opportunity (Friesen, 2012). As I show below, that impression short-changes the potential of


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computer-simulated dissection and it overlooks the limitations resulting from the artefacts of corpse dissection. In what follows, I develop a phenomenological defence of computer-simulated frog dissection in the primary and secondary school classroom. I begin with a review of John Dewey’s account of progressive education, the pedagogical context within which both corpse dissection and computer-simulated dissection fit. Next, I review a phenomenological account of the experience of computer interface, and I contrast that with the experience of the interface of the tools of real-world corpse dissection. Finally, computer-simulated dissection and corpse dissection are contrasted in terms of the very different kinds of educational experiences they provide. Here it is important both to consider the potential for computer-simulation to be expanded to include educational experiences unique to the virtual context, and also to consider the limitations inherent in the technological mediation of classroom corpse dissection. With the following phenomenological reflections, I hope to challenge at least three intuitions that may underlie the thoughts of those inclined to prefer frog corpse dissection in the classroom: (1) that the vividness of the experience of corpse dissection makes it indispensible to biology instruction; (2) that the pedagogical effectiveness of computer-simulated dissection should be evaluated primarily on how well it imitates corpse dissection; and (3) that “real-world” corpse dissection presents students with any kind of unmediated access to educational content. By offering phenomenological deflations of these intuitions, and by brainstorming the ways that computer-simulated frog dissections could continue to be expanded into novel educational ground, I hope to supplement the ethical and environmental arguments that have already been developed in defence of computer-simulated animal dissection in the classroom.1 1. The Progressive Education Context Much of the debate over frog dissection in the classroom occurs within the context of a general commitment to the values of “progressive education.” In this perspective, schooling should create experiences that engage students’ individual interests, encourage creativity, and link up lessons with the concerns of the wider community. This view can be contrasted with the “essentialist” perspective on education, as it is often referred in the field of teacher education, which advocates a focus on the most basic (or essential) knowledge and skills, such as math and writing, and recommends the use of repeated drills, standardized testing, and classic textbook work. Sometimes the history of education in the United States is cast in terms of an oscillation between essentialist and progressive values. Yet while the paradigm of education in the US set by the 2001 No Child Left Behind legislation certainly reflects the contemporary ascension of essentialism, progressive values are reflected in many still-common institutions, such as class trips, guidance councilors, and, relevant here, science laboratory exercises. Much of the discussion over frog corpse dissection and computer-simulated frog dissection occurs together within the context of a shared general commitment to the progressive framework; the advocates for both frog corpse dissection and computer-simulated frog dissection together appear to agree that the creation of vivid, hands-on, interactive classroom experiences is important for learning about biology. A chief developer and advocate of the progressive educational perspective is the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey (e.g., 1897; 1916; 1938). Not only did he develop the theoretical underpinnings of this perspective, he was a dedicated participant, founding the Laboratory School associated with University of Chicago which built its curricula on these ideas. Dewey often cast his claims in terms of the contrast between progressive schooling and essentialism (or “traditional education,” as he called it). He insisted on the importance of


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assessing the individual student’s experience in the classroom. This remains important, according to Dewey, not only for the progressive setting, but also for the traditional classroom, with its standardized textbooks, forward-facing desks, worksheets, and droning lectures. He says, “It is a great mistake to suppose, even tacitly, that the traditional schoolroom was not a place in which students had experiences” (Dewey, 1938, 26). For Dewey, the dull and disconnected context of traditional education does create an experience for students: a boring one which fails to provide lasting knowledge by failing to link teachings to students’ lives outside the classroom. He contrasts traditional and progressive schooling respectively as follows:

To imposition from above is opposed expression and cultivation of individuality; to external discipline is opposed free activity; to learning from texts and teachers, learning through experience; to acquisition of isolated skills and techniques by drill, is opposed acquisition of them as means of attaining ends which make direct and vital appeal; to preparation for a more or less remote future is opposed making the most of opportunities present in life; to static airs and materials is opposed acquaintance with a changing world (Dewey, 1938, 19-20).

According to Dewey, in order to understand exactly why it is that progressive education is important for learning, we must develop a deeper understanding of what it means to have an experience. He says, “Everything depends upon the quality of the experience which is had. The quality of any experience has two aspects. There is an immediate agreeableness or disagreeableness, and there is an influence upon later experiences” (Dewey, 1938, 27). A given educational experience should be relevant to the experiences of other aspects of the student’s life, should lead the student to connect those parts together, and should lead to the growth of further experiences. It is important to remember that an educational experience also has the potential to remain isolated, failing to tie to one’s larger life, and possibly inhibiting the growth of further experiences (say, by implying that school lessons are unrelated to real-life concerns, or by stifling creativity). As he puts it, “Every experience is a moving force. Its value can be judged only on the ground of what it moves toward and into” (Dewey, 1938, 38). The traditional approach, with its dry textbooks, abstract knowledge, and repetitive exercises, only creates experiences which “move toward and into” an attitude that classroom lessons are boring and irrelevant. He writes that with traditional education, “the subject-matter in question was learned in isolation; it was put, as it were, in a water tight compartment” (Dewey, 1938, 48). The lessons of a progressive classroom are, in contrast, learned through interactive and flexible classroom activities that maintain a connection to the larger environment. This kind of schooling, according to Dewey, creates learners that can apply their knowledge, and thus engenders citizens concerned with their communities. Frog dissection—in both its real-world corpse and computer-simulated instantiations—clearly fits into the progressive model. Both instantiations are undeniably hands-on. And both create rich experiences for students in the classroom. Also undeniable is the fact that these two general options—corpse and simulation—create very different experiences for students. As Friesen shows clearly in his article in this volume, the experience of each of these options is quite distinct. My goal in what follows is neither to suggest that computers can adequately mimic corpse simulation, nor to assume that the closer a simulation can get to mimicking corpse dissection the greater educational value it would possess. The goal is instead to compare and contrast the educational value, in a progressive sense, of the very different experiences of frog corpse dissection and computer-simulated frog dissection.


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2. A Phenomenology of Computer Interface Philosophers of technology working from the phenomenological tradition often conceive of the relationships between users and technologies in terms of the notion of mediation (e.g., Verbeek, 2005; Kockelkoren, 2007; Ihde, 2009; Rosenberger, 2009).2 Under this conception, a technology is understood to be an intermediate aspect of a user’s experience, one that changes the user’s abilities to perceive and/or to act on the world. Thus, in this view, a human-technology relation is non-neutral; it non-innocently alters a user’s experience of the world. As a user experiences the world through the mediation of the technology, she or he interacts with the technology’s interface, i.e., those aspects of the technology that are intended to be explicitly engaged. However, as explored below, even the technology’s interface does not always maintain an explicit place within a user’s awareness.3 In this section, I consider the phenomenology of human-computer interface, and contrast this with the interface of the tools used in classroom corpse dissection. A central relationship that a user may develop with a technology is one in which a user’s experience of her or his own body is extended to include the device. Maurice Merleau-Ponty offers the example of a blind man using a cane. He writes, “The blind man’s stick has ceased to be an object for him, and is no longer perceived for itself; its point has become an area of sensitivity, extending the scope and active radius of touch, and providing a parallel to sight” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, 143). Don Ihde uses the term embodiment relation to refer to this kind of human-technology interaction (Ihde, 2009, 42). In such cases, the technology itself is not the central object of the user’s encounter; the technology is the means by which the user experiences an encounter with the world, a mediated encounter through which both the user and the world are transformed. In addition, whether the technology’s interface itself remains conspicuous within the user’s awareness depends in part on just how accustomed she or he is to the device. For one deeply accustomed to using a particular technology, the experience of the device itself may take on less significance within one’s overall awareness. Ihde uses the term transparency to refer to the particular degree to which the technology recedes into the background of awareness as it is used (2009, 42). In this terminology, the blind man’s cane transforms his perceptual abilities and also in the process it takes on a degree of transparency. That is, even as the cane enacts transformations to his perception, it fades into the background of his awareness.4 While a technology may be designed for a particular purpose, it always remains the case that individual users can interpret that technology differently and use it for different purposes within a different context. Ihde refers to this as the multistability of technology (2009, 14). An individual technology has the potential to mediate the relation between a user and the world in multiple ways. Yet at the same time, as a concrete material object, that technology cannot simply make any kind of relation to the world possible; though multiple, only certain “stable” relations to the world are enabled by a technology. To understand this notion, it is helpful to bring to mind examples of technologies which are often taken up for purposes quite different from that for which they were designed. I have offered the example of the magnifying glass (Rosenberger, 2009, 176). A magnifying glass is of course a tool designed for the purpose of enlarging something to see it better. However, there is another purpose for which it can be used. A magnifying glass can also be used for focusing light to start a fire (like Piggy’s glasses in Lord of the Flies, Golding, 1955). We can even imagine a user for whom the primary relationship to the device has developed in terms of this alternate usage. Since this user is deeply accustomed to focusing light with the magnifying glass, she or he will have developed a deeply sedimented habitual relationship with the device in terms of this usage, and as it is used the magnifying glass itself may take on a high degree of transparency. As highly


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transparent, the user pays more conscious attention to task of focusing the beam of light than on the bodily comportments of holding and positioning the magnifying glass in hand. I have used the term relational strategy to refer to the particular bodily comportments, habits, and understandings that enable a user to take up a technology in terms of a particular stability (Rosenberger, 2009; Rosenberger, forthcoming). This paragraph has described some details of the general relational strategy involved in using a magnifying glass for its fire-starting stability. It would be possible to then contrast these details with those involved in taking up this technology in terms of its more traditional—i.e., magnifying—stability.5 Computers (in their various forms—desktop, laptop, tablet, handheld, etc.) and computer programs (e.g., software packages, websites, smartphone applications) can both be conceived in terms of user experience of interface. For example, the interface of a typical desktop computer includes a user typing a keyboard, maneuvering and clicking a mouse, and looking at a screen. In order to use a desktop computer in a smooth manner, a user must develop many specific bodily comportments and understandings which relate to the various features of the device; from a sense of the arrangement of the QUERTY keyboard, to familiarity with the positioning of one’s fingers above the proper keys; from accustomedness to the feeling of the mouse under hand, to the anticipation of its corresponding movements on the screen (including a tacit understanding of the on-screen mouse’s changing form: from arrow, to hand, to typing cursor, to the “standby” notice of the twirling pinwheel or hourglass). As a user becomes more and more accustomed to the relational strategies required for standard desktop computer use, these aspects of interface take on a greater and greater degree of transparency. Over time, the user is able to focus more and more on what she or he is trying to with the computer, rather than on these features of interface themselves. That is, through general computer interface training, the computer becomes embodied.6 A similar story can be told about the user’s relation to the programs she or he runs on the computer. One can come to embody these programs in specific ways as one becomes accustomed to their use. For example, consider the experience of “logging in” to an email provider’s website. For many, checking email is a commonplace activity engaged daily, if not multiple times daily. The relational strategy for interacting with the website includes, for example, an anticipation of where on the screen sign-in boxes will appear, an expectation about the placement of on-screen icons and buttons, and preconceptions about the procedures for reading and writing emails. For an everyday user, these aspects of interface with the email website may be experienced with a high degree of transparency. Through the force of well-established habits of bodily and perceptual interaction with the program’s interface, the accustomed user experiences the content of her or his email with a greater significance than she or he does the means of interface itself. The notions of embodiment, transparency, and relational strategies can be applied to the interface involved in both corpse dissection and computer-simulated dissection. As Friesen points out, the relational strategies involved in the use of computer simulations of dissection largely reduce to those described above regarding desktop computer use generally. Despite the possibility of on-screen representations of scalpels, magnifying glasses, and pins, a user’s approach to computer-simulated dissection occurs in terms of bodily relations to mouse clicks, keystrokes, and screen watching. In striking contrast, real-world corpse dissection involves grasping scalpels, rendering incisions into flesh, pushing pins through appendages, encountering the smells of formaldehyde, and such. Independent of the biology lessons of dissection (addressed in the next section), questions can first be raised about the educational value of the interface of each mode of dissection itself. Following Dewey, we can consider what further experiences will connect up with the experiences


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of the interface of corpse dissection and computer-simulated dissection. That is, we can ask how training regarding each of these forms of dissection—corpse and simulation—is educationally valuable to students in itself. In the case of computer-simulated dissection interface, the value of the interface training is straightforward: using a computer program about dissection involves learning about how to use the computer generally. Instruction regarding this kind of interface may be more or less important depending on the individual student’s knowledge of computers. This relation also opens the possibility of integrating the dissection simulation with other lessons about computer interface, such as typing instruction. In the case of the tools of real-world corpse dissection such as blades and pins, it is less clear into what further experiences of primary and secondary school instruction these experiences of interface may “flow,” as Dewey would say. Put another way, it is unclear what educational value in itself is possessed by, say, pressing a pin through a dead frog’s wrist. However, it is impossible not to acknowledge that such an experience would be as memorably discomforting as Friesen’s paper underlines. The use of these tools adds a visceral dimension—e.g., the feeling in one’s hand of the scalpel as it is pulled though the frog’s resisting skin—to an experience of content (i.e., entrails) that is already fraught with uneasiness and abjection. With that acknowledged, I agree with Estrid Sørensen’s observation in her contribution to this volume that Friesen’s article overlooks the level of disgust that students still experience through dissection simulated on the computer (2012). Of course the lessons learned through the experience of interface are not only those which reduce to interface training itself; lessons learned through interface training exist in relation to the experience of the content of the dissection exercise. A. David Kline makes this point while defending corpse dissection, stating, “There is certain knowledge that they [students] can get best by cutting open the abdomen of a creature and seeing the mesentery. By exercising knowledge how, they attain knowledge that” (1995, 194). That is, mastering the otherwise irrelevant interface of corpse dissection is part of a process that, according to Kline, is the best way for students to learn the anatomy lessons at issue. I agree that the experience of interface is valuable most of all for its relation to lesson content. However, I suggest that pro-corpse dissection views like Kline’s assume that the lessons learnable through the evisceration of a corpse are the only ones that should be considered in this debate. In the next section, I show this to be their crucial mistake. 3. Lesson Content Mediated by Computer Simulations and Laboratory Corpses While it may be differences in interface that jump first to mind when contrasting computer-simulated dissection and real-world corpse dissection—the mouse clicking vs. the scalpel wielding—these two educational practices also mediate student experience very differently. That is, it is not only the interaction with tools that is different; these two practices make possible very different learning experiences of lesson content. They enable very different access to the subject matter itself. The things that can be revealed to students about biology through the experience of cutting open a frog corpse are very different from what can be revealed through the experience of interacting with a computer simulation. To explore these differences it is important to consider two contexts of technological mediation:

(1) We must consider not only attempts to imitate corpse dissection through computer simulation, but also the potential for simulation to go beyond the limitations of real-world frog corpse dissection. I suggest that the potential for computer-simulated dissection has not yet been exhausted, and that the pedagogical value of corpse dissection may even be surpassed by what


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simulations could deliver. As shorthand, I use the term expanded simulation here to refer to simulations designed not only to imitate real-world corpse dissection, but to also reach beyond the constraints of those practices in order to exploit the unique pedagogical opportunities afforded by the virtual environment.

(2) We must also consider the ways in which real-world frog corpse dissection itself—while of course involving actual, non-simulated frogs—nonetheless in practice also crucially involves artifacts of laboratory environment, procedure, and “sample” preparation. Recognition of the technological mediation of the practices of frog corpse dissection highlights the limitations of this form of biology education. I explore these two contexts, expanded simulation and the artifacts of corpse dissection, in the following two subsections. 3a. Expanded Simulation While increasing in popularity, computer-simulated frog dissection remains novel compared to the long-established classroom practices of real-world frog corpse dissection. Innovations continue to be made with regard to computer-simulated dissection, and such developments are furthered by the continuing advancement of computing capabilities generally. Thus, it is important not only to contrast the pedagogical value of traditional corpse dissection with that of the particular simulations that happen to be available today, but to also consider simulation’s expanding potential. My contention here is that computer-simulated dissection has the potential to offer distinct pedagogical advantages that go beyond the charge of simply imitating corpse dissection, far enough, even, that the issue of imitation may be rendered moot. The question becomes: in what novel and pedagogically relevant ways can simulations mediate student experience of the subject matter? Here I would like to consider three ways in which contemporary frog dissection simulation software could be expanded: (1) dissection simulations could be expanded to include an integrated and interactive environmental context; (2) they could be expanded to incorporate animal motion, including the dynamics of systems within the body; (3) they could be expanded to incorporate a variety of dissection options, including advanced abilities to make mistakes and to explore multiple examples. (1) Environmental Contextuality. Computer simulations of frog dissection could be expanded to include interactive resources regarding the natural habitats of these animals. Information from the volumes of books and video documentary on frogs and their relationships to their environment could be integrated into the simulation itself. For example, it is possible to imagine a simulation which begins with a video of an actual frog in its habitat, complete with information about predators and prey, ponds and lily pads. The video could zoom inward to a close-up view of the frog and then the video-frog could transform into a simulated frog whose interior could be explored through virtual dissection. The frog’s internal organs could be investigated through the simulated dissection, and then afterward the view could pull back and return to the video of the frog in its environment. (An example of a dissection program that includes substantial interactive education about frog habitation is Digital Frog 2.5.7) Unlike the frog corpse, the simulated frog in such expanded simulations could be returned to its habitat—its virtual habitat—after it has been investigated.


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The point is that the virtual context need neither include nor reduce to the context of classroom laboratory corpse dissection; there are other contexts made possible by computer simulation. There need not necessarily even be any simulation of real-world laboratory devices such as the pins which secure the frog corpse to the wax-lined tray, the scalpel, or the magnifying glass. The simulated dissection could include a simulated context of the frog’s natural environment, rather than a context that reduces to an imitation of laboratory practices concerned exclusively with how a dead and isolated frog can be dismembered. Where real-world frog corpse dissection is limited to the context of a classroom lab table, an expanded simulation instead has the potential to include education about the relationships between an individual, its bodily processes, and its natural surroundings. (2) Interior Dynamics. Many have recognized that computer-simulated dissections present a distinct advantage over corpse dissection, namely, that simulations can enable students to explore their subjects in motion. Since in the case of corpse dissection the frog under examination is necessarily dead, neither its bodily motion nor the dynamics of its internal systems can be explored. Simulations, on the other hand, are not encumbered by this limitation, and many cutting-edge simulation programs explore the educational possibilities enabled by this divergence. It is possible to imagine expanded simulations that take even fuller advantage of this potential. A variety of pedagogical opportunities are afforded by the fact that the object of study in a simulated dissection need not retain the features of an inert corpse. Some of the frog’s most interesting features as a species—its hop, its tongue—could be better explored if they could be observed in action. In simulation, students could potentially be exposed not only to what individual organs look like and to the organs’ particular spatial configuration, but also to the roles of these organs in the dynamic functioning of larger systems: circulatory, respiratory, digestive, nervous, etc. It is possible to imagine a simulation in which the dynamics of, say, the respiratory system are tracked throughout a simulated frog’s body. One option for interface would be to shrink the size of the students’ perspective and to take them along an interactive 3D tour within vessels or along nerves. Students could track air into the lungs and then follow further as the oxygen is introduced to the blood and delivered throughout the frog’s body. In such expanded simulations, students may have the freedom to choose which systems they follow, which systems are visible at a particular time, what malfunctions occur if nodes are interrupted, or how close inwardly they wish to zoom (including, potentially, exploration at the cellular level). For example, as takes place in the V-Frog simulation, the frog’s simulated heart can be witnessed not as an inert bean-like mass, but as a beating simulated organ.8 The temporal dynamics of the simulation are also a feature potentially subject to customization in computer-simulated dissection. Where real-world corpse dissection will require a separate dissection event—a separate corpse—for each stage of a frog’s life cycle that students and educators may wish to explore, simulations could instead potentially include speeded-up views of frog maturation, both in terms of exterior bodily morphology and the development of internal systems. The example of frogs is of course especially interesting in this regard, with their tadpole and leg-sprouting stages. Indeed, even speeded-up perspectives on frog evolution through history are possible. Building on the suggestion above that expanded simulations can integrate learning about an organism’s environment with learning about its internal bodily structures, we can imagine a version of a simulation in which a narrative begins, for example, with a video of a frog consuming a fly and then shifts to a simulation in which students interactively explore the


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dynamics of the digestion process. The frog’s environment is also deeply relevant to its reproductive processes, with fertilization of course occurring externally. The dynamics of the frog’s internal systems can be potentially represented in multiple ways, a point raised in Ihde’s response in this volume (2012). That is, it need not be the case that simulations only do their best to provide a view of what it would look like were a frog to be cut open yet remain alive and functioning. As Ihde notes, an alternative visual template could involve views made possible by contemporary imaging technologies, such as fMRI. It might be possible to integrate education about contemporary imaging into the lessons on internal bodily structures. (3) Subject Variability. Simulation also has the potential to be expanded to provide individual students with the experience of multiple frog subjects. In real-world corpse dissection, if a student is to be exposed to, say, frogs of different sizes, then multiple frog corpses are required for dissection. A useful moment of classroom dissection can be when different students dissecting different corpses come to recognize that the specimens maintain individual differences. There is no reason that an expanded simulation cannot include the experience of multiple objects of study. Expanded simulations could allow students to encounter frogs of different sizes and different levels of maturation. Individual simulated frogs could spend time in the different areas of their simulated environment, perched by the side of a pond, for example, or swimming if still tadpoles. A simulated frog found under the mud at the bottom of a pond during wintertime in the simulation could be shown to have internal processes that reflect its stage of hibernation. Students could potentially encounter a variety of virtual stomach contents upon exploring different individual simulated frogs. An issue raised in the consideration of these potentials for simulation is the seemingly unlimited pliability and customizability so often identified as a constitutive feature of virtual objects. Questions arise here in terms of how useful an infinitely moldable object would be for pedagogy. A version of this concern arises, for example, in Friesen’s paper when he identifies the reversible quality of the particular simulation he investigates. He writes, “with the online dissection, there ultimately seems to be no chance of making an error with the incision or with any other part of the dissection activity overall” (Friesen, 2012). This surely cannot be an inherent limitation, but one specific to the individual simulation with which he has tinkered. For expanded simulations, these kinds of limitations can be addressed straightforwardly: just as in real-world corpse dissection, instructors are important. There is no reason why reversibility—or any other pliable feature—must be part of the student experience of computer-simulated dissection. For example, a toggle could be added to a simulation to enable instructors to choose an irreversibility setting. If an instructor finds it pedagogically valuable to evaluate the choices students make through the course of the simulated dissection, tools for doing so could be developed. If irreparable mistakes are deemed important by the instructor, then limits can be placed on students’ abilities to correct mistakes in a simulation. That is, simply because simulations in theory can be substantially malleable, it need not be the case that this malleability be placed totally under the command of students rather than teachers. To be clear, the suggestions outlined here do not represent fantasies possible only in some distant future, but instead simply an extension of directions already being explored by dissection simulation developers. The point is that compared to the practices of real-world corpse dissection in the classroom, set as they are in long-entrenched traditions and expectations, computer-simulated dissection is instead only just beginning to discover its potential. It is a potential tied to


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our capacity to imagine novel and effective pedagogical strategies, and also to the advancement of computing generally. 3b. The Artifacts of Corpse Dissection An intuition that may be at work beneath arguments in favor of corpse dissection is that computer simulations are inherently artificial and as such must always be only inferior copies of comparable real-world educational tools. According to this line of thinking, while simulations may be getting better and better at approximating real frogs, they will always have a long way to go. Thus, real-world frog corpse dissection should not be substituted with something inherently lacking; when it comes to child education, there is no substitute for exposing students to real-world objects. There are two assumptions behind this line of thinking with which I disagree. The first is that simulations should only be evaluated on how well they work as substitutes, stand-ins, or approximations of corpse dissection. A simulation can aim to do more than simply mimic real-world corpse dissection as best as possible. I have instead argued above that the value of simulation lies in its own distinct pedagogical advantages. The second assumption is that frog dissection simply presents a student with “the real thing.” This is an exaggeration. That is, while it is certainly true that in real-world frog corpse dissection students are exposed to actual rather than virtual objects, it is simply not the case that corpse dissection represents any kind of unmediated encounter with the subject matter of the frog body. Classroom frog corpse dissection is indeed deeply technologically-mediated, and those transformations to a student’s experience of the subject matter are non-innocent—both pedagogically and morally. As has been emphasized throughout the paper, a central feature of real-world corpse dissection is that it involves not an encounter with just any frog, but necessarily only a frog’s dead body. Friesen’s phenomenological analysis brings many of the aspects of this essential feature of real-world frog corpse dissection to attention, including student experiences of abjection, the smell of formaldehyde, eventual desensitization, etc. I suggest that this feature of real-world corpse dissection renders it unable to even potentially provide the kinds of pedagogical advantages that are possible for expanded simulations. Consider again the three points of potential expansion outlined in the previous subsection: the frog’s interaction with its environmental context; the dynamics of interior systems; and subject variability without multiplying subjects. It is not only the case that simulations can be expanded to address these educational issues; it is also correspondingly the case that corpse dissection, as such, cannot. Take, for example, the issue of environmental context. It is certainly possible to supplement frog corpse dissection with instruction regarding the habitat of frogs, though not with the same potential as simulation for the integration of media. Even still, it remains the case that this particular frog, the one whose corpse the student is about to mutilate, is one whose relation to the environment has been necessarily altered as part of a technologically-mediated process. It has been extracted from its environment already (or raised in an artificial one), has died of non-natural causes, has been treated with chemicals, and has been packaged and shipped. These technologically-mediated features are not irrelevant to the lessons learned by students. One of Dewey’s central insights is that the context of the classroom is itself significant to the learning experience. These artifacts of the corpse dissection procedure—the packing and shipping, the chemical treatments, the pins and wax trays—are parts of the student experience. For example, Friesen provides the example of the encounter with the jar of formaldehyde stuffed full with frog


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corpses as an aspect of the lab dissection context that students commonly find striking (2012). Reading that section of his paper I was reminded of my own experience of dissecting a frog in high school. While it may very well be the case that those forgotten incisions contribute to my current knowledge of anatomy, I do instead distinctly recall the experience of seeing that flat and vacuumed-sealed bag the size of a desktop full of overlapping frog bodies. Ethical arguments for and against corpse dissection in the classroom have not been the focus of this paper, but there is one ethical argument that should be addressed here for its relevance to the progressive educational context inhabited by both real-world and computer-simulated frog dissection. It is often argued that the practices of classroom frog corpse dissection have the lamentable side effect of engendering in students a disrespect for life; in this view, through corpse dissection students are taught by implication that an animal’s life is not even worth one afternoon lesson that could have been learned otherwise.9 I suggest that conceiving of computer-simulated dissection and corpse dissection as two forms of technological mediation draws out this issue explicitly. As technologically-mediated practices, computer-simulated dissection and real-world corpse dissection have been shown above to each involve certain forms of interface, to enable certain pedagogical possibilities, and also to each be limited in certain respects. This backdrop of technological mediation is part of the structure of interconnected classroom experiences that Dewey highlights, that “moving force” as he calls it, which travels into other experiences, for better or for worse. In the case of expanded simulation, we have seen the virtual frog to move into further experiences such as the interaction with the dynamic systems of internal organs, the training of computer interface skills, and the context of the organism’s habitat. Contrarily, we have seen real-world frog corpse dissection to move into experiences such as the visceral feeling of slicing flesh, the training of the skills of using of scalpels and pins, and the context of the preparation of the animal’s dead body. It is the last of these, the student’s encounter with the frog as a corpse—extracted from its natural environment, killed, prepared, and shipped—that introduces lessons about how students should regard animal life. As Dewey puts it, “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only the particular thing he is studying at the time” (1938, 48). 4. Conclusion Through this phenomenological analysis, I hope to have shown that the context for comparing corpse dissection and computer-simulated dissection should not reduce to questions about how well a computer program can imitate classroom laboratory procedure. As Friesen demonstrates in his piece, the experiences of corpse dissection and computer-simulated dissection are very different. Building on this insight, I have explored the distinct advantages that computer-simulated dissection could provide to students, and have also considered limitations distinct to corpse dissection. These advantages of computer-simulated dissection include simulation’s expanding abilities to provide original educational opportunities for exploring dynamic and variable subjects in relation to their environments, and for integrating these lessons into computer interface instruction generally. These limitations of corpse dissection include the inherently inert objects of study abstracted from their environments, and the arbitrary training of the dissection interface. To be clear, I do not take the above analysis to have proven there to be no distinct advantages to corpse dissection. However, it has shown the inadequacy of any argument claiming that corpse dissection is superior to computer-simulated dissection simply because it retains features that computer simulations cannot imitate well. The distinct advantages of corpse dissection must be


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weighed against the distinct and continually advancing advantages of computer-simulated dissection. In this proper context of comparison, I suggest that corpse dissection increasingly appears lacking. The phenomenological arguments in defense of computer-simulated dissection in this paper are intended to supplement the ethical and environmental arguments against frog corpse dissection in primary and secondary school classrooms, and of course these points also apply more broadly to any animal dissection in primary and secondary school. When added to arguments regarding the ethical treatment of animals and the environmental impact of these practices—arguments which are by themselves persuasive to many—the case against favoring computer-simulated dissection in the classroom is left on increasingly thin and withering ground. References Akpan, J. P. (2001). “Issues Associated with Inserting Computer Simulations Into Biology Instruction: A

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Chicago Press. Borgmann, A. (1992). Crossing the Postmodern Divide. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Borgmann, A. (1999). Holding On To Reality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dewey, J. (1897). “My Pedagogic Creed.” The School Journal. LIV(3): 77-80. Dewey, J. (1916). Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education. New York: Free Press. Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and Education. New York: Collier Books. De Villiers, R., and M. Monk. (2005). “The First Cut is the Deepest: Reflections On the State of Animal Dissection in

Biology Education.” Journal of Curriculum Studies. 37(5): 583-600. Dreyfus, H. (1972). What Computers Can’t Do. New York: MIT Press. Dreyfus, H. (2001). On the Internet. London: Routledge. Fallman, D. (2007). “Persuade Into What? Why Human-Computer Interaction Needs a Philosophy of Technology.” In

Y. de Kort et al. (eds.), Persuasive 2007, LNCS 4744. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. pp. 295-306. Fleishmann, K. R. (2003). “Frog and Cyberfrog Are Friends: Dissection Simulation and Animal Advocacy.” Society &

Animals. 11(2): 123-143. Friesen, N. (2012). “Dissection and Simulation: Brilliance and Transparency, or Encumbrance and Disruption?”

Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology. 15(3): this volume. Golding, W. (1955). The Lord of the Flies. New York: Coward-McCann. Heidegger, M. (1953). Being and Time, trans. J. Stambaugh, 1996. Albany: SUNY Press. Hickman, L. (2008). “Postphenomenology and Pragmatism: Closer Than You Might Think?” Techné: Research in

Philosophy and Technology. 12(2). Hug, B. (2008). “Re-Examining the Practice of Dissection: What Does It Teach?” Journal of Curriculum Studies.

40(1): 91-105. Ihde, D. (2002). Bodies in Technology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ihde, D. (2009). Postphenomenology and Technoscience: The Peking University Lectures. Albany: SUNY Press. Ihde, D. (2012). “Dissection and Simulation: A Postphenomenological Critique.” Techné: Research in Philosophy and

Technology. 15(3): this volume. Keiser, T. D., and R. W. Hamm. (1991). “Dissection—The Case For.” The Science Teacher. 51(1): 13. Kline, D. A. (1995). “We Should Allow Dissection of Animals.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics.

8(2): 190-197. Kockelkoren, P. (ed.). (2007). Mediated Vision. Rotterdam: Veenman Publishers and ArtEZ Press. Medrazo, G. M. (2002). “The Debate Over Dissection: Dissecting a Classroom Dilemma.” Science Educator. 11(1):

41-45. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception, trans, C. Smith. London: Routledge. Mitcham, C. (2007). “From Phenomenology to Pragmatism: Using Technology as an Instrument.” In E. Selinger (ed.),

Postphenomenology: A Critical Companion to Ihde. Albany: SUNY Press, pp. 21-33. Oakley, J. (2009). “Under the Knife: Animal Dissection as a Contested School Science Activity.” Journal for Activist

Science & Technology Education. 1(2): 59-67. Orlans, F. B. (1991). “Dissection—The Case Against.” The Science Teacher. 58(1): 12. Riis, S. (2010). “A Sense of Postphenomenology.” SATS: Northern European Journal of Philosophy. 11(1): 107-115. Rosenberger, R. (2009). “The Sudden Experience of the Computer.” AI & Society. 24: 173-180. Rosenberger, R. (2011). “A Phenomenology of Image Use in Science: Multistability and the Debate over Martian


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Gully Deposits.” Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology. 15(2): 156-169. Rosenberger, R. (forthcoming). “The Importance of Generalized Bodily Habits for a Future World of Ubiquitous

Computing.” AI & Society. Sørensen, E. (2012). “Comment on Norm Friesen’s: ‘Dissection and Simulation: Brilliance and Transparency, or

Encumbrance and Disruption?’” Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology. 15(3): this volume. Steinert, S. (2010). “Interfaces: Crosslinking Humans and Their Machines.” International Journal of Applied Research

on Information Technology and Computing. 1(1): 130-140. Sapontzis, S. F. (1995). “We Should Not Allow the Dissection of Animals.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental

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posted at: http://www.childresearch.net/RESOURCE/RESEARCH/2010/TRIPATHI2.HTM Tripathi, A. K. (2010b). “Ethics and Aesthetics of Technology.” AI & Society. 25: 5-9. Winograd, T., and F. Flores. (1986). Understanding Computers and Cognition. Norwood: Ablex Publishing

Corporation. Verbeek, P.-P. (2005). What Things Do: Technology, Agency, and Design. State College: Penn State University Press. Notes 1. For more on the debate over frog dissection in the classroom, see (e.g., Keiser and Hamm, 1991; Orlans, 1991; Kline, 1995; Sapontzis, 1995; Akpan, 2001; Medrazo, 2002; Fleishmann, 2003; Allchin, 2005; De Villiers and Monk, 2005; Hug, 2008; Oakley, 2009). 2. More specifically, the perspective I work from in this paper is called “postphenomenology.” Postphenomenology refers to a contemporary school of thought which builds on the work of Don Ihde, and which addresses issues regarding the bodily and perceptual experience of technology through a perspective which combines thinking from the philosophical traditions of phenomenology and American pragmatism. For more on postphenomenology, see (e.g., Verbeek, 2005; Ihde, 2009; Rosenberger, 2009; Riis, 2010; Rosenberger, 2011; the 2008, 31(1) issue of Human Studies; and the 2011, 16(2-3) issue of Foundations of Science. For critical assessments of the relationship between postphenomenology and American pragmatism, see (Mitcham, 2007; Hickman, 2008). 3. For more on the notion of interface, see (Steinert, 2010). 4. Another clear inspiration is the work of Martin Heidegger, especially his account of tool use in Being and Time (1953). I hesitate to utilize Heidegger’s work here, however, since I do not want to commit this analysis to the larger account of ontology and the critique of the history of philosophy within which his account of tool use is intimately embedded. 5. Like the notion of multistability itself, the notion of “relational strategies” represents an analytic tool to be deployed contextually. For example, we could consider a transistor radio in terms of its multistability, brainstorming various uses for the device and considering various meanings it could potentially maintain for different users within different contexts. But we could then also change the entire context of this analysis by opening up the radio, pulling out an individual transistor, and then considering its own potential stable relations. The situatedness of the person conducting the analysis is thus at issue in these sorts of investigations. The notion of relational strategies—referring to the bodily and conceptual approach that enables a particular stable relation—is also wrapped up within the pragmatic contextuality of the analyst. If we were to brainstorm multiple possible stabilities for the transistor radio, then we could consider what sorts of general comportments and understandings would be required for one to take up the device in terms of each stability. If we were to next pull open the transistor radio, tear out an individual transistor, and brainstorm multiple stabilities possible for it, then we could again consider the relational strategies that would be required for one to take up each of those stabilities. Likewise, in the case of computer interface we could consider the relational strategy associated with our approach to the computer as a whole, or we could consider the relational strategy of our approach to only the computer mouse, or keyboard, or screen, etc. This depends on the context of investigation. 6. For further phenomenological accounts of computer use, see (e.g., Winograd and Flores, 1986; Borgmann, 1999; Dreyfus, 2001; Suchman, 2007; Fallman, 2007; Tripathi, 2010a; Tripathi, 2010b). 7. For more on the Digital Frog 2.5 computer-simulated dissection, see: www.digitalfrog.com


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8. For more on the V-Frog computer-simulated dissection, see: www.tactustech.com 9. For examples of the argument that corpse dissection teaches disrespect for life, see (e.g., Orlans, 1991; Sapontzis, 1995; Oakley, 2009). Douglass Allchin argues the opposite: that it is in fact simulations that teach disrespect for life by presenting animal bodies as easily and cleanly dismantled, thus objectifying them. He writes, “A proper aim is discovery, not destruction. One should separate and clarify: Trace pathways, find boundaries, encounter connections—quite impossible if things are pre-cut and disappear as preformed units in a single mouse-click” (Allchin, 2005, 370). While initially persuasive, it is exactly this kind of argument that does not hold up in the face of what expanded simulations could deliver. Like Kline above, Allchin’s arguments assume that the goal of simulation must be to reproduce the experience of corpse dissection. I have shown that on the contrary the proper comparison is instead between corpse dissection’s limitations and advantages and computer simulation’s own distinct limitations and its still-expanding advantages.

Techné 15:3 Fall 2011 Friesen, Less Is More: A Response to Ihde, Rosenberger…

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Less is More: A Response to Ihde, Rosenberger, Borgmann, Barney and Sørensen

Norm Friesen

Thompson Rivers University

Abstract This response paper begins by countering the contributions of Don Ihde and Robert Rosenberger to this special issue, making its case in existential terms. Then, addressing Darin Barney, these arguments are developed further in aesthetic terms, making use of the “modernist” educational theory of René Arcilla. This response article concludes by returning to the realm of the educational with the help of Albert Borgmann's and Estrid Sørensen's feedback. Keywords: simulation, phenomenology, pedagogy, aesthetics, kitsch, alterity I have enjoyed the rare privilege of being placed in dialogue with a range of highly accomplished scholars, with a common focus on concerns and arguments that have preoccupied me for some time. It is not easy to answer to this rich variety of theoretical, methodological, and personal responses. However, I will try to do so first by countering the contributions of Don Ihde and Robert Rosenberger, making my case in existential terms. Then, addressing Darin Barney, I develop my arguments further in aesthetic terms, by making use of the “modernist” educational theory of René Arcilla. Finally, I conclude by returning to the realm of the educational with the help of Albert Borgmann and Estrid Sørensen. In my original paper, I argued that to undertake high school dissection using a computer simulation is to omit important experiential elements that are available only in the dissection laboratory. I used Albert Borgmann’s (1992) characterizations of hyperreality as “pliable,” “discontinuous,” and “brilliant” to argue for the fundamental conformity of the hyperreal and its interfaces with intentionality as defined in the phenomenological tradition: Software is carefully designed to anticipate and accommodate intention and habitual action at every turn—to cultivate a “liv[ing]-in-certainty-of-the-world”—whereas an animal carcass used in lab dissection offers little by way of instructionally convenient “brilliance,” and, indeed, is not “designed” at all. The systematic exclusion of elements of deprivation, interruption and upheaval in hyperreal interfaces provides students with an on-screen experience of transparency and intentional flow with which they are likely already all too familiar. The experiential elements of deprival and interruption, I conclude, are by definition unrecognized and unrecognizable in the rational processes underlying an instructional simulation’s development. Ihde and Rosenberger respond to this by advancing two important and interrelated claims: that the hyperreal brings more than a single modality of engagement to students, and that the kinds of skills and experience involved in these modalities are constitutive (in part) of natural scientific knowledge itself. Ihde for example writes:

My first point here is that today’s biology education, as with today’s scientific practices, takes up a wide set of variant instrumentally mediated perspectives, each producing different ranges of knowledges …physiological, neurological and other… which synthesized produces a much richer and robust result than the limited dissection/simulation example given (2012, 224).


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Rosenberger similarly argues that hyperreal dissection need not “reduce to the context of classroom laboratory dissection: there are other contexts made possible by computer simulation” (2012, 40). What Rosenberger refers to as “expanded simulation” could facilitate a much wider range of experiences and possibilities, he implies, by including also imaging different types of representation and remote action. Rosenberger and Ihde cite examples of “robotic surgery,” “external imaging [of] a frog… catching insect prey,” and a “3D tour within vessels or along [the frog’s] nerves” as examples of the expanded, “variant instrumentally mediated perspectives” and modalities that are possible (Ihde and Rosenberger, 2012). The claim that hyperreality would, in these terms, provide a student so much more than the “inherently inert object” (Rosenberger 2012, 219) of a preserved animal is consistent, I believe, with my original argument that simulations, when designed effectively for predefined outcomes, can manifest instructional brilliance: The “truly brilliant hyperreality,” I quote Borgmann as saying, “will exclude all unwanted information” (1992, 97), and would heighten, enhance, enrich, and expand the information that is wanted. As an inherent quality of hyperreality, this type of brilliance is manifest in my original descriptions of the frog simulation, however technically modest this example may be. The appearance and disappearance (as appropriate, or on command) of prompts, instruments, and even the entire dissection exercise itself for multiple users, anywhere all evince a convenience, pliability and disposability that this relatively simple simulation would share with much more technically impressive and sophisticated technologies of hyperreality. In its ability to facilitate enhanced representation and remote action, the computer does indeed open up a wide field of exciting possibilities for education. And to reference Rosenberger’s and Ihde’s second claim, many of these possibilities are of great relevance and value to natural sciences and other knowledges currently in high demand. The ability to master computer interfaces of various kinds is certainly a prerequisite for work in the 21st century as Ihde suggests, from the activities of a remote, micro or “Nintendo” surgeon, to the labours of a franchise short-order cook. I do not hesitate in granting all of these points. Highlighting, pointing, enhancing, enabling, and simplifying are all indispensible pedagogical acts, and in granting them flexibility, ubiquity, flow and interchangeability, the instructional potential of the Internet and of hyperreality is indeed enormous. But all of this misses an important point: What is valuable in an educational experience is not just a matter of Ihde’s “richer and more robust results” and Rosenberger’s vastly “expanded simulation.” Experiences of educational value do not simply involve engagement with more -- enrichment, augmentation, highlighting, or increases in flexibility and interchangeability. Education also involves experiences of less: deprivation, limitation, disruption and finitude. Relevant examples provided in my article include the confinement and inconvenience presented at various stages in a laboratory dissection. The examples I mention also include a rather different simulation (referenced only in a footnote): The virtual representation of the “true horrors of concentration camps” that educational gaming enthusiast Marc Prensky suggests has potential value for instruction on the Nazi era. This last example is perhaps troubling, and probably not just because of Adorno’s interdiction against poetry after (or aesthetic representation of) Auschwitz. The trouble with Prensky’s example can indeed be articulated in aesthetic terms, but it is also a matter of the inherent logic of hyperreality. It has to do with the impossibility of simulating the deprival, encumbrance, disruption and finitude that may be a part of an experience. There are many commonplace experiences—both in and out of the classroom—where limitations and encumbrance (much less extreme than those of a death camp) are both inherent to the experience have evident educational value. Think simply of what is involved in working competently with physical materials --the patience and cultivated attunement called for in working with wood, or in repairing an obstinate


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mechanical malfunction. Think also of engaging with phenomena of the natural world, the patience and care required—and sometimes rewarded—in growing bean seeds in the classroom or in gardening at home. Finally, think of simply engaging with others as co-present embodied beings—subject to the reciprocal restrictions (and possibilities) presented by the time and space that our bodies are always inhabiting. In all of these examples, limitation, encumbrance and deprival are to varying degrees an inescapable part of the experience; they are not an arbitrary, external imposition. Instances where deprival and confinement are extrinsic to the experience or matter at hand are equally illustrative. Outside of the context of games or competitions (where handicaps are a common device), to arbitrarily deprive or to limit someone’s ability generally has the significance of a punishment or penalization. I would argue, contra Rosenberger (2012), that this is how limitations imposed in hyperreality, like the disabled “undo” button that he envisions, would be experienced: It would turn the simulation into either a punishment or a game (both reducing its manifest content to a matter of secondary concern). Simply put: A simulation, as a technology or tool, is by definition a means to an end; elements not consistent with this means-ends structure are alien to its character as a tool. This is why arbitrary limitations on a simulation’s functions and capabilities would be experienced as impositions, not as themselves part of the simulated reality. Still, Rosenberger (and Ihde) might reply that the representation and simulation of experiences of encumbrance, limitation and finitude could avoid this problem by being richer, more expansive and robust through the deployment of more advanced technologies and techniques. I would argue, though, that this only reinforces what I understand as the inherent logic of the simulation. This is a cumulative, multiplicative logic that looks to add features and heighten immediacy, consistently taking the simulation every further from encumbrance and finitude that might be intrinsic to what is being simulated. To follow this argument further, I now move into the aesthetic domain, and consider the dissection simulation (and its variants) in terms of the responses they produce in their viewers or audience. Referencing Adorno, I’ve already mentioned the “troubling” implications or possible responses associated with Prensky’s death camp simulation. In his recent book Mediumism: A Philosophical Reconstruction of Modernism for Existential Learning (2011), René Arcilla articulates a modernist critique of representation and simulation that reflects some aspects of Adorno’s aesthetics. Adapting modernist critiques of aesthetic realism to apply to a generalized notion of simulation, Arcilla suggests that one aesthetic category in particular would be relevant to simulation; he refers to this as kitsch. Kitsch “…is an art and a culture of instant assimilation, of abject reconciliation to the everyday [and] of avoidance of difficulty…” (Arcilla, 2011, 7, quoting T.J. Clark, 1985); it is “…formulaic art calculated to trigger automatic, unthinking reactions” (Arcilla, 2002, 462). Arcilla then goes on to explain why simulation and its cumulative, multiplicative logic of “more” are emblematic of kitsch:

...the most efficient form for accomplishing this [instant, convenient assimilation] is one that conveys the strongest sense of immediacy. The more the work enables us to feel that we are there, as if in the blink of an eye we had been whisked to some other scene, the more irresistible its diverting power. ...Our thirst for the startlingly new and distracting is apt to be quenched, and rearoused, more by works, or channels, that overwhelm us with the sheer quantity of their ...bits of information... (2011, 70, 72; emphasis in original).


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It is precisely the aesthetic of a simulated dissection—perhaps especially in its “extended” sense—that is illustrative of Arcilla’s characterization of kitsch. Such an enhanced simulation would seek to convey the strongest sense of immediacy, enabling us to feel that we are there: in the frog’s habitat, or in the lab, slicing its abdomen to reveal its highlighted organs, or even miniaturized and weightless flying along its vessels and nerves. In addition, for Arcilla, this sense of readily accessible presence (as the term “im-mediacy” suggests) involves a kind of sleight-of-hand concerning the medium or the technology that makes it possible. The medium underlying the experience of the simulation or hyperreality, Arcilla argues, must become a kind of “occult technique,” a technology that “withdraws into invisibility” behind the simulation’s manifest, im-mediate content (2011, 71). “The work’s miraculousness,” according to Arcilla, “is a function of how well it cloaks its medium” (2011, 71). The problem with this type of medium or technology, and the responses it cultivates is that it alienates the viewer not only from the technology underlying it, but also from his or her situation and embodied finitude. In this sense, media of hyperreality by definition bear the traits of inauthenticity. The immediacy of digital kitsch, Arcilla explains, acts as “transporting force, and transport in this sense... is flight from our authentic condition” (2011, 72). It “requires me [the viewer or user] to be distanced enough from the event that nothing about it reminds me of myself or of my condition” (2011, 70). To return to the original example of the frog simulation, the student does not need to seek out the inert bean-like mass of a reptile heart within a shrivelled corpse, and in this sense to confront the certainties of finite, physical embodiment—destined also to inertia and decay. Instead, taking a “view from nowhere” (see Nagel, 1989) she is able to fly along arteries, see the frog move in slow motion, or practice remote microscopic interventions—experiences unimaginable within the limits of her quotidian embodied existence, and unachievable without sophisticated technologies of hyperreality. In contrast, education should provide students with a view from somewhere, specifically from their own developing identity, and their own “authentic condition,” as Arcilla puts it. This is the condition presented by the student’s own existence. Correspondingly, Arcilla describes to this kind of education as individual “existential learning.” The process of existential learning, according to Arcilla, is above all one of interrogation and questioning --a questioning directed towards the authentic conditions of our “existence:”

Existence is questionable: it calls us to exercise our freedom, to understand its meaning for us. [It leads us to ask questions like:] Is there truly no reason for existence or for why I exist? ...Who am I [in this existence]?...How should I live concretely with [the fact and the] sense of existence? (2011, 23, 25)

Answers to such questions of existence, of freedom and identity are of course ultimately undecidable: there is no one, “right,” answer to any of them. They do not present problems to be solved, but predicaments to be confronted. And like any predicament requiring action towards an uncertain outcome, they also involve risk. Such characterizations converge remarkably with Darin Barney’s response in this issue. In particular, the kinds of questions and uncertainties raised in Arcilla’s “existential learning” are strikingly similar to those that are implied by what Barney calls “actual politics:”

When politics happens, the shape and operation of power is exposed, and questions are raised about justice and the good life, questions whose answers cannot be given in advance, questions whose very undecidability calls upon us to make judgments and to act. ...expos[ing] us to differences that disrupt our certainties, [these issues] thwart


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immediate gratification of our desire for convenience, and impose burdens of consideration, care, judgment and action that cannot be shed without draining the situation of its political character (2012, 210).

Occult mechanisms are exposed, undecidable questions are raised (and addressed) through unavoidably risky endeavors, and burdensome conditions are confronted. The questioning and knowing implied in this real and existential engagement is a very different from the “scientific knowledges” invoked by Ihde—and the “variant instrumentally mediated perspectives” that would be used to produce them. In one type of knowledge, as Ihde describes the student confronts something fully transformed into a “scientific object,” and learns modalities of “human-instrument interactivity” (2012, 203) in the other, the student confronts (on some level) his or her own finitude, and encounters aspects or consequences of the human domination of the natural world, as well as the limitations of this domination. And the student does so precisely through (and not at all in spite of) the desultory paltriness of the frog’s shriveled corpse. Other experiences of the body are central to Barney’s actual politics (and arguably, to experiences of “existential learning” as well). In Barney’s case, these experiences are described specifically in gustatory terms, in terms of the aesthetics of taste (in one’s mouth) and the unavoidability of one’s own “gut response:”

It is when the disgusting taste, sight, smell, sound or feel of injustice turns our stomachs that we are given over to empathy and outrage, and thereby incorporated into a political event that might otherwise present itself as an imprudent wager. . . . Politics, like actual dissection, takes guts (2012, 212).

But exactly what kind of curriculum would be adequate to the “gutsy” politics advocated by Barney? An answer is adumbrated in my response to Albert Borgmann’s and Estrid Sørensen’s contributions. Borgmann concludes his piece in this issue by stressing the need for an “alternative that can take the place of instrumentalized and virtualized education:”

To reject the conventional instrumental view of education that is so easily commandeered by technology is a good thing, but rejection can mean rebellion or replacement. Rebellion in the name of disruption and upheaval may be a helpful beginning, but it is not enough, and it is less than that if it is extended to the teachers, the pupils, and the parents as a choice between yielding or withdrawing (2012, 201).

An adequate alternative to simple rebellion, if I read Borgmann correctly, would be more specific than what Arcilla describes as “existential learning” or what I have just mentioned concerning Barney’s “actual politics.” An adequate alternative would offer teachers, pupils, and parents a curriculum which (for example) would help differentiate the educational differences separating a dissection and simulation rather than cloak them through claims of technological necessity or superiority. In the monograph in which a version of my original paper on dissection has subsequently appeared (Friesen, 2011), I take the time to outline at least some of the alternative “non-instrumentalized” curricular possibilities. These possibilities, I show, are grounded in embodied relation, subject to the reciprocal encumbrances (and possibilities) presented by our bodies, and the singular place and time we are always necessarily inhabiting. Through further examples that build on the descriptions of dissection featured in this issue, I show this alternative curriculum to be realized not so much in the form of individualized “learning” as through an asymmetrical pedagogical relationship between students and teacher. On the teacher’s side, this relationship is marked by a greater responsibility than is held by the student or child. And I emphasize that this responsibility is exercised just as much by what is not done, by what is withheld or muted, as by what is explicitly emphasized and enacted. Following Dewey, I refer to


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this witholding as “negative capability:” a non-specialized capacity to suspend intentionally focused awareness and action. In addition, I oppose this capability to what are generally seen as positive, specialized instructional abilities, such as instructional planning, behavior modification and other instrumental techniques. This negative capability, to conclude, can only be manifest contextually, in relationship with a particular student or child. And it is in this connection that Sørensen’s response is particularly illuminating; for she reminds us that in education, particular

…children [are always] present in flesh and blood, and through their activities with the computers and stories around them, they [come] to relate a great variety of facets of their lives to the digital technology. Digital technology is always embedded in rich social practice (2012, 207).

The instructional brilliance of hyperreal technologies can add a great deal to the richness of social practice in which they are embedded. However in this embedding, it is the surrounding social and embodied practice ultimately stands out as primary. The very interchangeability, renewability, and convenience of the hyperreal gives it an educational value that is easy to recognize and affirm in an already-technologized educational world. It is more difficult to recognize and affirm educational places and experiences that are embodied, particular, non-interchangeable, and flesh-and-blood. However, it is to these places and these experiences that we are repeatedly and unavoidably forced to return, by our own bodies, and through our relations with others and with the world around us. References Arcilla, R.V. (2002). “Modernising Media or Modernist Medium? The Struggle for Liberal Learning in Our

Information Age.” Journal of Philosophy of Education. 36(3): 457-465. Arcilla, R.V. (2010). Mediumism: A Philosophical Reconstruction of Modernism for Existential Learning. Albany NY:

SUNY Press. Barney, D. (2012). “Gut Feelings: A Response to Norm Friesen’s ‘Dissection and Simulation.’” Techné: Research in

Philosophy & Technology 15(3): 209-214. Borgmann, A. (1992). Crossing the Postmodern Divide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Borgmann, A. (2012). “Response to Norm Friesen.” Techné: Research in Philosophy & Technology 15(3): 201-202. Clark, T.J. (1985). “Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art.” In F. Frascina (ed.) Pollock and After: The Critical Debate.

New York: Harper and Row, 47-63. Friesen, N. (2011). The Place of the Classroom and the Space of the Screen: Relational Pedagogy and Internet

Technology. New York: Peter Lang. Ihde, D. (2012). “Dissection and Simulation: A Postphenomenological Critique.” Techné: Research in Philosophy &

Technology 15(3): 203-205. Nagel, T. (1989). The View from Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rosenberger, R. (2012). “A Phenomenological Defense of Computer-Simulated Frog Dissection.” Techné: Research in

Philosophy & Technology 15(3): 209-221. Sørensen, E. (2012) “Comment on Norm Friesen’s: ‘Dissection and Simulation: Brilliance and Transparency, or

Encumbrance and Disruption?’” Techné: Research in Philosophy & Technology 15(3): 206-208.

Techné 15:3 Fall 2011 Byrne, Trade Barriers to the Public Good

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Book Review: Trade Barriers to the Public Good

Edmund F. Byrne Indiana University & Purdue University Indianapolis

Review of Trade Barriers to the Public Good: Free Trade and Environmental Protection by Alex Michalos (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008). ISBN 978-0773533523 (cloth); 978-0773533806 (paper). $30, paperback. I once wrote about law as an instrument of technology assessment (Byrne, 1982) but questioned government’s capacity to regulate technology (Byrne, 1983). What Alex Michalos shows with persuasive rigor is that those concerns barely scratched the surface, for they did not take into account the seemingly uncontainable influence of corporate prerogatives. A distinguished scholar and prolific author, Michalos has now produced a book of singular importance to anyone concerned about the tendency of corporate power and profit to determine what technologies are fostered and what harmful side-effects are legally disregarded. Stating his objective as to show that “the pursuit of commercial trade over every other value can destroy opportunities for achieving the broader public good” (p. 2), in this book he demonstrates convincingly how a commodified technology can have very detrimental consequences and still surmount regulation and continue to amass profits for its manufacturer. The technology he chooses to illustrate this thesis is internal combustion octane enhancement via MMT, a product of the Ethyl Corporation, now known as Afton Chemicals. Ethyl introduced this product – its full technical name: Methylcyclopentadienyl managanese tricarbonyl – as a gasoline additive to facilitate a higher octane without engine knocking. It did so (in the 1970s) to offset an emerging ban on lead-based additives, the harmful effects of which had been established. In the US this ban was embodied in the 1973 Clean Air Act that called for a gradual phase-out of leaded gasoline; and Canada gradually followed suit. Lead remains an additive in some parts of the world, e.g., China; and the use of MMT is restricted in some places, e.g., parts of the United States and the European Union. It is no longer banned outright in Canada, however, for reasons that Michalos spells out and critiques with meticulous logical and ethical analyses. How the Canadian government, after banning MMT, was soon forced to relent constitutes the master plot of this book. In spinning out this plot Michalos raises fundamental questions about economic constraints on impartial scientific research and about the survivability of national sovereignty now that trade agreements not only restructure international law but limit the ability of national and local government to intervene on behalf of the public good. In preparatory chapters Michalos lays out: “Philosophical Foundations and Method”; “Globalization, Democracy, and Federalism”; and “Motor Vehicle Technology.” Then he describes US Environmental Protection Agency procedures and processes and the goal of cross-border “harmonization” of regulatory standards of the US, EU, and Canada. Next are two chapters showing how the Canadian government came to legislate against MMT. Then, after describing the legal process of arbitration he devotes six chapters to showing how complainants used arbitration to win damages against the Canadian government. Two chapters tell how under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) the Ethyl Corporation won substantial damages against the Canadian government for banning importation of MMT, and four chapters tell how several provinces used the Canadian Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT) to win damages as well. Michalos proceeds with logical finesse to critique the procedures followed in each case. Logic as


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used here, though, is a tool in the service of ethical analysis. This latter he bases on a “broad-based moral consequentialism,” which says “one ought to try to act such that one’s actions tend to improve the quality of life [one of the author’s major interests] of all those affected by one’s actions (p. 22). Thus he faults NAFTA because it benefits corporations, adds few jobs anywhere, and undercuts governmental powers via a “quiet constitututionalism” that establishes “supraconstitutional norms” (Ch. 3). This, in brief, is what the MMT cases produced, thanks to panels prioritizing the international trade rules standard of (corporate) autonomy over that of judicial scrutiny (p. 176). They should not have, says Michalos, because these cases involved “inherent national concern” (p. 56). The statute corporations attacked was a 1997 Canadian government ban on MMT. The Canadian parliament first considered this ban in 1995 and was promptly besieged with pro-MMT documents. Michalos examines in detail both critical and affirmative arguments contained in these documents. Then he turns to a Senate Standing Committee Interim Report (open to a ban) and a Minority Opinion (opposed). The latter drew on a US court decision that found the EPA lacked statutory power to ban MMT (never reaching the substantive issue). The former ignored evidence that MMT is both a health hazard and harmful to the environment, but allowed that it might be a factor in causing a catalytic converter’s on-board diagnostic device (OBD) to malfunction. Health Canada submitted that manganese is not a health hazard but MMT is “highly toxic” (p. 162). The bill (C-29) became law on June 24, 1997. Then supraconstitutionalism took over to produce arbitration rulings that required Canada – a historical first – to reverse its law and compensate a corporation and two provinces for harm done via “expropriation” (pp. 207, 223, 253). As shown in this book, NAFTA and to a lesser extent AIT give corporate interests a veto power over national public policy. Ethyl Corporation surmounted Canadian government restrictions by persuading a NAFTA panel that there is no evidence sufficient to justify a ban on importing MMT. The Province of Alberta, eventually supported by Quebec, Nova Scotia, and Saskatchewan, persuaded an AIT panel that the Canadian government was exceeding its authority by prohibiting the manufacture and inter-province distribution of MMT without just cause. That the manufacturers involved in these cases could achieve this rout of national governance is due to a variety of causes, among them the hearing officers’ lack of scientific competence, the corporate representatives’ and documents’ presumed veracity, and the distorted priorities of a process minimally interested in non-commercial values. In Michalos’s own words:

the biggest flaws in both [the NAFTA and the AIT] agreements, so far as they are revealed in our two cases, are at least the imprecision or obscurity of certain articles, and at most their logical incoherence or their bias in favour of commercial trade over the prevention of environmental degradation and the protection of human health and consumers (pp. 348-349).

This book is highly systematic in organization and methodology. Each chapter focuses on a particular aspect of the MMT controversy and/or draws upon one or more particular disciplinary approaches, including logic, ethics, technology, political theory, and legal analysis. This methodical layering is essential to the author’s ultimate objective, which is not primarily descriptive or analytical but normative. Its detailed examination of governmental regulatory procedures might not attract some philosophers who focus on technology. But its consecutive use of complementary foci may serve as a model to anyone doing applied philosophy, political philosophy, and/or business ethics. And its normative emphases open the door to critical reexamination of studies that approach commodified technologies phenomenologically.


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Trade Barriers is in some respects a takeoff from and response to Albert Borgmann’s phenomenological works beginning with Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life (1984). In that work Borgmann describes the take-it-for-granted obviousness of technologies that deliver commodities in our everyday lives and are perceived to be instantaneous, ubiquitous, easy and safe. Where Borgmann and Michalos part company is in their proposed responses to such “device paradigms.” Borgmann recommends a kind of diversionary commitment to a “focal thing or practice” such as music, gardening, or cuisine. Michalos, by contrast, is more in tune with Hans Jonas’s imperative of responsibility. On this view, we need to confront the dangers behind our euphemistic perceptions of a technology by taking into account its overall effects on people’s lives. MMT can be considered a device paradigm (or at least a component thereof) as experienced at the gas pump, where a driver chooses a particular octane level without regard to how the chosen octane is obtained or with what collateral damage. For, the driver wants his or her vehicle to be speedy but run quietly; and achieving this via available technical options requires fuel of a certain recommended octane. MMT serves this purpose, as does a lead additive. But as Michalos shows, no one who considers all the evidence without corporate or political interference would call MMT-enhanced gasoline safe. Rather would one so informed endorse the precautionary principle and opt for excluding this device paradigm from his or her lived world. And in fact use of MMT in both Canada and the US has declined (http://www.aenweb.ca/content/mmt-its-way-out-canada) and reference standards for concentrations of manganese have been significantly tightened in Canada, California, and Europe (http://www.theicct.org/2010/09/fuel-additives-mmt/). So the public policy Michalos recommended is increasingly favored by others in Canada and beyond. References Byrne, E. (1982) “Law as Technology Assessment,” in Research in Philosophy & Technology. Vol. 5, pp. 101-115 (Westport, CT: JAI Press). Byrne, E. (1983) “Can Government Regulate Technology?” Philosophy and Technology, ed. P. T. Durbin and F. Rapp (Dordrecht/Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Co.), pp. 17-33.

Techné 15:3 Fall 2011 Ess, facebook and Philosophy

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Book Review: facebook and Philosophy Charles Ess Drury University Review of facebook and Philosophy: What’s on your mind? edited by D.E. Wittkower (Open Court Press, 2010). ISBN 978-0812696752. $25, paperback. At its best – which is most of the time – this volume succeeds in fulfilling what I take to be the crucial and defining goals of the Open Court Series on “Popular Culture and Philosophy” – namely, to provide instructors with a wide range of essays on contemporary elements of popular culture, where such essays engage students through an accessible style and interesting subject matter, while further introducing and then engaging them with credible philosophical analysis. The volume’s chapters are uniformly accessible for the undergraduate audience to which they are pitched – whether in philosophy or media-related classes. To be sure, a very small number of chapters run a primary risk accompanying the series’ pedagogical intentions: in the name of relevance and accessibility, the philosophical critique and scholarly substance threaten to become so thin as to lose substance and utility. Happily, the very large majority of the essays in fact succeed in the difficult task of bringing the reader up to speed with one or more significant philosophical theories, figures, or frameworks, including Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Hume, Heidegger, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Bakhtin, Nel Noddings, Habermas, McLuhan, Ivan Illich, Baudrillard, Žižek, and the inevitable Foucault. The results are consistently well-grounded, insightful analyses of one or more aspects of computer-mediated communication in general and Facebook in particular. Indeed, the clear majority of the essays collected here provide the very valuable service of showing how diverse philosophical frameworks can lead to both significant criticisms as well as novel defenses of FB and CMC that students might at first not take seriously or consider. These essays thereby demonstrate what is in my view one of the primary values of philosophy applied in these ways – i.e., such analyses take us well beyond the assumptions and styles of the everyday. Equally important, not simply for our students but for us as researchers and scholars: the best essays here offer concise but cogent philosophical analyses of important phenomena clustering about FB and computer-mediated communication (CMC) that, both individually and collectively, constitute a significant contribution to two closely related but still largely disconnected literatures, i.e., that of philosophical analysis of technologically-mediated phenomena and that of Internet Studies (defined broadly as empirically-oriented research and reflection on communication and other human engagements facilitated by the Internet: cf. Consalvo and Ess, 2011). This said, the book itself lacks two critical features that would make it far more accessible for students, instructors, and scholars. First, there is no introduction per se. Yes, the essays themselves are organized into five sections: “facebook itself,” “The Profile and the Self,” “facebook Friends,” “Social Networking,” and “Activity and Passivity.” What these categories are taken to mean, and how they are elaborated and illuminated by the specific essays, however, is not indicated. Secondly, the volume mimics the organization and layout of FB itself: in place of authors’ biographies, for example, we are given FB-style profile pages. This is cute and harmless enough – but in place of an index, the volume offers a “Keyword Search.” On first glance, the categories and names collected here closely resemble a more traditional index, and are serviceable at least up to a point: but they also demonstrate the important differences between (simple) keyword searches and a carefully crafted index. Consider the critical example of privacy. One of the important contributions of several essays is that they give us diverse philosophical frameworks perspectives on the very problematic themes and issues of privacy and Facebook. Alas, the keyword entry on ‘privacy’ is just that – a flat listing of the appearances of the word throughout the volume, with no further details such as author’s names, subcategories, etc., that would provide a useful sketch and reference of the diverse views to be found here. The upshot is that the index fails to do justice to the essays’ richness and insight. Between no


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introduction and such flat index entries, the reader is given no orientation to the diverse perspectives and insights to be gleaned here, much less how these might contribute to the larger and lively discussion in both philosophy and Internet studies on the thorny ethical and communicative issues swirling around FB, beginning with privacy. For that, we are given the editor’s impassioned “Reply to facebook critics,” followed by a brief demographic analysis of FB users by Homero Gil de Zúñiga and Sebastián Valenzuela. Each is competent in its own right. But the demographic survey is US-centric, which limits its utility and relevance for the global FB. The editor’s essay is less compelling and helpful than it could be: “the critics” are not named or referenced, and so it’s very unclear as to who the real targets of critique may be – though many of the volume’s contributions certainly well articulate many of the criticisms addressed here – much less what any of this has to do with the volume we’re about to explore. Without such an orientation, that exploration is considerably more work than it would otherwise be. Even so, the exploration more than rewards the additional effort. To begin with, many of the strongest contributions are of compelling interest as they address standard topics in computer-mediated communication – but in philosophically-grounded and interesting ways, such as Mimi Marinucci’s “You Can’t Front on facebook,” which conjoins Plato’s example of Gyges’ ring (as granting invisibility) with the well-known issues and concerns of anonymity and disinhibition in online venues. Moreover, a very wide range address such core issues as friendship and identity, and how these are enabled, frustrated, and/or reshaped through online engagements. So Mariam Thalos, in her frankly titled “Why I am Not a Friend,” takes up Sartre’s notion of the Gaze to examine what is lost from face-to-face communication in online venues such as FB. Thalos further raises a core issue that is attracting increasing critical attention these days – namely, how much our use of such sites as facebook (as well as other iconic applications of so-called “Web 2.0”), far from liberating us as promised and hyped through such terms as “prosumer,” rather trap us within the logics and power structures of capitalist economy. This theme is further elaborated on in subsequent essays, including “Spectacle 2.0?” by Rune Vejby and the volume editor, and in Adam Briggle’s untitled chapter structured as a break-up letter to FB. Briggle’s use of Ivan Illich’s concept of conviviality provides one of the strongest critiques of what is amiss for many of us in FB. Additional essays very helpfully explore these issues from still different perspectives, such as Trebor Scholz’s “facebook as Playground and Factory” and Richard Morgan and John Clulow’s “The Proles and Cons of facebook”: the latter is especially striking for its use of a facebook-style “cause invitation” from Karl Mark to explore the ambiguities and potential self-deceptions of so-called online activism. These critiques are echoed – by way of taking up Žižek’s notion of interpassivity – in “Faking It on facebook” by Sara Louise Muhr and Michael Pedersen. Not surprisingly, the notion of friendship provides a fruitful core focus both for contributions collected under the section title “Facebook friends” along with others, starting with Thalos. And friendship (and other virtues) on facebook certainly enjoys strong defenders here, beginning with Tamara Wandel and Anthony Beavers’ “Playing Around with Identity.” Subsequent apologies and defenses usefully take up Aristotle and Cicero (Craig Condella, Maurice Hamington, Chris Bloor), Heidegger and Adorno (Chris Bloor), and the care ethics of Nel Noddings (Maurice Hamington). These essays are particularly useful, in my view. Virtue ethics in general and feminist ethics of care in particular have grown over the past two decades or so into prominent, indeed, essential, frameworks for approaching new media, most especially from the global perspective all but required by media technologies that now link over two billion people around the world. In addition to serving as useful chapters in their own right, these essays could be helpfully conjoined with the work of other philosophers using virtue ethics – including, as but one important example, Shannon Vallor (2011). The individual and collective result is substantive philosophical analyses that bring forward foundational critiques, defenses, and fresh insights. The collection thus stands as a significant contribution not only to the growing philosophical literature that seeks to address contemporary


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media and the phenomena they evoke in important philosophical terms (e.g., ethical, social, political, epistemological, and ontological). By the same token, media scholars and researchers who recognize the importance of such careful philosophical analyses of contemporary media phenomena will find many of the essays collected here to be invaluable. References Consalvo, M. and Ess, C. (eds.). 2011. The Handbook of Internet Studies. Oxford: Blackwell. Vallor, S. 2011. Flourishing on facebook: virtue friendship & new social media. Ethics and

Information Technology.

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Book Review: Homo Sapiens Technologicus

Céline Kermisch Free University of Brussels

Review of Homo Sapiens Technologicus by Michel Puech, (Le Pommier, 2008; in French). ISBN 978-2746503571. $53, paperback. Homo Sapiens Technologicus intends to propose a contemporary ethics adapted to our technological world. With this goal in mind, Michel Puech structures his reflection in five parts. First, he proposes an existential analysis of the relationship between man and technology. Then, he proceeds to a critical analysis of the dynamics underlying contemporary technology, with a specific attention to the coevolutions of man and artefacts. The third part shows the gap between the potential of contemporary technology and traditional practices – philosophical, political, institutional, etc. – surrounding them. Afterwards, Puech emphasizes various strategies to bridge this gap and to serve as foundations for a new wisdom. Finally, from the perspective of practical philosophy, he characterizes this new kind of wisdom, which will modify our relationship with technology. One originality of Homo Sapiens Technologicus lies in the fact that the author refuses to take a technophobic stance. Even though he recognizes, in the first part of his book, the debt that each philosopher of technology owes to Heidegger, Puech cultivates an optimism found in the Anglo-Saxon tradition – Don Ihde, Borgmann, Mitcham – as well as in the French literature – Simondon or Hottois. He criticizes Ellul for focusing, as did Heidegger, on the essence of technology, and he denounces the traditional analysis which assumes the autonomy of technology and its dehumanizing power. Puech favours a more stimulating approach of the intimate relationship between man and usual artefacts, to which man owes his humanity. Non-spectacular technologies are indeed fundamental to human beings: the technologies which “survive” are the ones which have succeeded in contributing to the mediation between man and the world, the ones which have found an “existential niche” (p. 59). The author underlines in fact the essential role of the use of artefacts, which is at the origin of their success and their survival. Hence Puech assures, in an original way, the philosophical promotion of everyday life and of conviviality which characterizes the relationship between man and usual technologies, as he explores all the relevant aspects of the affective and functional appropriation of artefacts. At that point, he notes that we even don’t see artefacts anymore when they are well integrated as tools in our everyday life. His technological enthusiasm, rarely found in continental philosophers of technology, leads Puech to consider the emotional intimacy with artefacts to be the ground for a reflection on contemporary technology and on the wisdom it requires. The second part of Homo Sapiens Technologicus proposes an analysis of the laws of evolution of artefacts. Puech draws a parallel between natural evolution and the evolution of artefacts, insofar as the competition between artefacts for reaching an “existential niche” constitutes a form of selection. Many questions are addressed, which belong to sociology as well as to philosophy of technology: Puech analyses the topics of progress, of technological practice, and questions the borders between man, technology and nature. He also proposes an analysis of the notion of time. This may be a more speculative part, as Puech does not really justify his conception of the contemporary man living in the future rather than in the present. In this second part of the book, the author suggests already between the lines a series of ethical answers associated with the problem of cohabitation with new technologies. The major idea is to reinterpret the promises of technology so that man can become actor rather than passive beneficiary.

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The third part studies more specifically the “new disuses”. It radically denounces the inadequacy and the disused character of philosophical approaches, of political discourses, of advertising, and of journalists’ and elites’ practices, when facing the reality constituted by new technologies. Puech considers institutions to be counterproductive – Chernobyl for example is recognized as being an institutional failure rather than a technological one (p. 169). The traditional scheme of production and consumption, and the economic growth dogma are condemned with an Illichian radicalism. But here, his antipolitical stance may seem too systematic. Nevertheless, his socio-economic considerations show a faith in man as well as in technology, as will be confirmed later. The fourth chapter aims at bridging the gap between new technologies and man, stuck in his disuses. The author proposes a subtle analysis of our intimate relationship with computers and puts forward the revolutionary dimension of the internet, more specifically when the networks allow to bypass hierarchies and erase old mediations. His demystification and redefinition of virtual reality are as salutary as his original framing of the local/global paradigm. Furthermore, the ideological stakes of risk management are correctly emphasized as well. A major idea is getting more and more precise: the wisdom of homo sapiens technologicus consists in reappropriating technologies, as well as their risks that have to be converted into responsibility. Here, we can see a form of humanism, as Puech is reminding man of his responsibilities rather than accusing blind technological fate. The reflections on comfort and on leisure are less original, being variations of the topic panem and circenses. But when it comes to culture and education, the author becomes virulent. Does education really have to be reduced to an initiation into the submission to a symbolic order? Puech’s idea appears here to lack nuance. Finally, the last chapter develops the convincing theory of “micro-actions”. The message shines by its simplicity: everyone can decide to deliver himself from old disuses and to build his own access to the potentials of contemporary technologies (p. 331). We are far away from the logic of dominating nature condemned by the author. In any case, humility and optimism are at stake, as well as the denial of ideologies in the translation from a formulation of contemporary problems in terms of technology to a formulation of solutions in terms of wisdom (p. 356). His project of living as a wise man, who has the potentials of technology at his disposal without being a victim of it, leads him to follow Thoreau’s Rousseauist ideal of simplicity. Overall, Puech proposes a very thorough, engaged, and accessible work of popularization, as it is suggested by the abundant bibliography and by the quality of the notes. The book is indeed very readable and accessible to anyone – not only philosophers – interested in the way technology impacts our life. Puech’s pedagogical talents are undeniable, even though Homo sapiens technologicus would gain in being a bit more synthetic. To the question “which ethics for technologies?”, the author valuably proposes a tangible answer, which is well argued for. The implementation of his wisdom owes much to his nuanced comprehension of the new richness of the relationship between man and the computer and between man and others – through networks. This proximity with computers, in terms of access and of content, should allow man to come out on top of this new cultural revolution as he has been fortified by the experience of more traditional media, struggling with the mindless state associated with advertising and television. Eventually, Puech has faith in man for reappropriating technologies considered as being part of the commons. The book is convincing because the battle that the author suggests is within the reach of all of us. Puech gives us the relevant keys: lucidity, authenticity, civic responsibility, consciousness of a common good to defend, humility, and serenity – values Montaigne would not have denied. His engagement is confirmed by the micro-actions he suggests, which constitute a form of civic resistance. Connectivity will take care of the rest.

Techné 15:3 Fall 2011 Shew, Philosophy of Science: 5 Questions

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Book Review: Philosophy of Science: 5 Questions

Ashley Shew Virginia Tech

Review of Philosophy of Science: 5 Questions edited by Robert Rosenberger (Automatic Press/VIP, 2010). ISBN: 978-8792130341. $28, paperback. What do philosophers of science have to say about their field, their expertise, and the future of the field? Robert Rosenberger poses questions about the nature and the composition of the field of philosophy of science in his edited volume Philosophy of Science: 5 Questions. Though this collected volume of interviews centers around five questions, the answers are relevant to a larger field of scholars and students in science and technology studies (STS). The questions these philosopher-interviewees face are:

1. How were you initially drawn to philosophical issues regarding science? 2. What, in your view, are the most interesting, important, or pressing problems in

contemporary philosophy of science? 3. How has your work offered original contributions to discussion on science? What does

your work reveal that others fail to appreciate? 4. What is the relation between philosophy of science and scientific practice, science policy,

or efforts for social justice? Can there be a more productive relation? Is this desirable? 5. Where do you see the field of philosophy of science to be headed? What are the prospects

for progress regarding the issues you take to be most important? The interviewees include philosophers (and an occasional sociologist or “STSer”) from a wide variety of specializations and perspectives: Harry Collins, John Dupré, Arthur Fine, Allan Franklin, Peter Galison, Ronald N. Giere, Adolf Grünbaum, Sandra Harding, Don Ihde, Sheila Jasanoff, Evelyn Fox Keller, Philip Kitcher, Helen Longino, David Papineau, Stathis Psillos, Joseph Rouse, Patrick Suppes, and Nancy Tuana. The structure of Philosophy of Science: 5 Questions is extremely straightforward and reader-friendly. Chapters contain one interview each, with the questions answered in the order listed above, followed by a selected bibliography of the interviewee's work. The selected bibliographies provide wonderful jumping off points for those new to philosophy of science (or those new to the work of some of these notable contemporary philosophers). Chapters are organized alphabetically by author, so finding out the specific information is incredibly easy. The book is also well-indexed, with important concepts, theories, and figures referenced listed for easy discovery in the back of the book. If you have a specific conceptual or theoretical interest, rather than an interest in the answers of one of the interviewees, this book still proves worthwhile. Similarly structured “5 Questions” books for a variety of other areas of philosophy are available (it's a series), but this latest book will be of interest to a larger audience than simply philosophers. This edited volume features a healthy representation of feminist philosophers of science, as well as the inclusion of influential sociologists of science whose work has been relevant and exciting within the philosophy of science. The responses given by this diverse group of interviewees should excite those outside a strict philosophy of science audience. Science studies people of all stripes – those interested in activism, policy, history, sociology, as well as philosophy – will find the answers contained in this series of interviews refreshingly personal and specific. Individual interviews might be productively and provocatively integrated into philosophy of science and

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science studies courses alongside readings written by these interviewees to aid students' understanding of the context and understanding each philosopher brings to their own work. Each interview is relatively succinct – the entire volume, which consists of eighteen interviews, reaches a length of only 235 pages. This work would make a wonderful companion to a philosophy of science reader. This volume suffers only from the individual nuances of the philosophers, which is to say that the interviewees obviously weren't reading each others' answers, so the parallel structure with which this book was so wonderfully designed does seem to break down in some parts. To the question of how a philosopher came to philosophy of science, answers vary from a record of educational milestones to an account of a problem in philosophy of science that first possessed them to childhood interests that led to the study of science. The ways that the interviewees couch their work varies immensely – as well it should. However, if you pick up this volume expecting the authors to format their responses in the same way or answer questions in a parallel manner, you might be disappointed. Though the questions are all listed in the same sequence, the responses are particular to the interviewees' style and sequence of thought. The overarching message of this volume, though explained in different ways by different interviewees, is the necessity for philosophy of science to face the messy realities of scientific practices. Philosophy of science cannot be a study of ideals – in the words of Helen Longino, “this results in a distorted conception of science” (p. 153) – but must incorporate a larger context, familiar already to scholars of technology. Confronted by the materiality of technical work, philosophers of science must seek interdisciplinary interaction resulting in a philosophy of science engaged in science and in science studies and in the larger political and social scene in which science is embedded. Reading about the personal tales of how people came to philosophy of science, I am struck by how a book like this would have been derided a few decades ago. Philosophy of science can sometimes be considered sterile and coldly objective: viewing personal histories as secondary to scientific and intellectual practice. A volume of interviews like this provides a unique look into the practice of philosophy of science that will be of value in opening a broader audience of students to philosophy of science and that will pair beautifully with sets of readings by these philosophers of science.


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1. Dissection The pedagogical practice of dissecting animals in school biology courses has long been associated with experiences, opinions, and debates of special intensity. Juliana Texley, an assistant school superintendent, observes:

“I Remember Biology,” parents often begin at their annual conference with the teacher. The odor and distaste the dissection experience evokes have been among the most pervasive memories of secondary school science for more than a century. But in the 1990s, environmental consciousness, curricular concerns, and political pressure on schools have changed biology... (1992).

Some of the factors that have changed biology have developed out of important legal cases concerning in-school dissection. In the American context, one of the most prominent of these was heard by the California Supreme Court in 1987. It began with Jennifer Graham, a 15-year-old California girl who refused to participate in a school dissection on ethical grounds. When school officials refused to accept a project on amphibian behavior as an alternative, the young student took the school district to court. According to one report, “Graham became something of a celebrity, often called ‘the frog girl,’ who had the courage to stand up to the schools in her defense of defenseless animals” (Johnson, 1997). Today, in response to legal challenges and a number of other factors, schools and districts in the US and Canada are much more responsive to students’ concerns and to other issues surrounding dissection. The issues that are now considered important are manifold— “rang[ing] from inhumane treatment of animals by the supply industry and the depletion of natural populations of affected species to concerns about the emotional responses of students who are ‘turned off’ to biology because of a dislike of dissection” (Haury, 1996). Many schools and districts now recognize the legitimacy of individual student’s wishes to opt out of dissections, with some institutions deliberately providing alternative assignments, and still others having dispensed with the activity altogether. My aim in this paper is not to focus on the range of complex legal and moral issues raised by dissection activities; it is instead to compare the experience of dissection as an online activity with its offline counterpart. In doing so, I pay special attention to the sensory and experiential intensity of this activity, looking at the educational significance of the convenience and methodical design associated with online dissection, and the often strong emotional responses associated with its counterpart in the classroom. 2. Body and Relation in Lab Dissection Given its vivid and controversial nature, it is not surprising that there are a range of readily-available accounts of dissection in both school and university science classrooms. Already, we have a kind of compressed experiential description in Texly’s reference to parents’ recollections of working with “that terrible-smelling frog.” Accounts of classroom dissection typically follow a common sequence of events, beginning with a sensually intensive initiation and ending with a range of possible outcomes. In the course of this sequence, there are experiential moments of particular prominence that reappear with remarkable frequency. One such moment is the experience of an initial encounter or sighting of the animals to be dissected. Students typically notice them as they walk into the classroom, spotting “flattened rats in a jar” (interviewee), “little dead pigs lying in the sink,” “a jar of pickled animals,” or a creature


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simply “tossed... into a plate” (quoted in Solot & Arluke, 1997, 34). A second moment in the dissection that stands out in even greater experiential relief is the act of touching and above all making the first incision into the dead animal or carcass. One ethnographic study of classroom dissection explains:

The initial incision… the transforming cut and the only one made into a body that bears the obvious markers of “animal”… is frequently the hardest one for students to make. Even some students who had never dissected predicted that “opening” the animal would be the hardest part (Solot & Arluke, 1997, 35).

Whether a student make the incision him or herself, or whether anther does it instead, students’ comments give special emphasis to the embodied and specifically visceral character of this moment. For example, here is one account in a study of the “high school dissection experience” of a fetal pig:

The first day, I thought I was just gonna be sick when Linda was actually slicing this pig open. I felt nauseated... I don’t handle blood and that kind of stuff very well. I was very glad that it didn’t have blood in it. If it was a pig that had just died and had blood, I would not have been able to handle it... (Barr & Herzog, 2000, 64).

Other interviewees describe the act of “touching a dead pickled rat” as “the grossest part” of the dissection, also saying that the “first cut into” the animal, in which a liquid, presumably formaldehyde, “spurted” out, was particularly “gross.” The body in these cases becomes manifest experientially in a way that is rather forceful and direct. It is, in effect, subject to a kind of sensual assault—one that extends from the sight of the animal to the sound and the tactile sense of the first incision. It also includes the smells of formaldehyde, which “refuse to leave your hands” as one interviewee says, and of rotting flesh, which was said to “get a little riper with each passing session.” Also not to be overlooked are impressions and feelings of the “gut” as expressed through terms or phrases like “gross,” becoming “sick,” or “nauseous.” 3. Body and Relation in Online Dissection A virtual frog dissection provides a number of points of conspicuous contrast to the classroom or lab activities presented above. Such a dissection might begin for example with the student clicking on a link on a course website: “Frog Dissection: try the demo at froguts.com.”1 In the case of this specific simulation, the student would first wait for the software to load, and would then be greeted with pleasant musical tones, and an animated homepage advertising a number of demo simulations. Choosing the appropriate option, an image of what appears to be a life-size bullfrog fills much of the browser window—with a row of small buttons provided on the right. Underneath, text instructs the student to “press the pin button on the toolbar” so that the frog can be secured. When selected, a box of pins appears on the right, in place of the buttons. The student would then click and drag these pins one by one to spots on the frog’s arms and legs that are marked with small red “Xs” (inserting them with a double-click). When they land in place, they make a dull percussive sound. Next, a red, line running up and down the length of the frog’s abdomen appears. The student is instructed to “make 3 incisions along the dotted red line.” This is achieved by clicking and then dragging the cursor along the red line marking the frog’s glistening and smooth but mottled underbelly. Any sense of unease that one might feel at taking a simulated scalpel to this simulated surface would be in conflict with the absence of other sensations: No unpleasant sounds or unusual feelings of resistance or elasticity, no moist


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membrane to puncture and incise—only the frictionless gliding of the cursor across the computer screen.

Figure 1: Frog dissection

Such a “virtual” scenario of dissection illuminates aspects of the lived body that are rather different from those of the in-school dissection. The manifold sense impressions that assaulted the students in the previous descriptions are either absent or very much muted in this virtual exercise: There is no smell of formaldehyde or rotting flesh; there is no need to fear that blood or any other liquid might come “spurting” from the creature being dissected. Also, instead of first seeing the animal “lying in the sink” or “flattened” in a box or jar, the first experience with the frog occurs while waiting for it to load in the browser window. Handling and even cutting into the animal, furthermore, is a question of clicking on the correct button (the scalpel) and gliding it, in effect, across part of the screen. Naturally, there is much more to a dissection than viscerally unpleasant and indelible sights, smells and other sensations. There are well thought-out and articulated reasons for its inclusion in science and biology curricula, such as knowledge of “the structure and function of organs”


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(Jordan School District, 2004) and safe selection and use of dissection “apparatus and materials” (Sackville High School, 2008). However, speaking experientially, impressions of disgust, nausea and repulsion initially seem to overwhelm other, less visceral and more intellectual aspects of the in-school dissection. As mentioned above, this barrage of sense impressions is registered in specifically visceral terms, in the stomach, in the form of feelings of nausea and sickness—the word “viscera” referring to the lower abdomen or “bowels regarded as the seat of emotion” (OED, 2007). A related term, “gross” –meaning “plain, not delicate” or “uncleanly or repulsive in quality” (OED, 2007)—is also prominent in accounts of lab dissection, appearing no less than three times in the remarks quoted above. In more formal accounts, the term “squeamishness”—and its related meanings of nausea, sickness, queasiness and disgust (OED, 2007) – is repeatedly used to characterize student impressions of, and reactions to, dissection experiences (e.g., Barr & Herzog, 2000; Solot & Arluke, 1997). And “squeamishness” refers not only to a condition of the stomach, to the state of “being affected with nausea or qualms;” but it also corresponds to distinctly less visceral terms such as “disdainfulness,” “reserve,” or to “the quality... of being highly or excessively fastidious or dainty” (OED, 2007). What is significant in these definitions is clear evidence of a connection between the mind and body, intellect and viscera. Defined in terms of “qualms,” “reserve,” or “fastidiousness,” words such as gross, visceral or squeamish can refer to an overwhelmingly embodied feeling on the one hand; but on the other, they can also designate a more mental or intellectual state or position of defense, discomfort or unease. A profoundly uncomfortable or disquieting situation or experience, in other words, can be registered in terms of a deeply felt disgust or repulsion, and at the same time, can take the form of intellectual disquiet or be articulated in terms of moral qualms. Consider one undergraduate student's testimony in which he criticizes the ethics of dissection by recalling a particularly “sick feeling” that he associates not only with the literally visceral aspects of laboratory dissection, but also with less literally “gutsy” matters as well:

I feel a sick feeling thinking about those labs. The same sick feeling I felt as a child when I saw a dead frog, shot by a neighbor kid in my creek.... The same sick feeling I felt when I found that [an old railroad landmark] in Tolono had been bulldozed. And the same sick feeling I felt when I saw a pedestrian struck and killed by a car in Phoenix …during a spring break trip (Hassler, 2000).

The acts and the ethical implications of destroying a historical landmark, witnessing an accidental death, and dissecting a frog are obviously very different; but what is important in each case is the feeling of lived body that this student associates with each, and his reference to this recurrent feeling to justify an ethical and intellectual position against dissection. This further emphasizes the connection between embodied sensation and intellectual conviction, between feelings of the “gut” and impressions and decisions of the “mind.” In an article on the “guts” and learning, Robyn Barnacle observes the following about the “viscera” and knowledge:

recognition of the emotionality of the gut is evident in everyday expressions, such as gutless, which refers to a lack of courage, or a fearful gut. In addition, both the notions of ‘gut reaction’ and ‘gut instinct’ treat the gut as a site of specific responsiveness to the world, the former in an immediate, unreflective sort of way, and the latter, conversely, as a particularly fine-tuned and insightful form of intelligence (2009, 26).

The gut provides us with ways of knowing that can be instant and immediate, but also subtle and insightful. For example, in the descriptions of dissection provided above, there is experiential evidence of a kind of communication, connection or relation between bodies: Cutting into the soft belly of an animal, or witnessing the injury or death of a pedestrian are illustrative of a kind of


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experiential relation that can exist between our body and those of others–even when those “others” are mammals or other creatures. And although these examples of incision and even death are extreme, this kind of connection and relation can be said to exist in more commonplace and everyday contexts. This is a relation that is closely related to empathy, specifically as it is defined as the “project[ion of] one's personality into (and so fully comprehending) the object of contemplation” (OED, 2007). This experiential aspect is the embodied or corporeal correlative to intersubjectivity, and is designated intercorporeality. 4. Distantiation, Care and Risk As the dissection progresses, it moves from an initial and explicitly intercorporeal encounter with the body of the animal and its tactile and olfactory characteristics, and becomes an exploration of its internal anatomy and physiology. As this transition occurs, a different set of experiential elements are foregrounded. At the same time, the experience of intercorporeality, as an empathic connection between bodies in the dissection experience remains an important but more implicit factor. One student interviewed for this study explains:

The rat that we were dissecting had its tongue jammed out of its mouth and had clumps of fur sticking everywhere; it kind of looked like Bill the Cat from the cartoon “Bloom County.” So my lab partner and I named it “Bill the Rat.” The fact that the rat looked like a cartoon character made the dissection easier to deal with.

Similar techniques of distantiation, de-humanization or “de-animalization” (as Solot and Arluke 1997, 35 put it) are apparent in other accounts. For example, Barr and Herzog report that some “students cover[ed] the face of the animals they were dissecting,” with one of these students explaining:

Every time we’ve worked on it (the pig) the face was covered. I couldn’t cut the face. I could watch, and once the face was cut it didn’t look like a pig anymore, and I could deal with that because it looked like—you know—a scientific experiment to me (2000, 59).

In the place of a strong intercorporeal link between the dissected animal and the student doing the dissection, a different relationship between the two is gradually emerging. Instead of being marked by a visceral, acutely empathic response, concerns of a more intellectual manner come to the fore:

As these changes take place, the viewer’s gaze is directed toward the newly exposed organs. One student observed, “You opened it up and the pig just like flapped down. You didn’t see [the animal] when you looked at it. You didn’t see the pig, you just saw like insides.”… One student, who expressed ambivalence about the prospect of dissecting, said, “I couldn’t physically open it myself... but once it’s open then I can look” (Solot & Arluke, 1997, 35).

Although the smell of formaldehyde and rotting flesh certainly remain, they no longer combine with the sight of the animal’s body to simply repulse students, making them squeamish, or “grossing them out.” Instead, a different set of sentiments and impressions become possible. These include feelings of curiosity, a desire to explore and experiment, or in some cases, the emotional response of outright fascination. As one interviewee puts it, a kind of “conflict developed” for her “between the intricacy of the internal organs of the rat on the one hand, and its stinking and revolting body on the other.” The interviewee also describes what was revealed in the rat’s insides as a kind of “marvel: all of these little body parts, fitting and working neatly together like a sort of beautiful wet machine.” Barr and Herzog say they “heard comments like


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“God, his liver is like a mushroom or something. His heart’s kinda tough. Feel that,” and “look at that. Ooh, its got a weird texture” (2000, 63). Reflecting a more playful curiosity—or simply greater bravado—Barr and Herzog also report that:

On one occasion… boys in a group cut out their pig’s intestines and stretched them almost completely across the room, inadvertently demonstrating the extraordinary length of the viscera to the rest of the class (2000, 61).

A pig’s small intestines, it should be noted, form a tiny ball together with the large intestines, but when they are uncoiled they can stretch to 20 feet or more in length. Whether the act of uncoiling this organ across the length of a room is judged to be in bad taste or as a legitimate experiment, it is certainly a type of improvisation that would have no direct equivalent in an online dissection. It is also worth noting that this kind of activity brings with it a special kind of risk, since it may not be entirely neat or tidy, it is not reversible if done in error. As one student reports, “the rat got kind of mutilated,” and sometimes the “organ or part that the instructor would point out would no longer be there.” The online dissection provides a similar emphasis on the work of accessing and exploring the deceased animal’s viscera, but at the same time, of course, it provides many points of contrast. Following the incisions into the belly of the frog, the dissection software described above proceeds by showing the student a pair of scissors. The student is asked to “cut upwards with the scissors through the muscle tissue.” After clicking on the scissors a few times text pops up advising the student to “twist the scissors to avoid cutting the heart under the ribs.” Yet another icon appears and when selected, it causes the scissors to slip over to one side, allowing the student to continue cutting. Clicking and dragging through a few more steps, the internal organs of the frog gradually begin to appear. Then the cursor abruptly turns into a magnifying glass, allowing the student to zoom in on the animal’s abdomen. A label appears for each organ as the magnifying glass passes over it. Clicking on each of the labels causes the organ’s name to be added to a list in a small notebook page that has appeared on the right side of the simulation window—making the whole process remarkably seamless and uninterrupted.


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Figure 2: Organization of organs

Emotions and impressions of various kinds are manifest in the simulated dissection, as they were in the descriptions of classroom dissection. But their substance and intensity are rather different. In the simulated dissection, what appears as remarkable is the responsiveness of the interface, the ease and convenience with which the dissection steps can be negotiated. One instrument replaces another almost magically, and they function together seamlessly. The user glides and clicks on the mouse as one dissection instrument is automatically replaced by another, and as labels hover over the dissected animal’s body—to be recorded in a notepad with a mere mouse-click. 5. Computer Use as a Relational Strategy The ease with which the user can exchange one tool for another in the online dissection can be seen as a significant pedagogical advantage, as a convenient, carefully-integrated set of interactional possibilities or affordances that allow the student to focus on the anatomy of the frog rather than on the mechanics of the dissection tools. However, it is worth reflecting briefly on precisely what is asked of the student when she engages with different tools in the classroom dissection, and similarly, what is required in engaging with the screen, keyboard and mouse in the simulation. According to Robert Rosenberger, engagement with different kinds of offline tools involves the adoption of what he refers to as different “relational strategies” (2009). To engage with a particular technology, Rosenberger explains, is to “embody” that technology in particular ways. Referring specifically to the example of using a magnifying glass, Rosenberger writes:


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To embody a technology, one…must comport one’s body in a certain manner. I use the term relational strategy to refer to the particular configuration of bodily habits, intentions, and conceptions that make it possible for a person to take up a particular stable relation [with a given technology]. For example, for a person to use a magnifying glass to enlarge text on a page, she or he must possess a particular relational strategy for embodying the device… This relational strategy involves certain conceptions of the magnifying glass, and certain bodily comportments and habits regarding its operation (emphasis in original, 2009, 176).

Just as the use of a magnifying glass to examine a specimen or to enlarge text on a page involves a particular strategy of positioning and aligning the given object, the body and the eye, the use of scissors in dissection requires a rather different set of approaches for coordinating forces and movements applied through the fingers, hands and arms. Similarly, engagement with a computer involves its own kind of comportments and habits: the face of the reader/writer and that of the screen must meet or “interface” at a prescribed angle, almost as parallel planes. Additionally, to do anything more than reading or watching the screen, both hands must also be kept on or near the keyboard and mouse. The computer can be remarkably fixed and inflexible in its demands on the comportments and dispositions of those engaged with it. Even in portable or hand-held incarnations, engagement with the computer is generally both “hands-on” (with a keyboard or other interface) and “face-to-face” (with the screen).2 Writing on the topics of “new media” or “virtuality,” some have used the metaphorics of “imprisonment” to refer to the way that the computer confines its users to the specific relational strategy of screen, the mouse, keyboard and other devices. In The Virtual (2003), Rob Shields, for example, explains how this technology “both liberates and incarcerates” (p. 11); and in The Language of New Media (2001) Lev Manovich, speaks of “the imprisonment of the body” realized in using computer technology (p. 105). Physical maladies associated with extensive computer use provide a different kind of evidence for these charges of incarceration at the hands of the computer. From “Blackberry-” or “gamers’-thumb,” through “work-related upper limb disorder,” to “carpal-tunnel syndrome,” these maladies are known collectively as “repetitive strain” or “repetitive stress” injuries—highlighting the very “repetitive,” narrowly-defined nature of embodied engagement with computer technology. One significant historical precursor for the experience of the relational strategies represented by the fixed arrangement of keyboard and screen is provided by the technology of the typewriter. Writing in the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty describes this experience, simultaneously situating it in a discussion of habitual and embodied “knowledge:”

It is possible to know how to type without being able to say where the letters which make the words are to be found on the banks of keys... If [this kind of] habit is neither a form of knowledge nor an involuntary action, then what is it? It is a knowledge in the hands, which is forthcoming only when bodily effort is made, and cannot be formulated in detachment from that effort… When I sit at a typewriter, a motor space opens up beneath my hands, in which I am about to ‘play’ what I have read (2002, 166-167).

When we sit at a keyboard (and monitor), to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty, a space of action and of vision open up in front of our hands and eyes. This is a highly habitualized terrain, one that is intricately sub-divided in space and layered in time: Through hundreds of individual keystrokes, and acts of scrolling, clicking and dragging, this type of engagement seems similar to a process of weaving and reinforcing a complex web of habit, perhaps best described as a combination of many interconnected of relational strategies.


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The comportment or relational strategy required by a computer is different in (at least) one important way from those elicited by other tools and instruments such as pins, magnifying glasses or scissors: instead of allowing the individual to undertake one task each requiring different relational strategies (such as fastening, magnifying, or cutting) the computer allows users to undertake the widest range of tasks with one relational strategy. And in doing so, it requires only a single relational strategy. Cutting, magnifying, fastening and many other types of work can be all be accomplished while seated in front of a screen, with hands at (or near) the keyboard and mouse. Unlike the earlier description of working with and switching between the magnifying glass, the writing pad and other dissection instruments, working with the simulation does not involve a change in disposition or mode of operation. There is no particular “relational strategy” that might involve “bodily comportments and habits regarding [any one instrument’s] operation” as Rosenberger says. Instead, the various activities comprising the dissection are all exclusively associated with those facilities, dispositions and habits that are part of using a computer. These skills have no more obvious relation to the activity of dissection than they do to myriad other activities that can be undertaken using computers and networks like composing, browsing, clicking or dragging. And for someone who has mastered these generic interface skills, the online dissection can indeed seem remarkably seamlessness. Corresponding to the different relational strategies (or sets of these strategies) associated with each instrument in the dissection is a particular type of “care” or attention that each elicits. The online exercise instructs the student to take care to turn the scissors onto their side “to avoid cutting the heart under the ribs.” However, this particular instance of being “careful” and attentive involves a mere mouse-click. No one mouse click or keyboard stroke, of course, is necessarily more gently or skillfully executed than any other—at least as far as computer software is concerned. Further reducing the need for a particularly attuned care or caution is the fact that the simulation provides “back” or “undo” buttons or commands, allowing any one action to be immediately reversed. In fact, with the online dissection, there ultimately seems to be no chance of making an error with the incision or with any other part of the dissection activity overall. Taking “care” to avoid these types of errors is simply a matter of clicking and dragging in the ways and in the places that the simulation allows and points towards. In the classroom dissection, irreversible errors, of course, can be made, and things can go seriously wrong. As mentioned earlier, parts of the dissected body can be cut or removed incorrectly, rendering further steps in the dissection process impossible to perform. There are other aspects of the dissection that require special care: The razor-sharp scalpel can do damage to living, human flesh as easily as it can slice the body of the dissected animal. And gloves and goggles must be worn to protect students’ hands and eyes from the preservative chemicals which are also deadly poisons. Different acts of incision, probing and exploration require different levels and types of dexterity and facility. One act of incision or act of probing can indeed be very different from another, in its quality, its effectiveness and its care. And there is no way to simply undo a particular action or decision: In keeping with its natural origins, the body of the rat, pig or other animal cannot be the subject of any sort of “undo” command. It cannot be “refreshed,” “reset,” or “rebooted.” 6. The Virtual Dissection: Pliable, Discontinuous, Brilliant The experiential possibilities and limitations presented by simulated and in-school dissections may be further explored by looking specifically how theorists of technology have enumerated and described the qualities of “virtual” “hyperreal” and “microworld” objects and settings. For example, Rob Shields describes how such virtual objects and spaces


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have an elusive quality which comes from their status as being both nowhere and yet present via [technology]. …they also have duration but strictly speaking, neither history, nor a future. Of course there is a history of virtual spaces and of the technologies that make [them] possible… But inside a virtual space itself, there is only the immediacy of the scenario displayed (2003, 51).

Virtual objects, in other words, are not “worn out” or “used up;” they are not abandoned to decompose in a landfill. Unlike the formaldehyde-soaked carcass and organs of a dissected animal or a dulled scapel or pair of scissors, virtual objects do not have to be “disposed of” once they have outlived their usefulness. They can be endlessly minimized, closed, reopened and refreshed. In this sense, virtual objects can be said to occupy a kind of placeless space, to inhabit a kind of timeless present or “immediacy.” Augustin Araya uses the term “microworld objects” to describe other properties of these virtual things and spaces (1997). He characterizes simulated objects as lacking “certain kinds of functional and physical properties; for example,” he says, “they cannot malfunction nor break in the sense that real objects do.” Although these objects, like the computer technology on which they rely can freeze up or disappear from the screen, they generally cannot be “broken” or “mutilated” in ways that go beyond the preconceived limitations of software designers. In the online dissection, for example, the user is simply not allowed to cut or explore the frog carcass in the wrong way. The only type of malfunction or breakage that can occur is instead a completely different kind: the computer could lose power or the browser or the operating system can crash. In a critique of “hyperreality,” philosopher Albert Borgmann characterizes virtual contexts and objects as being (among other things) “pliable,” “brilliant,” “discontinuous and disposable” (1992, 87-102). Borgmann describes hyperreal objects as being pliable specifically in the sense that they can be “entirely subject[ed] to…desire and manipulation” (1992, 88). This pliability is perhaps most vividly illustrated in the online dissection in the ease with which the virtual frog can first be sliced open, its organs revealed, then inspected with a magnifying glass, and finally noted with pencil and paper. As mentioned earlier, no one tool or task in these activities requires a particular disposition comportment or effort that would differ from any other. Borgmann describes the discontinuous and disposable characteristics of hyperreal objects and environments specifically in terms of their relationship to their context:

To be disposable, hyperreality must be experientially discontinuous with its context. If it were deeply rooted in its setting, it would take a laborious and protracted effort to deracinate and replace it. Reality encumbers and confines (1992, 95-96).

The description of classroom dissection above is rife with examples of encumbrance and confinement: this begins with the persistent odor that is a part of the preserved animal’s “context,” and extends to the irreversible incisions that might render certain organs absent or unidentifiable. Neither the process nor the product of physical dissection lend themselves to discontinuity or disposability in the sense that Borgman associates with the hyperreal: the toxic remains of the dissection are also all too persistent, and present particular challenges for safety, cleansing, and disposal.3 By way of contrast, undo and redo options or buttons on the virtual dissection are not so much convenient features as they are intrinsic properties for this virtual world—a world in which an object can be refreshed, rebooted or shut down simply at will.


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Borgman describes the “hyperreal” quality of brilliance in terms of an “absence of noise” and a heightening of an object’s “attractive” features. The “truly brilliant reality,” Borgman says, “would exclude all unwanted information,” resulting in an experience in which only those aspects of explicit relevance are provided. In the online dissection, or nearly all encumbering physical and intercorporeal aspects of the activity are removed; what remains is indeed brilliant in Borgmann’s sense, from the X’s and dotted lines that appear in the places for fastening and incision to the appearance and disappearance of instruments, labels and other visual prompts. 7. Educational “Brilliance” The inclusion of “brilliant” features in virtual contexts—and the systematic exclusion of all forms of encumbrance and confinement—is remarkably consistent with the way that virtual instructional simulations are actually conceptualized and designed. The tasks and activities to be included in such a simulation are analyzed and selected in terms of how they might contribute to the attainment of specific educational objectives or learning outcomes. Those parts of the task or activity relevant to the educational objectives are included or even heightened in the design, and those elements that are deemed irrelevant or unnecessarily confining and encumbering are excluded. Such a selection of elements is considered as a part of “instructional design,” a field that works to “design… learning experiences” so as to maximize their instructional effectiveness and efficiency (Dede, Whitehouse, Brown-L’Bahy, 2002). Practitioners in this field sometimes reference a quasi-mathematical formula that captures the processes of inclusion and exclusion specifically from a design perspective. For example, Jacobs and Dempsey explain:

The supposition we make is that one only needs to simulate those events or characteristics that allow the learner to perform in a proficient manner when performing in the operational environment, i.e., the real world. This representation of the characteristics of simulation has been characterized by Gagné (1962), and later by Clariana in the following formula: Simulation = (Reality) - (Task irrelevant elements) (Jacobs & Dempsy, 1993, 200; Leemkuil et al., 2003, 93; Chandra & Sharma, 2004, 106).

A simulation, in other words, is a representation of the reality of a task or activity, with only those elements included and represented which are required for the attainment of predetermined learning outcomes, or predefined measures of learner proficiency. All other elements and components are to be be subtracted or eliminated in order to maximize instructional efficiency. As mentioned earlier, educational outcomes typically associated with dissection include “knowledge of [the animal’s] internal anatomy,” “skills and processes [for working with] primary data” (Scholl, 2007), and the “practice [and] understand[ing of] dissection [as] a method of scientific investigation” (Mondragon, 2005). It is precisely by eliminating those elements which do not explicitly or directly contribute to the attainment of these goals—and by including and heightening those elements that do—that the online dissection simulation is designed. Its design and operation instantiates this in a way that is very deliberate, rigorous and systematic. Using Borgmann’s terms, it excludes “noise” that would “encumber” and “confine”—from the persistence of the animal’s body to the insistence of the smells emanating from it. And it includes those features such as labels, pins, scissors and a magnifying glass only when their presence is instructionally and practically desirable. The end product, then, is one which is as “pliable” and accommodating of “discontinuity” and “disposability” as possible; it is as fully deracinated from


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any environment—laboratory or otherwise—as design will allow. In short, the simulation can be said to be “brilliant” in a way that is specifically instructional or educational. But does this completely capture and exhaust the pedagogical significance or value of the dissection activity? 8. Dissection: Interface, Encumbrance or Upheaval? To begin to answer this question and bring this paper to its conclusion, it is important to reflect specifically on the different origins of the objects or bodies being dissected. A virtual object typically develops, or rather, is developed on the computer screen through the actions and interactions of instructional, technical and graphical designers, and other experts. In this process, as already indicated, all aspects of the simulation are developed and coordinated according to specific, enumerated instructional objectives. The original development of the organic object dissected in the lab, of course, occurs very differently, taking place through “natural” processes of (re)generation rather than through specialized acts of production. It occurs not in a workplace or on a computer screen, but in the warm and wet darkness of a body. This can be the body of the animal itself, or the womb of its mother. This development, in other words, occurs through a kind of propagation and differentiation of elements of flesh and bone—through processes of gradual folding and unfolding, shaping and reshaping of proliferating, living matter. Of course, this process does not revolve around explicit, educational objectives, but occurs for its own “reasons” (if they can be called that). To summarize, the virtual object is designed by someone for explicit human (educational) purposes, whereas its physical counterpart develops on its own for purposes that are (at best) implicit and are not directly reducible to instructional human ends. As something developed by experts for explicit, human ends, the simulation exercise differs in other ways from the in-school dissection. Like any other piece of software, students engage with the simulation via an “interface.” This refers to the means by which the various components and tools of the simulation are accessed and manipulated. A quick look at the language used in the literature of interface design reveals some interesting patterns related to phenomenology. This vocabulary includes words such as “seamlessness,” “transparency,” “translucency,” “playability,” “learnability,” “flow” and “intuitiveness”—all of which designate desirable design attributes for interfaces (e.g., see: usabilityfirst, 2010). This vocabulary makes it clear that one of the goals of interface design is a kind of comfortable certainty and familiarity. And this type of experience, moreover, is clearly resonant with the kinds of terms Husserl uses to describe intentionality. Intentionality, as mentioned at the outset, refers to the everyday purposes, plans and categories that connect us with the world around us. It renders this reality familiar, enabling us, as Husserl says, to “live in certainty of the world,” and in this sense sustain the everyday, commonsense “natural attitude.” Terms such as seamlessness, transparency and flow all suggest that the person engaged with an interface or a computer (whether working or playing) should be able to become familiar with its features and functions in a manner that is easy or “intuitive.” The smooth operation of and interaction with the interface is thus rendered clear or “translucent.” Further, the interface is then also able to provide a virtual domain in which an individual is able to operate in an uninterrupted, intentionally-directed “flow”—a flow that is said to represent a deliberately maximized or “optimal experience” (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). Computers and particularly their interfaces, in other words, are designed to anticipate and facilitate what we want to do, when we want to do it. In the dissection exercise, as a very simple example, scissors appear precisely when an incision is required, and a magnifying glass takes their place when closer inspection is needed. This smoothly flowing motion from one tool to another is intended to provide students with an experience of uninterrupted transparency and seamlessness: a sustained but prereflective assurance of “living-in-certainty-of-the-world.”4


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Attempts to simulate experience of encumbrance and inconvenience on the computer highlight further important differences that separate online dissection from that undertaken in school: In particular, and as already indicated above, each involves rather different experiences of care. The warning in the frog dissection simulation to carefully “twist the scissors to avoid cutting the heart under the ribs” is a simple, specific example. What the simulation actually requires at this point is a mouse-click that is no different—no more “careful” or skillful—than any other. To simulate this type of care, and the encumbrance and confinement that it presupposes, is to work against the very logic, design and purposes of the computer and its interfaces. Attempts to simulate encumbrance, and confinement—and other experiences like deprivation or deprival5—end up being experienced as either trivial or futile. They are seen as arbitrary or unnecessary irritations, rather than as challenges inherent to the task itself. If a more significant disruption takes place in the online dissection—a browser or operating system crash, for example—such a disruption would not be proper to or draw attention to the dissection exercise. It would instead draw the student’s attention to the computer or the simulation software, and perhaps also to the artificial nature of the simulation itself. In this sense, the simulated dissection can be said to confront the student not with something different, other or unusual, but with an interface and mode of engagement that is likely all too familiar in a media-saturated lifeworld. The simulated dissection is unavoidably presented in a way that is carefully designed to reinforce rather than undermine the natural attitude or Husserl’s sense of living “in-certainty-of-the-world.” In other words, the “intentional threads” that Merleau-Ponty says always connect us with the world around us are in this case taut or very tightly drawn –with no excess available to encourage awareness of self or of one’s epistemological situation. If the simulation can thus be said to confront the student with more of the self-same and familiar, then the classroom dissection can be described as presenting him or her with that which is not the self, with that which is “other.” It is a situation in which the intentional threads are slackened, and as a result, they are readily brought to our notice. The “other” according to phenomenologist Bernard Waldenfels is something that is manifest as a kind of disruption of the self, its world, its plans and intentions. Waldenfels goes so far as to describe it as an “upheaval,” and he adds: “As far as such upheavals are concerned, one can only yield to them or withdraw from them” (2007, 30). One could say that this choice between yielding and withdrawing captures the situation faced by the students in the in-school dissection exercise. The purpose of drawing distinctions between the virtual and the “real” in this way is not to enter the fray of arguments directly for or against animal dissection. Instead, I am attempting to broaden the factors or criteria considered in such arguments—and in doing so, to say something about the nature of pedagogy and pedagogical experience. Like all experience, pedagogical experience is about an encounter between self and world. This experience can have the character of an upheaval or disruption, or it can be planned and optimized in advance, down to the finest detail. Both of these types of experience—experiences of inconvenience, encumbrance, or disruption and of familiarity, pliability, flow, and brilliance—are important in education. For example, the attribute of “brilliance” that Borgmann ascribes to the hyperreal can be seen as being of significant pedagogical value (as the above reference to “educational brilliance” already suggests): The elimination of irrelevance or noise, and the foregrounding of that which is relevant or important is—with good reason—an indispensible part of lesson planning and instructional design processes. In many contexts, “educational brilliance” and the associated phenomena of flow, transparency and learnability makes sense as a pedagogical goal. But we should not conclude from this that such experiences represent the sum total of what is desirable for education. Opacity, disruption and upheaval—rather than always requiring withdrawal or protection—need to be studied and cultivated as educational experiences. Experiences that are emphatically embodied, mediated affectively and viscerally, are intrinsic to what it is to know, to


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judge, to sense, to learn and to educate. At the same time, it is evident that these experiential elements cannot always be captured or engaged through systematic categorization and planning. By definition, disruption and upheaval are mutually exclusive to processes of systematic planning—and run against the grain of the interfaces through which planned instruction is increasingly delivered. Opacity, encumbrance and disruption—with the unfamiliarity and uncertainty they imply—are instead disclosed only through a slackening of the figurative threads of intention, categorization and planning. As a rigorous means through which these threads can be loosened and the grip of intentionality relaxed, phenomenology takes valuable first steps in bringing this experiential realm into focus. References Araya, A. A. (1997). "Experiencing the World Through Interactive Learning Environments." Techné:

Journal of the Society for Philosophy and Technology. 3(2). http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/SPT/v3n2/ARAYA.html

Barnacle, R. (2009). "Gut Instinct: The Body and Learning." Educational Philosophy and Theory. 41(1): 22-33.

Barr, G., & H. A. Herzog. (2000). "Fetal Pig: The High School Dissection Experience." Society & Animals. 8(1): 53- 69.

Borgman, A. (1992). Crossing the Postmodern Divide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chandra, S.S., & R. K. Sharma. (2004). Sociology of Education. New Dehli: Atlantic Publishers. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row. Dede, C., P. Whitehouse, & T. Brown-L’Bahy. (2002). "Designing and Studying Learning Experiences that Use

Multiple Interactive Media to Bridge Distance and Time," In Current Perspectives on Applied Information Technologies, Vol. 1: Distance Education, C. Vrasid & G. Glass (eds.). Greenwich, CT: Information Age Press, 1-30.

Froguts.com. 2003. Froguts, http://froguts.com/ Froguts.com 2009. Froguts, http://froguts.com/flash_content/index.html Gagné, R. M. (1962). Psychological Principles in System Development. New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston. Hassler, F. (2000). Student Choice for Dissection Alternatives, Experience Notebook.

http://www.dissectionchoice.org/notebook.html Haury, D. L. (1996). Alternatives to Animal Dissection in School Science Classes (Report No. EDO-SE-96-08),

Columbus, OH: Clearinghouse for Science Mathematics and Environmental Education (ERIC Document Reproduction ServiceNo.ED402155), http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/contentdelivery/servlet/ERICServlet?accno=ED402155

Hein, S.F., & W. J. Austin. (2001). "Empirical and Hermeneutic Approaches to Phenomenological Research in Psychology: A Comparison." Psychological Methods. 6: 3–17.

Husserl, E. (1970). Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Husserl, E. (1983). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. New York: Springer.

Jacobs, J. W., & J. V. Dempsey. (1993). "Simulation and Gaming: Fidelity, Feedback, and Motivation." In: Interactive Instruction and Feedback, J. V. Dempsey, & G. C. Sales (eds.). Englewood Hills, NJ: Educational Technology Publications, 197-227.

Johnson, D. (1997). “Frogs’ Best Friends: Students who won’t Dissect them.” New York Times, May 29. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D00E5DF123AF93AA15756C0A961958260.

Jordan School District. (2004). “4th Quarter Biology Project ‘Pig Dissection.’” http://edublog.sedck12.org/media/blogs/UTIPS/BioPT_C.doc

Leder, D. (1990). The Absent Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Leemkuil, H., T. de Jong, R. de, Hoog, & N. Christoph. (2003). "KM Quest: A Collaborative Internet-based Simulation

Game." Simulation & Gaming. 34: 89-111 Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge & Paul. Mondragon, J. (2005). Jordan School District Amphibian Curriculum: Frog Anatomy.

http://www.sf.adfg.state.ak.us/Static/Region1/amphib/PDFs/student.pdf OED [Oxford English Dictionary]. (2007). Oxford: Oxford UP. http://www.oed.com/ Rosenberger, R. (2009). "The Sudden Experience of the Computer." AI & Society: Knowledge, Culture, and

Communication. 24: 173–180. Sackville High School. (2008). Specific Curriculum Outcomes: Oceans [Grade] 11.

http://www.sackville.ednet.ns.ca/CurriculumDocuments/SCOFilesScience/OCE11SCO.pdf Scholl, C. (2007). General Template Rat Dissection Years 11-12.


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http://education.qld.gov.au/curriculum/area/science/docs/temp-rat11-12.doc Shields, R. (2003). The Virtual. London: Routledge. Smith, P. L., & T. J. Ragan. (1993). Instructional Design. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc. Solot, D. & A. Arluke. (1997). "Learning the Scientist's Role: Animal Dissection in Middle School." Journal of

Contemporary Ethnography. 26: 28-54. Texley, J. (2009). Educator Testimonials. http://www.animalearn.org/eduCntrTestimonials.php Texley, J. (1992). “Doing without Dissection.” American School Board Journal. 179(1): 24-26. Usabilityfirst. (2010). Usability Glossary. http://www.usabilityfirst.com/glossary/main.cgi Van Manen, M. (1997). Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy, 2nd ed.

London, ON: Althouse Press. Waldenfels, B. (2007). The Question of the Other. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong. Notes 1. This diagram and the multipart description for froguts.com combine characteristics of two versions of the online dissection simulation: one version was openly available in 2002-2003, and a second “demo” version was accessed 2008-2009. The descriptions of student experience of the simulation are developed from the author’s own engagement with the software during the two aforementioned time-frames (2002-2003 and 2008-2009). 2. Some exceptions are presented by adaptive and speech recognition interfaces, many of which allow differently-abled users to engage in a range of relational strategies. 3. At the same time, it is important to note that the animal in this dissection has itself been deracinated or uprooted from its own context—natural or otherwise. However, for this radical de-contextualizing to have been successful, a laborious and protracted effort is required: the animal’s body has to be drained of its natural fluids, and these have to be replaced with strong preservatives; the body needs to be kept in a sealed container, and once the dissection has begun, further steps need to be taken for its preservation. 4. Indeed, as one phenomenological study (Leder, 1990) shows, the world of our own internal organs is generally experienced in either a manner that is shadowy and indirect, or in extreme emergencies, where our experience of them is essentially life-threatening in its danger and immediacy. This represents a new “context” from which this carcass now cannot easily be deracinated. 5. An example of other experiences difficult (if not impossible) to simulate is provided in Marc Prensky’s essay on “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants.” In it, he encourages the development of simulations for all types of curricula, even for subjects as problematic as the holocaust: “Create a simulation where students role-play the meeting at Wannsee, or one where they can experience the true horror of the camps” (2001, 6). The inability of simulations to render deprivation, encumbrance and confinement—along with experiences of risk and care—would clearly standing in the way of approximating the “true horror” of the camps.


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Response to Norm Friesen

Albert Borgmann University of Montana

Abstract Friesen has presented an articulate and detailed account of the injuries of virtualized education and a convincing brief for the value of education that is face-to-face and engaged with tangible reality. Keywords: Virtualized education, ambiguity of technology, ambiguity of reform, engagement with reality. Norm Friesen has written an exemplary paper—well-crafted, diligent, and substantial. There is at last some dismay in the national conversation of the United States about the distracting and shallowing effects of information technology. But that dismay is in part based on impressions and in part on survey data. Impressions can be valuable clues, and social science data are needed to test and undergird philosophical analysis. But that’s not enough. Impressions by themselves are fuzzy, and survey results alone are colorless. What Friesen has produced is a description of the effect of information technology that is articulate and colorful. It rests solidly on a thorough examination of what happens in classrooms, and it turns on a case that is striking in its contrast of actual and virtual reality. Some of Friesen’s theoretical substructure is less helpful than it might have been though its deficiencies did not do any damage to the substance of his paper. Husserl’s conception of intentionality became increasingly abstract as his phenomenology became transcendental. The “Crisis” essay was in part a return to concreteness, but that turn did not pivot on Husserl’s intentionality. Hubert Dreyfus’s conception of practice would provide much more congenial support for Friesen’s concerns. But in the main, I want to build on Friesen’s paper and use it as a basis for a discussion of an ambiguity that haunts the current dismay about information technology and in fact about technology more generally. It’s an ambiguity that is constantly in danger of being resolved in the wrong way and thus to allay the current distress in an equally distressing way. One of the things that are so helpful in Friesen’s paper is his demonstration that the use of information technology in the case of dissection is itself ambiguous. There is the loss of engagement in virtual dissection, so memorably described by Friesen, but then there is also the gain of not having to kill a lot of animals and of not offending the real and honorable sensibilities of pupils. This two-sidedness alerts us to the need to avoid summary appraisals of information technology and to recognize both that there are clear cases on either side of the divide that virtual dissection straddles and that judgments become more difficult the nearer to the divide a particular phenomenon is located. Of course, no matter how far down on the virtual slope of distraction and wasted time a cultural phenomenon may be found—twittering, texting, friending, video gaming—there will be intrepid defenders who claim that the region in question is in fact hospitable to social interaction and mental improvement. But there is now wide-spread doubt and countervailing evidence and, most


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important, a growing hunger for reality, for the commanding presence of the surprising, and unfathomable things and events that Friesen describes so well. In the wider reaches of this hopeful development you find appreciation for the irreplaceable value of face-to-face instruction, a call to return to real or actual food, and the advocacy of walkable urban environments. In education, there are moreover demands to enforce rigorous teaching to ambitious standards. The disturbing ambiguity that settles on these laudable tendencies becomes visible when reformers feel called upon to explain or defend these proposals. Why should we do all these things? The answers most often resort to health or sustainability—the health of persons, the health of the economy, the health of the planet. In these justifications a gap between means and ends begins to open up—reforms are the means, health is the end. To begin with education, we need to reform it to be able to compete and to restore health to our economy. Eating real food makes you healthy, and shortening the food miles slows the ailments of the planet. Walking to the store, the courthouse, or the post office is good for cardiovascular health. But once reforms are defended as instruments, they are entered into competition with the paradigmatic instrument of today, the machinery of technology, and whether they will always prevail is an open question. What’s worse is the gauzy end that remains unchallenged by the prominence of the means. The end, the goal, the purpose of it all? Isn’t that obvious? It’s prosperity when people have good jobs and can afford the good things in life, a nice house with a three-car garage, a big family room with a large plasma screen, . . . My suggestion is that behind the reform of wholesome means there lurks the unwholesome life of consumption. It’s a disparity that lines up well with the division between real and virtual dissection that Friesen has marked so incisively. Friesen concludes his article with a determined rejection of instrumentalized education—a commendable move. But here is a second instance where the philosophical support he has used has not served him as well as it might have. To reject the conventional instrumental view of education that is so easily commandeered by technology is a good thing, but rejection can mean rebellion or replacement. Rebellion in the name of disruption and upheaval may be a helpful beginning, but it is not enough, and it is less than that if it is extended to the teachers, the pupils, and the parents as a choice between yielding or withdrawing. What’s needed is an invitation to a richer alternative that can take the place of instrumentalized and virtualized education. Education, childhood, and adolescence are no doubt instrumental and preparatory with a view to adulthood and maturity. But they are more than that; they are also final in harboring times and stages of our lives that are captivating and memorable in their own right, full of charms and pains that provide a backdrop for the rest of our lives. What Friesen shows so impressively is that to virtualize education is to flatten and impoverish the depth and wealth of education. His description of real dissection is best understood as an invitation to a life that is engaging, invigorating, and profoundly enriching. It’s a lesson of wide and urgent significance.


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Dissection and Simulation: A Postphenomenological Critique

Don Ihde Stony Brook University

Abstract In the lead article dissection is juxtaposed to simulation, but the problem is the example set on both sides is antiquated. I argue that a dynamic set of imaging technologies uses as in science documentaries is far superior to either the the 18th-19th century notions of biological education illustrated is what is needed. Keywords: dissection, simulation, instrumental phenomenological variations. A postphenomenological critique of both dissection and simulation draws, on the one hand, from ‘science studies’ and on the other ‘philosophy of technology.’ Science studies raises the question: what practices are used to produce scientific knowledge? And the philosophy of technology in turn raises an analysis of what technologies are used to produce this scientific knowledge? From both perspectives, it is also recognized that science practices, involving technologies, must first transform natural objects into scientific objects. And this transformation applies equally to both dissection and simulation. Unfortunately, in the cases examined in the leading article, both dissections and simulations describe and deal with practices which are highly limited and out-of-date.

In the pedagogical dissection practices described, appealing both to secondary school student responses and to parental memories, the high school labs included use specimens which are dead and chemically preserved with formaldehyde, and with smells, secretions and odors from a decaying specimen. No wonder the practice is perceived as distasteful. As indicated, such a model for dissection is quite old, indeed, I would claim this dissection model is at least an 18th or 19th century model of biological knowledge based upon necessarily ‘dead’ objects. Older philosophy of biology recognized that part of the transformation from a natural to a scientific object included the passage from life to death. What is learned is a set of identities of organs—heart, liver, kidneys, etc.—as related to relative positions, shapes and appearances. This is how the frog or other specimen is transformed into a scientific or anatomical object. This does produce a limited type of scientific knowledge, but it is a statics limited to dead objects and which objects are usually considered distasteful to contemporary students. And even insofar as the function of organs is concerned, this is not derived from the dissection, but from the added—usually verbal or textual—commentary. (I, myself, deplore the waste of specimens in the hundreds of thousands in the large laboratories which still practice the outdated statics model in secondary schools.) Unfortunately, the simulation version of an online dissection is likewise modeled upon a rather poor virtual imitation of a dissection. It is cast in something of an entertainment mode with music or dialogue, in a set of simulation movements which entail mouse clicks or keystrokes which are nothing like the embodiment moves of classical dissection—the dissector is instructed not to cut into the heart which is under chest cavities, not by skillfully utilizing hand motions, but by self-consciously making the right ‘click.’ Moreover, whereas the smells and liquids are now gone, the model remains limited to a virtual statics depiction. In this sense the simulation is an impoverished virtual statics.


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Now, without denying that knowledge from a death based statics does provide some narrow kind of scientific knowledge, today’s biological knowledge demands much, much more and focuses much more primarily upon a dynamics. How does the circulation system work, the nervous system work, digestion, or even the living dynamics of frogs catching prey or behave in other life situations? In these cases the scientific knowledge produced is often produced through contemporary imaging technologies. I shall only selectively point to internal and external variants of these instruments. Today’s internal imaging relies upon micropscopic and laproscopic devices. For illustration here, I shall use my own experience of imaging technologies instead of high school biology examples. Colonoscopies entail a narrow tube device which has lighting, a wire-loop to remove polyps, and a full color display screen to show the inner surfaces of the intestine. The enterologist and (before the practice of anesthesia) the patient can see in full glowing color the intestinal interior. Similarly, in angioplasty the cardiologist (and the patient, who in this case must remain awake) can locate the obstruction for either balloon clearance or stent insertion. In the consultation process prior to my own heart surgery, the surgeon utilized a multi-screen display which showed what parts of the mitral valve needed repair, etc. The only device I myself missed using, was a pill sized camera which can be swallowed and which takes images all along the esophagus, stomach and intestinal track. Today I have a library of DVDs of “my case.” Now, while I have used autobiographical experience, these same devices can be used on living animals to produce dynamic physiological, neurological, and other knowledges. Moreover, the specimens remain alive. And, one can add an enormous other set of internal imaging processes such as MRI, fMRI, PET, CT, scaning devices. Granted, all these processes are expensive and high school labs cannot each have their own devices. But like me with my collection of “my case” DVDs, each high school lab can have high resolution imaging which produces the displays needed. Much can even be found on the internet and most without charge. Let us now switch to external imaging: example, a frog catching insect prey. Any ‘nature’ documentary can use high speed photography to depict a bullfrog, with speed too fast for human vision, to snag a fly or other flying insect with its rapid tongue motion. Or, even faster photography can show the flight trajectory of a humming bird as it does a courting display of dive-and-pullout for a watching female. And, as with the internal imaging, external imaging can depict the dynamics of courting, hunting, or other behaviors of living animals and DVDs are doubtless stored in high school libraries for classroom display. This is a different, imaging, transformation of what could be seen in naked eye compared to magnified and speed imaging, another variant upon nature-to-science object. My first point here is that today’s biology education, as with today’s scientific practices, takes up a wide set of variant instrumentally mediated perspectives, each producing different ranges of knowledges, which synthesized produces a much richer and robust result than the limited dissection/simulation example given. My next point continues the analysis of human-instrument interactivity, but this time in terms of a learning of embodied skills. To be sure, in both the antiquated dissection process and the virtual simulation process the student can learn skills—how to use the dissection knife, how to use the mouse and keys. But again these are narrow skills compared to the varieties of embodiment today available. For the moment switch to imagining the hi-tech skills which are contemporarily being used: my examples are robotic surgery and robotic military skills. The above angioplasty procedure is a common and simple example of robotic surgery. The surgeon manipulates a pair of “joystick-like” devices which eye-hand coordinating with the multiscreens showing the interior of the artery. This is what is frequently called “Nintendo surgery” because its model base—and skill


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design is more like that of computer games than traditional surgery. Only certain individuals can attain high skills with this new style of embodiment. Similarly, military robotics—say the piloting of a Predator surveillance aircraft in Afganistan, managed from a base in Nevada by a skilled operator sitting before a screen and again manipulating “joystick-like” controls , steers the craft over the targets predetermined. Here eye-hand coordination is focal, but it also is a form of embodiment which retains a number of analogue features with respect to intuitive or learned intuitive movements. It is very unlike the click which instructs the simulation dissector to avoid damaging the heart. Rather, the robotic, embodiment at a distance motions are part of contemporary science skills. This includes the time-space delay problems that controllers of the Mars Explorer encounter. Both embodiment skills and instrumental phenomenological variations would, in my opinion, enrich both the range and richness of secondary biological education. On my part, I was disappointed that Jennifer Graham, who suggested an imaginative alternative to the dissection example, was not granted producing a different slice of biological knowledge.


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Comment on Norm Friesen’s: “Dissection and Simulation: Brilliance and Transparency, or Encumbrance and Disruption?”

Estrid Sørensen

Ruhr-University Bochum Abstract Friesen's comparison between classroom practices and digital dissection carries the flaws of treating the digital and non-digital learning materials differently when comparing. This reply paper argues for a symmetric comparison through a focus on the way in which comparability between digital and non-digital learning materials is established by the researcher. It is suggested that such comparison might have brought about a result more favorable for digital technology. Keywords: comparability, Bruno Latour, learning-materials, digital materiality, symmetry principle Comparing different media is important in order to gain an understanding of their specificities; what they do to our lives, to our ways of interacting, to our thoughts, feelings and bodily engagements. As any researcher engaging in comparison is aware, this endeavor often requires considerable intervention in shaping the objects of comparison to make them comparable. Comparability has to be created (Niewöhner & Scheffer, 2010; Sørensen, 2008). Creating comparability between digital media, tools and practices with their non-digital counterparts confronts us with particular difficulties: on the one hand, we have objects that are familiar, well-integrated in particular practices, and which to a greater or lesser degree are ‘domesticated’ (Smits, 2006). On the other, we have objects that are new and even foreign or strange, that do not fit well with habitual practices, but rather irritate these, requiring practitioners to change their ways of going about things, often as well requiring an adjustment in social relationships. In his paper Norm Friesen takes upon himself the task of comparing two objects which are different along these lines: classroom dissection and a digital simulation of dissection. As is unfortunately quite common when scholars compare digital and non-digital media, Friesen does not reflect on the way in which he creates comparability in his study. For this reason, and because I think a more symmetric comparison would have led to quite different conclusions, this will be the focus of my comment. Friesen starts out by describing the rich practices unfolding in classroom dissections. Based on interviews, the analysis provides much more than just insight into what is done during dissection. We get to know how children experience dissection, how several of their senses are activated, how they, in their struggle to cope with this emotionally and morally provoking experience make jokes, name dead animals, focus on limited body parts and bracket out the ‘whole animal’, etc. Through interview excerpts a sense of the particular personal investments in the classroom activities is conveyed. The dissection simulation is described solely on the basis of imagined generalized ‘users’’ engagement with the program. There is no reference in the paper to which ‘users’ were studied. However, regardless of who and how many were actually involved, alone the different textual depiction of, on the one hand, anonymous ‘users’ and on the other, specific children with personal utterances transports an impression of the simulation as sterile and “brilliant,” and of the classroom dissection as creatively and emotionally complex. Would it have been possible to convey a similar impression of the simulation if we were indeed confronted with transcripts of


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sounds of disgust children might have expressed while cutting and pinning the frog in the simulation? My experience with children’s use of digital programs tells me that it is very unlikely that they would go through the operations of the program in the rational and emotionally disengaged way in which Friesen describes the simulation: cutting the frog’s skin, securing body parts with pins, identifying organs, etc. These operations, presented in the account of the dissection simulation, are in my reading a discussion of instruction, while the account of the rich social practices of the classroom dissection reports for learning. Since Lave and Wenger’s (Lave & Wenger, 1991) seminal book on learning as participation, scholars of learning theory have been careful not to confuse the perspective of the instructor with the learners’ perspective. When indeed compared as if instruction and learning were similar activities something interesting happens to the way the involved learning materials are portrayed. Because learning is a process involving active learners participating in specific ways in the classroom, the technologies or tools applied—scissors, scalpel, pins, etc.—come to be depicted in Friesen’s example as of marginal relevance to the activity, as passive and in the power of their active, participating human users. When instruction is accounted for, and especially when no human teacher is involved but it is the technology that is described as teaching, as is the case in Friesen’s discussion of the dissection simulation, the technology is granted much more agency, disregarding the ways in which learners might actively engage in different ways with this technology. The asymmetric account of one situation as learning and the other as teaching leads to an asymmetry in the agency granted to the learning materials involved. What happens if we conceive of the dissection simulation as a learning situation involving active participating children? As I worked through the demo version of the froguts.com dissection simulation I tried to imagine how the 4th grade children involved in my own research would have reacted. I heard their “ugh,” “phew,” “yech” in my inner ear expressing their emotional reactions. But more important are the kinds of stories that I know from my computer lab studies that children share in front of the monitor. These stories would most likely paint a much ‘bloodier’ and ‘dirtier’ (and ‘noisier’ to use Friesen’s vocabulary) picture of the dissection activity than what you get from a disinterested account of what is displayed on the screen. When doing empirical research with children using computer programs it becomes evident that there are no such things as “hyperreal” “microworlds” without histories and futures, without place and intimacy. As a researcher for over a year of children and their activities with computers and virtual worlds in the computer lab of a Danish local school I have come to learn a lot about their social relations, experiences and dreams, sorrows and joys. The children were present in flesh and blood, and through their activities with the computers and stories around them, they came to relate a great variety of facets of their lives to the digital technology. Digital technology is always embedded in rich social practice. Especially in school, where they usually engage with computers in larger groups, children share their digital experiences while having them. Just as Friesen shows is the case in the classroom dissection, working with digital programs in school is most often a social activity for children. Accordingly, it is our task as social researchers to describe the rich social activities unfolding, just as Friesen has done in his discussion of the classroom dissection. To most social scientists it would have been obviously reductive had he described the activity as a matter of simple operations such as “cutting the skin,” “pinning the body parts,” and “removing the organs.” That it is still acceptable in the social sciences to present such accounts when it comes to analyses of digital media can probably be explained by a nostalgic and modern bias distinguishing what Heidegger calls “things” (such as scissors, knives or scalpels, and pins) from “objects” (such as machines, computers, and digital simulations) (Heidegger, 1982). As Latour explains, this bias is


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fundamental to our understanding of what counts as social, human and ‘good’ and what is regarded technical, alienating and ‘bad’ (Latour, 2004). This position is unfortunate, as it makes it difficult to investigate what kinds of sociality, emotionality and indeed reality actually unfold in our contemporary technicized world. We end up evaluating digital media on the basis of criteria given by non-digital ones, and accordingly we necessarily come to depict the former as a deficit version of the latter. This said, I want to close my comment by emphasizing the importance of Friesen’s endeavor of investigating what kinds of bodily and sensory engagements are involved in using digital media, such as a dissection simulation. I think this can very well be done by contrasting it to non-digital dissection, only such a comparison must be symmetric. In my comparison of traditional learning materials such as text books, blackboard, pen and paper etc. with a virtual environment in a school setting, I constructed comparability between the two by investigating in both settings how children, teachers and materials got mutually involved with each other, as well as what knowledge was constituted and what ways of being present these different involvements lead to (Sørensen, 2009). The children I observed were clearly bodily active—with much more than their hands, as Friesen describes. They rarely sat passively on their chairs while working on a computer. So, rather than asking how much bodily and sensory activity is involved, we should inquire how and which senses, and how the body becomes active when doing digital dissection. We should do just the same with digital simulation that Friesen does with classroom dissection. We should create comparability symmetrically. References Heidegger, M. (1982). The Question Concerning Technology: and Other Essays. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Latour, B. (2004). “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam: From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical

Inquiry. 30(2), 225–248. Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Learning in Doing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Niewöhner, J., & T. Scheffer. (2010). “Introduction – Thickening Comparison: On the Multiple Facets of

Comparability.” In International studies in sociology and social anthropology: Vol. 114. Thick comparison. Reviving the ethnographic aspiration, T. Scheffer & J. Niewöhner (eds.).Leiden: Brill, 1–16.

Smits, M. (2006). “Taming Monsters: The Cultural Domestication of New Technology.” Technology in Society. 28, 489–504. Sørensen, E. (2008). “Multi-Sited Comparison of ‘Doing Regulation.’” Comparative Sociology. 7(3). Sørensen, E. (2009). The Materiality of Learning: Technology and Knowledge in Educational Practice. Learning in doing. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.


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Gut Feelings: A Response to Norm Friesen’s “Dissection and Simulation”

Darin Barney

McGill University Abstract This response considers how Friesen’s account of simulation helps us to think through the situation of politics under technological conditions. The alleviation of material and corporeal risks entailed in simulated dissection is compared to the manner in which emerging media technologies facilitate experiences of political participation that are evacuated of the burdens of engagement. This dynamic is finally attributed not to digital mediation itself, but to its operation under the sign of simulation. Keywords: simulation; politics; digital media; virtuality “It’s disgusting!” (quickly followed by “It’s cool!”). Thus declared my children, ages 9 and 12, upon having been enlisted into an impromptu experimental trial with the froguts.com online dissection simulation. Neither of them had ever dissected an animal before. It was striking how precisely their reactions to the simulation followed the affective trajectory from repulsion to fascination that Norm Friesen assigns to actual dissections of an animal’s preserved body in a classroom. What struck me most was how quickly it was all over. With the intuitive point-and-click virtuosity characteristic of their peers, it took the kids less than two minutes to complete the exercise of “eviscerating” the avatar (Can one eviscerate something that is bereft of viscera? What, exactly, were they doing to that thing?). The impression, I suspect, was superficial. Around the dinner table that night there was little talk of the operation that had taken place earlier that afternoon. It is nearly impossible to imagine that the same would have been true had they actually sunk a blade into some pickled creature’s flesh and peeled back its skin to reveal its innards for the first time. I think it is safe to assume this would have been a spontaneous and irrepressible topic of conversation, even as we passed the pork chops. As Friesen avers, nobody forgets the first cut. For all the reasons he lists under the auspices of the “sensually intensive encounter” that is a dissection—the shock of seeing the pale carcass; the agony and pleasure of the sound and feel of the inaugural incision; the gurgle and smell of the brine; the morbid curiosity satisfied only by probing the cavity; the strange identification with vital systems unexpectedly similar to our own; the nagging fear that, even though the thing is already dead, one wrong move could lead to serious trouble—the digital counterfeit could never be anything but impoverished and forgettable by comparison. Friesen’s arguments are so immediately convincing one wonders whether it was even necessary to make them. Surely—earnest school administrators aside—there is not a biologist alive who would deny that the pedagogical and experiential value of an actual dissection exceeds that of a simulation by many factors. And presumably none would contest that the superiority of the actual dissection accrues to precisely those qualities that Friesen assigns to the “transforming cut.” Simulation, they would likely say, is meant to supplement, not replace, actual dissection and, in its limited way, can contribute to the effective teaching of the biological arts. If fewer animals are raised for the sole purpose of becoming specimens, so much the better. Nobody is claiming that simulated and actual dissections are the same, or even equivalent. Surgeons will always need to be at least as good with a knife as they are with a mouse, and “turning off” certain kids to biology is arguably what compulsory exposure to actual dissection is really for: it separates those with a stomach for the trade from those who would be well-advised to take up another line.


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And so, perhaps Friesen’s careful illumination of the singular quality of actual dissection is just tilting at windmills…unless, of course, his arguments are not really about dissecting frogs at all, or at least not limited to this practice. By invoking Borgmann’s trenchant critique of hyperreality, Friesen signals that there might be more at stake here than a lost rite of passage. For Borgmann’s is not an account of this or that medium or tool but, rather, an indictment of contemporary technological experience as a whole, of which Friesen here presents simulated dissection as one particularly evocative example. This suggests the possibility that Friesen’s insights into the implications of normalized simulation in biological education might be portable to other domains in which the ethos of simulation also finds technological support and extension. Elsewhere, I have written about how certain applications of emerging media technologies relieve us of the constitutive burdens of community and art (Barney, 2004; Barney, 2010). Here, I would like to explore whether Friesen’s account of simulated dissection might help us to think about the circumstances of politics under contemporary technological conditions. By politics I mean something that exceeds what we normally think of when we hear that word. Politics happens when it falls to us to make judgments and to act. When politics happens, the shape and operation of power is exposed, and questions are raised about justice and the good life, questions whose answers cannot be given in advance, questions whose very undecidability calls upon us to make judgments and to act. In other words, politics is an excruciating and even pathological situation, to which a range of qualities can be attributed. These include: that political judgment and action tend to arise in response to a fundamental wrong (usually some form of inequality or a structural exclusion); that they are experienced as imperatives rather than choices (the form of their expression is: "Faced with the circumstances before me, I cannot tolerate abstaining; I have no choice but to make a judgment and take action"); that they nevertheless unfold contingently, under conditions of undecidability (where the outcome of a judgment cannot be given in advance) and unpredictability (where the outcome of action arising from those judgments also cannot be given in advance); that they are burdensome and, in particular, carry the burden of organization and work; that, in their unfolding, they reconfigure the horizon of possibility and impossibility (they are not just about gaining equality or inclusion on present terms, but reconfiguring the very terms of inequality and exclusion); and that they are therefore, essentially disruptive. Politics is thus a rare and exceptional thing. This does not mean politics is necessarily revolutionary—just that it is exotic in the precise sense of that word: it belongs to another country, a country to come—and that very little of what we associate with politics today actually qualifies as political, except in the sense that liberal-democratic “politics” formalizes a particular order and distribution of power. Inoculation against the pathology of politics has arguably always been a primary function of “normal” politics: most of what goes for politics in liberal-democratic contexts comprises a habit aimed at containing the possibility of politics itself. As Jacques Rancière observes: “Politics is the art of suppressing the political… Depoliticization is the oldest task of politics, the one which achieves its fulfillment at the brink of its end, its perfection on the brink of the abyss” (2007, 11, 19). In his book Political Machines, Andrew Barry attributes depoliticization directly to the normal operation of what goes by the name of politics in contemporary liberal democracies: “…one of the key functions of established political institutions,” he writes, “is to place limits on the possibilities for dissensus and restriction and on the sites in which political contestation can occur. What we generally term politics thus always has something of an anti-political impulse” (2001, 207). The genius of liberal democracies is that containment of the possibility politics is accomplished not via coercion but rather by consensus. According to Rancière, we live in consensual times, with consensus referring not to an agreement between people but rather to a collective resignation to the sense that “what is, is all there is”


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(2010, x). He contrasts consensus with another way of being in the world, a way of being that “lays claim to one present against another and affirms that the visible, thinkable and possible can be described in many ways. This other way has a name. It is called politics.” The relationship between emerging media technologies and the possibility of politics is, then, ambiguous. On the one hand, digital networks and the applications and appliances attached to them have provided activists and dissidents with powerful tools they can use to disrupt prevailing horizons of consensus and to organize alternative possibilities, both in media contexts that are normatively liberal and those that are openly authoritarian (see, for example, Goldfarb, 2006, and Benkler, 2006). On the other hand, critics such as Jodi Dean point to the role these same technologies have played in bolstering the regime of “communicative capitalism” under which politics becomes conspicuous by its absence (2008; 2009). As Dean describes, taken by the fantasy of participation, “people believe that their contribution to circulating content is a kind of communicative action. They believe that they are active, maybe even making a difference simply by clicking on a button, adding their name to a petition, or commenting on a blog” (2008, 109). For Dean, this passivity masquerading as activity “prevents actual action, prevents something from really happening.” In this respect, emerging media technologies function as a kind of fetish that compensates for what we experience more deeply as a profound lack – they relieve the pain of our of passivity and disempowerment by helping us to feel and believe that we are being active when really we are not. In language that resonates with Friesen’s account of the narrow (and narrowing) priorities of educational interface design, Dean describes a dynamic of “condensation” whereby:

The complexities of politics—of organization, struggle, duration, decisiveness, division, representation, etc.—are condensed into one thing, one problem to be solved and one technological solution. So, the problem of democracy is that people aren’t informed; they don’t have the information they need to participate effectively. Bingo! Information technologies provide people with information (2008, 112).

In this account, the fantasy of participation and the fetishization of its current technologies displace energy and attention from the more demanding burdens of politics by satisfying its less demanding counterfeits with relative ease or—to use Friesen’s Borgmannian terminology—“brilliance.” Thus, emerging media technologies culminate in a dynamic of foreclosure, whereby the advanced coding of communicative “participation” as political effectively excludes or forecloses more demanding forms of political judgment and action before they have a chance to happen. As Dean observes: “the political purchase of the technological fetish is given in advance; it is immediate, presumed, understood. File-sharing is political. A Web site is political. Blogging is political. But this very immediacy rests on something else, a prior exclusion. And what is excluded is the possibility of politicization proper…Struggle, conflict and context vanish, immediately and magically” (2008, 114). Just like with the digital frog. As Friesen puts it, “In the simulated dissection, what appears as surprising and also amazing or impressive is the responsiveness of the interface, the ease and convenience with which the dissection steps can be negotiated” (this volume). For someone with a cause to promote or a grievance to air, nothing could be easier than starting (or joining) a Facebook group. However, just as dissecting an actual frog takes resolve, care, and skill, nothing about actual politics is convenient or easy. The online simulation described by Friesen is designed specifically to relieve the user of the existential and material burdens associated with the practice being simulated, while heightening those elements that gratify the user’s “certainty-of-the-world.” The brilliant simulation, “designed to anticipate and facilitate what we want to do, when we want to do it,” takes the edge off our encounter with alterity and culminates in an experience whereby


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the user “really only encounters herself.” Just as actual dissection exposes practitioners to a field of difference, resistance and difficulty (for, no matter how sharp the knife, the flesh still resists the initial cut), so too does actual politics expose us to differences that disrupt our certainties, thwart immediate gratification of our desire for convenience, and impose burdens of consideration, care, judgment and action that cannot be shed without draining the situation of its political character. In this light, the parallel between the demands of dissection and those of politics, and the consistency in how emerging technologies become available to alleviate these demands, are striking. As Friesen describes it, initiation into the moral universe of an actual dissection comprises “a profoundly uncomfortable or disquieting situation or experience,” one that “can be experienced in terms of a deeply felt disgust or repulsion,” an embodied, intercorporeal imperative (whether it is the imperative to stop, or to proceed) that one feels in her guts even before she articulates that gut feeling with “intellectual disquiet” or a “moral qualm.” Such experiences, Friesen says, interrupt our “living-in-certainty-of-the-world.” As I have suggested above, to be initiated into politics is also to be incorporated into an essentially disruptive situation in which the outcomes of the imperative of judgment and action cannot be calculated in advance. And, after decades of critical feminist thought that has rescued us from the masculinist prejudice which equates public action with rationality expressed in reasoned speech, it should no longer be controversial to associate political judgment and action with the gut feeling that injustice simply cannot be tolerated (see, for example Berlant, 1997, and Ahmed, 2004). Such gut feelings are provoked more readily by sensory apprehension of the situation than by intellection or persuasion. As Davide Panagia puts it: “Flavor—not speech—turns the mouth into an organ of political action” (2009, 3). It is when the disgusting taste, sight, smell, sound or feel of injustice turns our stomachs that we are given over to empathy and outrage, and thereby incorporated into a political event that might otherwise present itself as an imprudent wager. Thus Rancière locates the possibility of politics in “ignorant stomachs,” and its suppression in the “intelligent heads” whose task it is is “to explain to the population that nothing can be done except what our governments are already doing” (2010, 2). Politics, like actual dissection, takes guts (see Barney, 2011). In her work on bioethics in the age of new media, Joanna Zylinska follows Derrida in describing “the cut” as “a differentiation in the flow of life that cannot be subsumed within this life because it comes from ‘elsewhere’” (2009, 30). Political claims would seem to represent cuts of this kind: they are advenient not convenient; they come from outside or beyond an existing situation, disrupt that situation and cannot readily be subsumed by it (see Panagia, 2009, 151-153). If, by replacing advenience with convenience, simulation can render gutless the act of “cutting into the soft belly of an animal,” what might it do for the guts it takes to make political claims—that is, to make cuts—that are at least as scary? It goes without saying that emerging media can be used to prompt sensory, affective, intercorporeal experiences of the injustices inflicted upon others in a manner that inconveniently disrupts our certainties about the world and moves us to judgment and action. In these cases, emerging media comprise means of representing an actual situation into which we might be meaningfully incorporated. It actually happened that on December 17, 2010, a Tunisian street vendor named Mohammed Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest his humiliation at the hands of state officials (Worth, 2011). That only relatively few people actually witnessed this act, or his subsequent death, or that many millions learned of these events via the internet, does not negate the fact that his story affected people such that many of them were moved to political judgment and action. This was clearly no mere simulation. Online dissection does not represent actual dissection, it simulates it, and so too is there an important distinction to be made between the use of emerging media to represent actual political acts and situations, and the proliferation of simulated political activity online. The difference is between those sorts of mediated encounters that call upon us to respond to the imperative of judgment and action by actually doing something


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gutsy, and those that enable us to evade that imperative by doing nothing at all, even as we console ourselves that by signaling our likes and dislikes, voting our approval or disapproval, and forwarding the link to our friends we are acting like people who care. Perhaps it as simple as this: you cannot be doing something if nothing is at stake. As Friesen describes, in contrast to the simulated dissection in which the previous condition can be restored after a slip of the mouse simply by clicking the undo button, “In the classroom dissection, irreversible errors, of course, can be made, and things can go seriously wrong.” The same goes for the adventure of politics. The primary meaning of adventure is “that which comes to us, or happens without design,” and among its secondary meanings is “the chance of danger or loss; risk, jeopardy, peril” (OED, 2011). This is what makes politics real, not whether it happens online or offline. When one is moved to political judgment and action, there is no telling where things might end up, and things could go terribly wrong. As Hannah Arendt suggested, the basic condition of political action entails the “predicament of irreversibility,” whereby one is “unable to undo what one has done” (1958, 237). For Arendt, the remedy for this predicament is forgiveness, without which there would be no home in the world for politics. The technological ability to undo an unfortunate act by pressing a button is not the same as forgiveness, because in tracing the wrong line on a picture of a frog, or signing the wrong online petition, there is nothing to forgive. When it comes to simulation—whether simulated dissection or simulated politics—forgiveness is unnecessary because nothing is at stake, and nothing could go seriously wrong. As Malcolm Gladwell observes, contrasting the “politics” of social networking with the organizational burdens and corporeal risks that characterized the U.S civil-rights movement, “Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice” (2010, n.p.). The question is not whether political activists can make good use of technologies such as Facebook in organizing and executing their attempts to disrupt and resist the prevailing consensus and to reconfigure the horizon of possibility, for it would be absurd to suggest that the mere use of online tools drains judgment or action of its political character. The question is what to make of the proliferating tendency to use these emerging technologies to support simulations of political judgment and action where nothing is on the line. “We cannot finally,” Albert Borgmann writes, “be citizens both of the hyperreal universe and of the real world” (1992, 97). This does not mean politics cannot happen online or that emerging media technologies cannot be used to pry open the possibility of politics. It does not mean that those committed to “real” politics had better steer clear of the Internet. A couple of days after he had tried out the dissection simulation, my 9 year-old son went online to watch streaming video of a performance of the song “Somalia” by the rapper K’Naan. The song tells of K’Naan’s upbringing amidst the violence and poverty of Mogadishu (“We used to take barbed wire/Mold it around discarded bike tires/Roll ‘em down the hill on foot blazin’/Now that was our version of mountain bike racin’”) and his dismay at the indifference to this situation he found upon escaping to Toronto where, as a refugee, he also lived amidst poverty and violence (“And when I told the world/None would bat an eye/They said,“Since you know how to kill/You should learn to die”). My son was moved. Perhaps it was the sound of the music; more likely it was the taste of injustice in his mouth, and the feeling it gave him in his guts. Whatever the case, there ensued several breakfast-table and bedtime conversations about Somalia and the wars there, about being a refugee, about poverty, race and violence in our own cities, and about K’Naan’s own prescription for all of this: an ethos of giving. These were not comfortable conversations, and it would have been far easier for me if we did not have to have them. But he would not let it go. He kept going back and listening to the song online. It seemed very real to him. Where this might lead is impossible to predict or control.


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The Internet is part of the real world in which the possibility of politics either will or will not unfold, and any dichotomy that categorically pairs offline with real, and online with unreal, misdiagnoses the reality of contemporary experience. Citizens of the real world are necessarily engaged with emerging media technologies, even as hyperreality—the reign of gutless counterfeits—also thrives in the environment supported by those technologies. In this environment, simulation and its ethos stand ready to absorb difference, burden, and resistance into the empire of convenience. To the extent this condition prevails, the possibility of politics will suffer and continue to be marginal to contemporary experience. This, however, might be exactly where politics belongs. For, if politics is an encounter with difference that prompts risky judgment and action which disrupts our certainty about the world, then it could only ever be of, and at, the margins of our experience. In temporal terms, we could say that politics is always to come. In this respect, we might therefore be forced to conclude that politics, whatever its technological situation might be from time to time, is essentially virtual: not simulated but potential. Reality will always nurture the potential of politics, even as hyperreality strives to starve it. References Ahmed, S. (2004). The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge. Arendt, H. (1958). The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Barney, D. (2004). “Communication versus Obligation: The Moral Status of Virtual Community.” In: Globalization,

Technology and Philosophy, D. Tabachnick & T. Koivukoski (eds.). Albany: SUNY Press, 21-41. Barney, D. (2010). “Terminal City? Art, Information and the Augmenting of Vancouver.” In: The Wireless Spectrum:

The Politics, Practices and Poetics of Mobile Media, B. Crow, M. Longford and K. Sawchuk (eds.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 115-128.

Barney, D. (2011). “Eat your Vegetables: Courage and the Possibility of Politics.” Theory & Event. 14:2. Barry, A. (2001). Political Machines: Governing in a Technological Society. London: Athlone Press. Benkler, Y. (2006). The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven:

Yale University Press. Berlant, L. (1997). The Queen of America Goes to Washington City. Durham: Duke University Press. Borgmann, A. (1992). Crossing the Postmodern Divide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dean, J. (2008). “Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics.” In: Digital Media and

Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times, M. Boler (ed.). Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 101-121. Dean, J. (2009). Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. Durham:

Duke University Press. Gladwell, M. (2010-11-04). “Small Change: Why the Revolution Will not be Tweeted.” The New Yorker. Online

edition. Goldfarb, J. (2006). The Politics of Small Things: The Power of Powerlessness in Dark Times. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press. Oxford English Dictionary. (2011). “Adventure.” Online edition. Entry 2923. Panagia, D. (2009). The Political Life of Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press. Rancière, J. (2007). On the Shores of Politics. London: Verso. Rancière, J. (2010). Chronicles of Consensual Times. London: Continuum. Worth, R. F. (2011-01-21). "How a Single Match Can Ignite a Revolution." New York Times.

www.nytimes.com/2011/01/23/weekinreview/23worth.html?src=twrhp. Retrieved 2011-04-15. Zylinska, J. (2009). Bioethics in the Age of New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.


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A Phenomenological Defense of Computer-Simulated Frog Dissection

Robert Rosenberger Georgia Institute of Technology

Abstract Defenders of educational frog dissection tend to emphasize the claim that computer-simulated alternatives cannot replicate the same exact experience of slicing open a frog, with all its queasy and visceral impact. Without denying that point, I argue that this is not the only educational standard against which computer-simulated dissection should be evaluated. When real-world frog dissection is analyzed as a concrete technological practice rather than an assumed ideal, the particular educational advantages distinct to real-world dissection and virtual dissection can be enumerated and compared. Building on the work of John Dewey and Don Ihde, I explore the still-expanding advantages of computer-simulated dissection, and in this proper context of comparison it becomes clear that virtual alternatives are increasingly the more educationally beneficial option. Keywords: educational computing; simulation; progressive education; animal rights; animal advocacy; frog dissection; postphenomenology

Phenomenology has proven especially useful within the field of philosophy of technology for uncovering just how deeply the experience of this or that new technology lacks the depth of more traditional experiences, and thus how the new technology may not live up to its surrounding hype. By providing a conceptual framework for describing an individual’s experience, phenomenology lends itself readily both to the task of articulating the striking richness of our everyday experience, and to that of evaluating whether a newly-offered technologically-simulated event lives up to the comparison. Hubert Dreyfus’s critique of AI research is perhaps the most influential example of this line of cautioning, along with his more recent evaluation of distance learning and Don Ihde’s reservations about virtual reality (Dreyfus, 1972; Dreyfus, 2001; Ihde, 2002). Albert Borgmann’s multiple critiques of contemporary relationships with commonplace technologies, such as television and fast food, are also paradigmatic examples (Borgmann, 1984; Borgmann, 1992). It is because phenomenology lends itself so readily to projects that articulate the things that technologically-mediated experiences lack that here I want to offer an explicit corrective: I develop a phenomenological account of the distinct richness that is possible for computer simulation in the classroom context. In Norm Friesen’s anchor piece for this special issue of Techné, “Dissection and Simulation: Brilliance and Transparency, or Encumbrance and Disruption?,” he presents phenomenological descriptions of the experience of both traditional classroom frog corpse dissection and a computer simulation of frog dissection. While Friesen states explicitly that he does not intend to enter the debate over which is to be preferred, my suspicion is that due to the readiness of phenomenology to point out the wilt of simulated experiences compared to those of the real world, his piece provides stronger tools to the pro-corpse-dissection side. That is, by detailing the “sensual assault” of real-world corpse dissection in contrast to the “muted” experience of computer-simulated dissection, a reader may come away from Friesen’s descriptions with the impression that the depth and vividness of the experience of the dissection of a real frog corpse is so great that it presents an indispensible pedagogical opportunity (Friesen, 2012). As I show below, that impression short-changes the potential of


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computer-simulated dissection and it overlooks the limitations resulting from the artefacts of corpse dissection. In what follows, I develop a phenomenological defence of computer-simulated frog dissection in the primary and secondary school classroom. I begin with a review of John Dewey’s account of progressive education, the pedagogical context within which both corpse dissection and computer-simulated dissection fit. Next, I review a phenomenological account of the experience of computer interface, and I contrast that with the experience of the interface of the tools of real-world corpse dissection. Finally, computer-simulated dissection and corpse dissection are contrasted in terms of the very different kinds of educational experiences they provide. Here it is important both to consider the potential for computer-simulation to be expanded to include educational experiences unique to the virtual context, and also to consider the limitations inherent in the technological mediation of classroom corpse dissection. With the following phenomenological reflections, I hope to challenge at least three intuitions that may underlie the thoughts of those inclined to prefer frog corpse dissection in the classroom: (1) that the vividness of the experience of corpse dissection makes it indispensible to biology instruction; (2) that the pedagogical effectiveness of computer-simulated dissection should be evaluated primarily on how well it imitates corpse dissection; and (3) that “real-world” corpse dissection presents students with any kind of unmediated access to educational content. By offering phenomenological deflations of these intuitions, and by brainstorming the ways that computer-simulated frog dissections could continue to be expanded into novel educational ground, I hope to supplement the ethical and environmental arguments that have already been developed in defence of computer-simulated animal dissection in the classroom.1 1. The Progressive Education Context Much of the debate over frog dissection in the classroom occurs within the context of a general commitment to the values of “progressive education.” In this perspective, schooling should create experiences that engage students’ individual interests, encourage creativity, and link up lessons with the concerns of the wider community. This view can be contrasted with the “essentialist” perspective on education, as it is often referred in the field of teacher education, which advocates a focus on the most basic (or essential) knowledge and skills, such as math and writing, and recommends the use of repeated drills, standardized testing, and classic textbook work. Sometimes the history of education in the United States is cast in terms of an oscillation between essentialist and progressive values. Yet while the paradigm of education in the US set by the 2001 No Child Left Behind legislation certainly reflects the contemporary ascension of essentialism, progressive values are reflected in many still-common institutions, such as class trips, guidance councilors, and, relevant here, science laboratory exercises. Much of the discussion over frog corpse dissection and computer-simulated frog dissection occurs together within the context of a shared general commitment to the progressive framework; the advocates for both frog corpse dissection and computer-simulated frog dissection together appear to agree that the creation of vivid, hands-on, interactive classroom experiences is important for learning about biology. A chief developer and advocate of the progressive educational perspective is the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey (e.g., 1897; 1916; 1938). Not only did he develop the theoretical underpinnings of this perspective, he was a dedicated participant, founding the Laboratory School associated with University of Chicago which built its curricula on these ideas. Dewey often cast his claims in terms of the contrast between progressive schooling and essentialism (or “traditional education,” as he called it). He insisted on the importance of


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assessing the individual student’s experience in the classroom. This remains important, according to Dewey, not only for the progressive setting, but also for the traditional classroom, with its standardized textbooks, forward-facing desks, worksheets, and droning lectures. He says, “It is a great mistake to suppose, even tacitly, that the traditional schoolroom was not a place in which students had experiences” (Dewey, 1938, 26). For Dewey, the dull and disconnected context of traditional education does create an experience for students: a boring one which fails to provide lasting knowledge by failing to link teachings to students’ lives outside the classroom. He contrasts traditional and progressive schooling respectively as follows:

To imposition from above is opposed expression and cultivation of individuality; to external discipline is opposed free activity; to learning from texts and teachers, learning through experience; to acquisition of isolated skills and techniques by drill, is opposed acquisition of them as means of attaining ends which make direct and vital appeal; to preparation for a more or less remote future is opposed making the most of opportunities present in life; to static airs and materials is opposed acquaintance with a changing world (Dewey, 1938, 19-20).

According to Dewey, in order to understand exactly why it is that progressive education is important for learning, we must develop a deeper understanding of what it means to have an experience. He says, “Everything depends upon the quality of the experience which is had. The quality of any experience has two aspects. There is an immediate agreeableness or disagreeableness, and there is an influence upon later experiences” (Dewey, 1938, 27). A given educational experience should be relevant to the experiences of other aspects of the student’s life, should lead the student to connect those parts together, and should lead to the growth of further experiences. It is important to remember that an educational experience also has the potential to remain isolated, failing to tie to one’s larger life, and possibly inhibiting the growth of further experiences (say, by implying that school lessons are unrelated to real-life concerns, or by stifling creativity). As he puts it, “Every experience is a moving force. Its value can be judged only on the ground of what it moves toward and into” (Dewey, 1938, 38). The traditional approach, with its dry textbooks, abstract knowledge, and repetitive exercises, only creates experiences which “move toward and into” an attitude that classroom lessons are boring and irrelevant. He writes that with traditional education, “the subject-matter in question was learned in isolation; it was put, as it were, in a water tight compartment” (Dewey, 1938, 48). The lessons of a progressive classroom are, in contrast, learned through interactive and flexible classroom activities that maintain a connection to the larger environment. This kind of schooling, according to Dewey, creates learners that can apply their knowledge, and thus engenders citizens concerned with their communities. Frog dissection—in both its real-world corpse and computer-simulated instantiations—clearly fits into the progressive model. Both instantiations are undeniably hands-on. And both create rich experiences for students in the classroom. Also undeniable is the fact that these two general options—corpse and simulation—create very different experiences for students. As Friesen shows clearly in his article in this volume, the experience of each of these options is quite distinct. My goal in what follows is neither to suggest that computers can adequately mimic corpse simulation, nor to assume that the closer a simulation can get to mimicking corpse dissection the greater educational value it would possess. The goal is instead to compare and contrast the educational value, in a progressive sense, of the very different experiences of frog corpse dissection and computer-simulated frog dissection.


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2. A Phenomenology of Computer Interface Philosophers of technology working from the phenomenological tradition often conceive of the relationships between users and technologies in terms of the notion of mediation (e.g., Verbeek, 2005; Kockelkoren, 2007; Ihde, 2009; Rosenberger, 2009).2 Under this conception, a technology is understood to be an intermediate aspect of a user’s experience, one that changes the user’s abilities to perceive and/or to act on the world. Thus, in this view, a human-technology relation is non-neutral; it non-innocently alters a user’s experience of the world. As a user experiences the world through the mediation of the technology, she or he interacts with the technology’s interface, i.e., those aspects of the technology that are intended to be explicitly engaged. However, as explored below, even the technology’s interface does not always maintain an explicit place within a user’s awareness.3 In this section, I consider the phenomenology of human-computer interface, and contrast this with the interface of the tools used in classroom corpse dissection. A central relationship that a user may develop with a technology is one in which a user’s experience of her or his own body is extended to include the device. Maurice Merleau-Ponty offers the example of a blind man using a cane. He writes, “The blind man’s stick has ceased to be an object for him, and is no longer perceived for itself; its point has become an area of sensitivity, extending the scope and active radius of touch, and providing a parallel to sight” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, 143). Don Ihde uses the term embodiment relation to refer to this kind of human-technology interaction (Ihde, 2009, 42). In such cases, the technology itself is not the central object of the user’s encounter; the technology is the means by which the user experiences an encounter with the world, a mediated encounter through which both the user and the world are transformed. In addition, whether the technology’s interface itself remains conspicuous within the user’s awareness depends in part on just how accustomed she or he is to the device. For one deeply accustomed to using a particular technology, the experience of the device itself may take on less significance within one’s overall awareness. Ihde uses the term transparency to refer to the particular degree to which the technology recedes into the background of awareness as it is used (2009, 42). In this terminology, the blind man’s cane transforms his perceptual abilities and also in the process it takes on a degree of transparency. That is, even as the cane enacts transformations to his perception, it fades into the background of his awareness.4 While a technology may be designed for a particular purpose, it always remains the case that individual users can interpret that technology differently and use it for different purposes within a different context. Ihde refers to this as the multistability of technology (2009, 14). An individual technology has the potential to mediate the relation between a user and the world in multiple ways. Yet at the same time, as a concrete material object, that technology cannot simply make any kind of relation to the world possible; though multiple, only certain “stable” relations to the world are enabled by a technology. To understand this notion, it is helpful to bring to mind examples of technologies which are often taken up for purposes quite different from that for which they were designed. I have offered the example of the magnifying glass (Rosenberger, 2009, 176). A magnifying glass is of course a tool designed for the purpose of enlarging something to see it better. However, there is another purpose for which it can be used. A magnifying glass can also be used for focusing light to start a fire (like Piggy’s glasses in Lord of the Flies, Golding, 1955). We can even imagine a user for whom the primary relationship to the device has developed in terms of this alternate usage. Since this user is deeply accustomed to focusing light with the magnifying glass, she or he will have developed a deeply sedimented habitual relationship with the device in terms of this usage, and as it is used the magnifying glass itself may take on a high degree of transparency. As highly


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transparent, the user pays more conscious attention to task of focusing the beam of light than on the bodily comportments of holding and positioning the magnifying glass in hand. I have used the term relational strategy to refer to the particular bodily comportments, habits, and understandings that enable a user to take up a technology in terms of a particular stability (Rosenberger, 2009; Rosenberger, forthcoming). This paragraph has described some details of the general relational strategy involved in using a magnifying glass for its fire-starting stability. It would be possible to then contrast these details with those involved in taking up this technology in terms of its more traditional—i.e., magnifying—stability.5 Computers (in their various forms—desktop, laptop, tablet, handheld, etc.) and computer programs (e.g., software packages, websites, smartphone applications) can both be conceived in terms of user experience of interface. For example, the interface of a typical desktop computer includes a user typing a keyboard, maneuvering and clicking a mouse, and looking at a screen. In order to use a desktop computer in a smooth manner, a user must develop many specific bodily comportments and understandings which relate to the various features of the device; from a sense of the arrangement of the QUERTY keyboard, to familiarity with the positioning of one’s fingers above the proper keys; from accustomedness to the feeling of the mouse under hand, to the anticipation of its corresponding movements on the screen (including a tacit understanding of the on-screen mouse’s changing form: from arrow, to hand, to typing cursor, to the “standby” notice of the twirling pinwheel or hourglass). As a user becomes more and more accustomed to the relational strategies required for standard desktop computer use, these aspects of interface take on a greater and greater degree of transparency. Over time, the user is able to focus more and more on what she or he is trying to with the computer, rather than on these features of interface themselves. That is, through general computer interface training, the computer becomes embodied.6 A similar story can be told about the user’s relation to the programs she or he runs on the computer. One can come to embody these programs in specific ways as one becomes accustomed to their use. For example, consider the experience of “logging in” to an email provider’s website. For many, checking email is a commonplace activity engaged daily, if not multiple times daily. The relational strategy for interacting with the website includes, for example, an anticipation of where on the screen sign-in boxes will appear, an expectation about the placement of on-screen icons and buttons, and preconceptions about the procedures for reading and writing emails. For an everyday user, these aspects of interface with the email website may be experienced with a high degree of transparency. Through the force of well-established habits of bodily and perceptual interaction with the program’s interface, the accustomed user experiences the content of her or his email with a greater significance than she or he does the means of interface itself. The notions of embodiment, transparency, and relational strategies can be applied to the interface involved in both corpse dissection and computer-simulated dissection. As Friesen points out, the relational strategies involved in the use of computer simulations of dissection largely reduce to those described above regarding desktop computer use generally. Despite the possibility of on-screen representations of scalpels, magnifying glasses, and pins, a user’s approach to computer-simulated dissection occurs in terms of bodily relations to mouse clicks, keystrokes, and screen watching. In striking contrast, real-world corpse dissection involves grasping scalpels, rendering incisions into flesh, pushing pins through appendages, encountering the smells of formaldehyde, and such. Independent of the biology lessons of dissection (addressed in the next section), questions can first be raised about the educational value of the interface of each mode of dissection itself. Following Dewey, we can consider what further experiences will connect up with the experiences


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of the interface of corpse dissection and computer-simulated dissection. That is, we can ask how training regarding each of these forms of dissection—corpse and simulation—is educationally valuable to students in itself. In the case of computer-simulated dissection interface, the value of the interface training is straightforward: using a computer program about dissection involves learning about how to use the computer generally. Instruction regarding this kind of interface may be more or less important depending on the individual student’s knowledge of computers. This relation also opens the possibility of integrating the dissection simulation with other lessons about computer interface, such as typing instruction. In the case of the tools of real-world corpse dissection such as blades and pins, it is less clear into what further experiences of primary and secondary school instruction these experiences of interface may “flow,” as Dewey would say. Put another way, it is unclear what educational value in itself is possessed by, say, pressing a pin through a dead frog’s wrist. However, it is impossible not to acknowledge that such an experience would be as memorably discomforting as Friesen’s paper underlines. The use of these tools adds a visceral dimension—e.g., the feeling in one’s hand of the scalpel as it is pulled though the frog’s resisting skin—to an experience of content (i.e., entrails) that is already fraught with uneasiness and abjection. With that acknowledged, I agree with Estrid Sørensen’s observation in her contribution to this volume that Friesen’s article overlooks the level of disgust that students still experience through dissection simulated on the computer (2012). Of course the lessons learned through the experience of interface are not only those which reduce to interface training itself; lessons learned through interface training exist in relation to the experience of the content of the dissection exercise. A. David Kline makes this point while defending corpse dissection, stating, “There is certain knowledge that they [students] can get best by cutting open the abdomen of a creature and seeing the mesentery. By exercising knowledge how, they attain knowledge that” (1995, 194). That is, mastering the otherwise irrelevant interface of corpse dissection is part of a process that, according to Kline, is the best way for students to learn the anatomy lessons at issue. I agree that the experience of interface is valuable most of all for its relation to lesson content. However, I suggest that pro-corpse dissection views like Kline’s assume that the lessons learnable through the evisceration of a corpse are the only ones that should be considered in this debate. In the next section, I show this to be their crucial mistake. 3. Lesson Content Mediated by Computer Simulations and Laboratory Corpses While it may be differences in interface that jump first to mind when contrasting computer-simulated dissection and real-world corpse dissection—the mouse clicking vs. the scalpel wielding—these two educational practices also mediate student experience very differently. That is, it is not only the interaction with tools that is different; these two practices make possible very different learning experiences of lesson content. They enable very different access to the subject matter itself. The things that can be revealed to students about biology through the experience of cutting open a frog corpse are very different from what can be revealed through the experience of interacting with a computer simulation. To explore these differences it is important to consider two contexts of technological mediation:

(1) We must consider not only attempts to imitate corpse dissection through computer simulation, but also the potential for simulation to go beyond the limitations of real-world frog corpse dissection. I suggest that the potential for computer-simulated dissection has not yet been exhausted, and that the pedagogical value of corpse dissection may even be surpassed by what


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simulations could deliver. As shorthand, I use the term expanded simulation here to refer to simulations designed not only to imitate real-world corpse dissection, but to also reach beyond the constraints of those practices in order to exploit the unique pedagogical opportunities afforded by the virtual environment.

(2) We must also consider the ways in which real-world frog corpse dissection itself—while of course involving actual, non-simulated frogs—nonetheless in practice also crucially involves artifacts of laboratory environment, procedure, and “sample” preparation. Recognition of the technological mediation of the practices of frog corpse dissection highlights the limitations of this form of biology education. I explore these two contexts, expanded simulation and the artifacts of corpse dissection, in the following two subsections. 3a. Expanded Simulation While increasing in popularity, computer-simulated frog dissection remains novel compared to the long-established classroom practices of real-world frog corpse dissection. Innovations continue to be made with regard to computer-simulated dissection, and such developments are furthered by the continuing advancement of computing capabilities generally. Thus, it is important not only to contrast the pedagogical value of traditional corpse dissection with that of the particular simulations that happen to be available today, but to also consider simulation’s expanding potential. My contention here is that computer-simulated dissection has the potential to offer distinct pedagogical advantages that go beyond the charge of simply imitating corpse dissection, far enough, even, that the issue of imitation may be rendered moot. The question becomes: in what novel and pedagogically relevant ways can simulations mediate student experience of the subject matter? Here I would like to consider three ways in which contemporary frog dissection simulation software could be expanded: (1) dissection simulations could be expanded to include an integrated and interactive environmental context; (2) they could be expanded to incorporate animal motion, including the dynamics of systems within the body; (3) they could be expanded to incorporate a variety of dissection options, including advanced abilities to make mistakes and to explore multiple examples. (1) Environmental Contextuality. Computer simulations of frog dissection could be expanded to include interactive resources regarding the natural habitats of these animals. Information from the volumes of books and video documentary on frogs and their relationships to their environment could be integrated into the simulation itself. For example, it is possible to imagine a simulation which begins with a video of an actual frog in its habitat, complete with information about predators and prey, ponds and lily pads. The video could zoom inward to a close-up view of the frog and then the video-frog could transform into a simulated frog whose interior could be explored through virtual dissection. The frog’s internal organs could be investigated through the simulated dissection, and then afterward the view could pull back and return to the video of the frog in its environment. (An example of a dissection program that includes substantial interactive education about frog habitation is Digital Frog 2.5.7) Unlike the frog corpse, the simulated frog in such expanded simulations could be returned to its habitat—its virtual habitat—after it has been investigated.


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The point is that the virtual context need neither include nor reduce to the context of classroom laboratory corpse dissection; there are other contexts made possible by computer simulation. There need not necessarily even be any simulation of real-world laboratory devices such as the pins which secure the frog corpse to the wax-lined tray, the scalpel, or the magnifying glass. The simulated dissection could include a simulated context of the frog’s natural environment, rather than a context that reduces to an imitation of laboratory practices concerned exclusively with how a dead and isolated frog can be dismembered. Where real-world frog corpse dissection is limited to the context of a classroom lab table, an expanded simulation instead has the potential to include education about the relationships between an individual, its bodily processes, and its natural surroundings. (2) Interior Dynamics. Many have recognized that computer-simulated dissections present a distinct advantage over corpse dissection, namely, that simulations can enable students to explore their subjects in motion. Since in the case of corpse dissection the frog under examination is necessarily dead, neither its bodily motion nor the dynamics of its internal systems can be explored. Simulations, on the other hand, are not encumbered by this limitation, and many cutting-edge simulation programs explore the educational possibilities enabled by this divergence. It is possible to imagine expanded simulations that take even fuller advantage of this potential. A variety of pedagogical opportunities are afforded by the fact that the object of study in a simulated dissection need not retain the features of an inert corpse. Some of the frog’s most interesting features as a species—its hop, its tongue—could be better explored if they could be observed in action. In simulation, students could potentially be exposed not only to what individual organs look like and to the organs’ particular spatial configuration, but also to the roles of these organs in the dynamic functioning of larger systems: circulatory, respiratory, digestive, nervous, etc. It is possible to imagine a simulation in which the dynamics of, say, the respiratory system are tracked throughout a simulated frog’s body. One option for interface would be to shrink the size of the students’ perspective and to take them along an interactive 3D tour within vessels or along nerves. Students could track air into the lungs and then follow further as the oxygen is introduced to the blood and delivered throughout the frog’s body. In such expanded simulations, students may have the freedom to choose which systems they follow, which systems are visible at a particular time, what malfunctions occur if nodes are interrupted, or how close inwardly they wish to zoom (including, potentially, exploration at the cellular level). For example, as takes place in the V-Frog simulation, the frog’s simulated heart can be witnessed not as an inert bean-like mass, but as a beating simulated organ.8 The temporal dynamics of the simulation are also a feature potentially subject to customization in computer-simulated dissection. Where real-world corpse dissection will require a separate dissection event—a separate corpse—for each stage of a frog’s life cycle that students and educators may wish to explore, simulations could instead potentially include speeded-up views of frog maturation, both in terms of exterior bodily morphology and the development of internal systems. The example of frogs is of course especially interesting in this regard, with their tadpole and leg-sprouting stages. Indeed, even speeded-up perspectives on frog evolution through history are possible. Building on the suggestion above that expanded simulations can integrate learning about an organism’s environment with learning about its internal bodily structures, we can imagine a version of a simulation in which a narrative begins, for example, with a video of a frog consuming a fly and then shifts to a simulation in which students interactively explore the


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dynamics of the digestion process. The frog’s environment is also deeply relevant to its reproductive processes, with fertilization of course occurring externally. The dynamics of the frog’s internal systems can be potentially represented in multiple ways, a point raised in Ihde’s response in this volume (2012). That is, it need not be the case that simulations only do their best to provide a view of what it would look like were a frog to be cut open yet remain alive and functioning. As Ihde notes, an alternative visual template could involve views made possible by contemporary imaging technologies, such as fMRI. It might be possible to integrate education about contemporary imaging into the lessons on internal bodily structures. (3) Subject Variability. Simulation also has the potential to be expanded to provide individual students with the experience of multiple frog subjects. In real-world corpse dissection, if a student is to be exposed to, say, frogs of different sizes, then multiple frog corpses are required for dissection. A useful moment of classroom dissection can be when different students dissecting different corpses come to recognize that the specimens maintain individual differences. There is no reason that an expanded simulation cannot include the experience of multiple objects of study. Expanded simulations could allow students to encounter frogs of different sizes and different levels of maturation. Individual simulated frogs could spend time in the different areas of their simulated environment, perched by the side of a pond, for example, or swimming if still tadpoles. A simulated frog found under the mud at the bottom of a pond during wintertime in the simulation could be shown to have internal processes that reflect its stage of hibernation. Students could potentially encounter a variety of virtual stomach contents upon exploring different individual simulated frogs. An issue raised in the consideration of these potentials for simulation is the seemingly unlimited pliability and customizability so often identified as a constitutive feature of virtual objects. Questions arise here in terms of how useful an infinitely moldable object would be for pedagogy. A version of this concern arises, for example, in Friesen’s paper when he identifies the reversible quality of the particular simulation he investigates. He writes, “with the online dissection, there ultimately seems to be no chance of making an error with the incision or with any other part of the dissection activity overall” (Friesen, 2012). This surely cannot be an inherent limitation, but one specific to the individual simulation with which he has tinkered. For expanded simulations, these kinds of limitations can be addressed straightforwardly: just as in real-world corpse dissection, instructors are important. There is no reason why reversibility—or any other pliable feature—must be part of the student experience of computer-simulated dissection. For example, a toggle could be added to a simulation to enable instructors to choose an irreversibility setting. If an instructor finds it pedagogically valuable to evaluate the choices students make through the course of the simulated dissection, tools for doing so could be developed. If irreparable mistakes are deemed important by the instructor, then limits can be placed on students’ abilities to correct mistakes in a simulation. That is, simply because simulations in theory can be substantially malleable, it need not be the case that this malleability be placed totally under the command of students rather than teachers. To be clear, the suggestions outlined here do not represent fantasies possible only in some distant future, but instead simply an extension of directions already being explored by dissection simulation developers. The point is that compared to the practices of real-world corpse dissection in the classroom, set as they are in long-entrenched traditions and expectations, computer-simulated dissection is instead only just beginning to discover its potential. It is a potential tied to


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our capacity to imagine novel and effective pedagogical strategies, and also to the advancement of computing generally. 3b. The Artifacts of Corpse Dissection An intuition that may be at work beneath arguments in favor of corpse dissection is that computer simulations are inherently artificial and as such must always be only inferior copies of comparable real-world educational tools. According to this line of thinking, while simulations may be getting better and better at approximating real frogs, they will always have a long way to go. Thus, real-world frog corpse dissection should not be substituted with something inherently lacking; when it comes to child education, there is no substitute for exposing students to real-world objects. There are two assumptions behind this line of thinking with which I disagree. The first is that simulations should only be evaluated on how well they work as substitutes, stand-ins, or approximations of corpse dissection. A simulation can aim to do more than simply mimic real-world corpse dissection as best as possible. I have instead argued above that the value of simulation lies in its own distinct pedagogical advantages. The second assumption is that frog dissection simply presents a student with “the real thing.” This is an exaggeration. That is, while it is certainly true that in real-world frog corpse dissection students are exposed to actual rather than virtual objects, it is simply not the case that corpse dissection represents any kind of unmediated encounter with the subject matter of the frog body. Classroom frog corpse dissection is indeed deeply technologically-mediated, and those transformations to a student’s experience of the subject matter are non-innocent—both pedagogically and morally. As has been emphasized throughout the paper, a central feature of real-world corpse dissection is that it involves not an encounter with just any frog, but necessarily only a frog’s dead body. Friesen’s phenomenological analysis brings many of the aspects of this essential feature of real-world frog corpse dissection to attention, including student experiences of abjection, the smell of formaldehyde, eventual desensitization, etc. I suggest that this feature of real-world corpse dissection renders it unable to even potentially provide the kinds of pedagogical advantages that are possible for expanded simulations. Consider again the three points of potential expansion outlined in the previous subsection: the frog’s interaction with its environmental context; the dynamics of interior systems; and subject variability without multiplying subjects. It is not only the case that simulations can be expanded to address these educational issues; it is also correspondingly the case that corpse dissection, as such, cannot. Take, for example, the issue of environmental context. It is certainly possible to supplement frog corpse dissection with instruction regarding the habitat of frogs, though not with the same potential as simulation for the integration of media. Even still, it remains the case that this particular frog, the one whose corpse the student is about to mutilate, is one whose relation to the environment has been necessarily altered as part of a technologically-mediated process. It has been extracted from its environment already (or raised in an artificial one), has died of non-natural causes, has been treated with chemicals, and has been packaged and shipped. These technologically-mediated features are not irrelevant to the lessons learned by students. One of Dewey’s central insights is that the context of the classroom is itself significant to the learning experience. These artifacts of the corpse dissection procedure—the packing and shipping, the chemical treatments, the pins and wax trays—are parts of the student experience. For example, Friesen provides the example of the encounter with the jar of formaldehyde stuffed full with frog


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corpses as an aspect of the lab dissection context that students commonly find striking (2012). Reading that section of his paper I was reminded of my own experience of dissecting a frog in high school. While it may very well be the case that those forgotten incisions contribute to my current knowledge of anatomy, I do instead distinctly recall the experience of seeing that flat and vacuumed-sealed bag the size of a desktop full of overlapping frog bodies. Ethical arguments for and against corpse dissection in the classroom have not been the focus of this paper, but there is one ethical argument that should be addressed here for its relevance to the progressive educational context inhabited by both real-world and computer-simulated frog dissection. It is often argued that the practices of classroom frog corpse dissection have the lamentable side effect of engendering in students a disrespect for life; in this view, through corpse dissection students are taught by implication that an animal’s life is not even worth one afternoon lesson that could have been learned otherwise.9 I suggest that conceiving of computer-simulated dissection and corpse dissection as two forms of technological mediation draws out this issue explicitly. As technologically-mediated practices, computer-simulated dissection and real-world corpse dissection have been shown above to each involve certain forms of interface, to enable certain pedagogical possibilities, and also to each be limited in certain respects. This backdrop of technological mediation is part of the structure of interconnected classroom experiences that Dewey highlights, that “moving force” as he calls it, which travels into other experiences, for better or for worse. In the case of expanded simulation, we have seen the virtual frog to move into further experiences such as the interaction with the dynamic systems of internal organs, the training of computer interface skills, and the context of the organism’s habitat. Contrarily, we have seen real-world frog corpse dissection to move into experiences such as the visceral feeling of slicing flesh, the training of the skills of using of scalpels and pins, and the context of the preparation of the animal’s dead body. It is the last of these, the student’s encounter with the frog as a corpse—extracted from its natural environment, killed, prepared, and shipped—that introduces lessons about how students should regard animal life. As Dewey puts it, “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only the particular thing he is studying at the time” (1938, 48). 4. Conclusion Through this phenomenological analysis, I hope to have shown that the context for comparing corpse dissection and computer-simulated dissection should not reduce to questions about how well a computer program can imitate classroom laboratory procedure. As Friesen demonstrates in his piece, the experiences of corpse dissection and computer-simulated dissection are very different. Building on this insight, I have explored the distinct advantages that computer-simulated dissection could provide to students, and have also considered limitations distinct to corpse dissection. These advantages of computer-simulated dissection include simulation’s expanding abilities to provide original educational opportunities for exploring dynamic and variable subjects in relation to their environments, and for integrating these lessons into computer interface instruction generally. These limitations of corpse dissection include the inherently inert objects of study abstracted from their environments, and the arbitrary training of the dissection interface. To be clear, I do not take the above analysis to have proven there to be no distinct advantages to corpse dissection. However, it has shown the inadequacy of any argument claiming that corpse dissection is superior to computer-simulated dissection simply because it retains features that computer simulations cannot imitate well. The distinct advantages of corpse dissection must be


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weighed against the distinct and continually advancing advantages of computer-simulated dissection. In this proper context of comparison, I suggest that corpse dissection increasingly appears lacking. The phenomenological arguments in defense of computer-simulated dissection in this paper are intended to supplement the ethical and environmental arguments against frog corpse dissection in primary and secondary school classrooms, and of course these points also apply more broadly to any animal dissection in primary and secondary school. When added to arguments regarding the ethical treatment of animals and the environmental impact of these practices—arguments which are by themselves persuasive to many—the case against favoring computer-simulated dissection in the classroom is left on increasingly thin and withering ground. References Akpan, J. P. (2001). “Issues Associated with Inserting Computer Simulations Into Biology Instruction: A

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Biology Education.” Journal of Curriculum Studies. 37(5): 583-600. Dreyfus, H. (1972). What Computers Can’t Do. New York: MIT Press. Dreyfus, H. (2001). On the Internet. London: Routledge. Fallman, D. (2007). “Persuade Into What? Why Human-Computer Interaction Needs a Philosophy of Technology.” In

Y. de Kort et al. (eds.), Persuasive 2007, LNCS 4744. Berlin: Springer-Verlag. pp. 295-306. Fleishmann, K. R. (2003). “Frog and Cyberfrog Are Friends: Dissection Simulation and Animal Advocacy.” Society &

Animals. 11(2): 123-143. Friesen, N. (2012). “Dissection and Simulation: Brilliance and Transparency, or Encumbrance and Disruption?”

Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology. 15(3): this volume. Golding, W. (1955). The Lord of the Flies. New York: Coward-McCann. Heidegger, M. (1953). Being and Time, trans. J. Stambaugh, 1996. Albany: SUNY Press. Hickman, L. (2008). “Postphenomenology and Pragmatism: Closer Than You Might Think?” Techné: Research in

Philosophy and Technology. 12(2). Hug, B. (2008). “Re-Examining the Practice of Dissection: What Does It Teach?” Journal of Curriculum Studies.

40(1): 91-105. Ihde, D. (2002). Bodies in Technology. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ihde, D. (2009). Postphenomenology and Technoscience: The Peking University Lectures. Albany: SUNY Press. Ihde, D. (2012). “Dissection and Simulation: A Postphenomenological Critique.” Techné: Research in Philosophy and

Technology. 15(3): this volume. Keiser, T. D., and R. W. Hamm. (1991). “Dissection—The Case For.” The Science Teacher. 51(1): 13. Kline, D. A. (1995). “We Should Allow Dissection of Animals.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics.

8(2): 190-197. Kockelkoren, P. (ed.). (2007). Mediated Vision. Rotterdam: Veenman Publishers and ArtEZ Press. Medrazo, G. M. (2002). “The Debate Over Dissection: Dissecting a Classroom Dilemma.” Science Educator. 11(1):

41-45. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception, trans, C. Smith. London: Routledge. Mitcham, C. (2007). “From Phenomenology to Pragmatism: Using Technology as an Instrument.” In E. Selinger (ed.),

Postphenomenology: A Critical Companion to Ihde. Albany: SUNY Press, pp. 21-33. Oakley, J. (2009). “Under the Knife: Animal Dissection as a Contested School Science Activity.” Journal for Activist

Science & Technology Education. 1(2): 59-67. Orlans, F. B. (1991). “Dissection—The Case Against.” The Science Teacher. 58(1): 12. Riis, S. (2010). “A Sense of Postphenomenology.” SATS: Northern European Journal of Philosophy. 11(1): 107-115. Rosenberger, R. (2009). “The Sudden Experience of the Computer.” AI & Society. 24: 173-180. Rosenberger, R. (2011). “A Phenomenology of Image Use in Science: Multistability and the Debate over Martian


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Gully Deposits.” Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology. 15(2): 156-169. Rosenberger, R. (forthcoming). “The Importance of Generalized Bodily Habits for a Future World of Ubiquitous

Computing.” AI & Society. Sørensen, E. (2012). “Comment on Norm Friesen’s: ‘Dissection and Simulation: Brilliance and Transparency, or

Encumbrance and Disruption?’” Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology. 15(3): this volume. Steinert, S. (2010). “Interfaces: Crosslinking Humans and Their Machines.” International Journal of Applied Research

on Information Technology and Computing. 1(1): 130-140. Sapontzis, S. F. (1995). “We Should Not Allow the Dissection of Animals.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental

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posted at: http://www.childresearch.net/RESOURCE/RESEARCH/2010/TRIPATHI2.HTM Tripathi, A. K. (2010b). “Ethics and Aesthetics of Technology.” AI & Society. 25: 5-9. Winograd, T., and F. Flores. (1986). Understanding Computers and Cognition. Norwood: Ablex Publishing

Corporation. Verbeek, P.-P. (2005). What Things Do: Technology, Agency, and Design. State College: Penn State University Press. Notes 1. For more on the debate over frog dissection in the classroom, see (e.g., Keiser and Hamm, 1991; Orlans, 1991; Kline, 1995; Sapontzis, 1995; Akpan, 2001; Medrazo, 2002; Fleishmann, 2003; Allchin, 2005; De Villiers and Monk, 2005; Hug, 2008; Oakley, 2009). 2. More specifically, the perspective I work from in this paper is called “postphenomenology.” Postphenomenology refers to a contemporary school of thought which builds on the work of Don Ihde, and which addresses issues regarding the bodily and perceptual experience of technology through a perspective which combines thinking from the philosophical traditions of phenomenology and American pragmatism. For more on postphenomenology, see (e.g., Verbeek, 2005; Ihde, 2009; Rosenberger, 2009; Riis, 2010; Rosenberger, 2011; the 2008, 31(1) issue of Human Studies; and the 2011, 16(2-3) issue of Foundations of Science. For critical assessments of the relationship between postphenomenology and American pragmatism, see (Mitcham, 2007; Hickman, 2008). 3. For more on the notion of interface, see (Steinert, 2010). 4. Another clear inspiration is the work of Martin Heidegger, especially his account of tool use in Being and Time (1953). I hesitate to utilize Heidegger’s work here, however, since I do not want to commit this analysis to the larger account of ontology and the critique of the history of philosophy within which his account of tool use is intimately embedded. 5. Like the notion of multistability itself, the notion of “relational strategies” represents an analytic tool to be deployed contextually. For example, we could consider a transistor radio in terms of its multistability, brainstorming various uses for the device and considering various meanings it could potentially maintain for different users within different contexts. But we could then also change the entire context of this analysis by opening up the radio, pulling out an individual transistor, and then considering its own potential stable relations. The situatedness of the person conducting the analysis is thus at issue in these sorts of investigations. The notion of relational strategies—referring to the bodily and conceptual approach that enables a particular stable relation—is also wrapped up within the pragmatic contextuality of the analyst. If we were to brainstorm multiple possible stabilities for the transistor radio, then we could consider what sorts of general comportments and understandings would be required for one to take up the device in terms of each stability. If we were to next pull open the transistor radio, tear out an individual transistor, and brainstorm multiple stabilities possible for it, then we could again consider the relational strategies that would be required for one to take up each of those stabilities. Likewise, in the case of computer interface we could consider the relational strategy associated with our approach to the computer as a whole, or we could consider the relational strategy of our approach to only the computer mouse, or keyboard, or screen, etc. This depends on the context of investigation. 6. For further phenomenological accounts of computer use, see (e.g., Winograd and Flores, 1986; Borgmann, 1999; Dreyfus, 2001; Suchman, 2007; Fallman, 2007; Tripathi, 2010a; Tripathi, 2010b). 7. For more on the Digital Frog 2.5 computer-simulated dissection, see: www.digitalfrog.com


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8. For more on the V-Frog computer-simulated dissection, see: www.tactustech.com 9. For examples of the argument that corpse dissection teaches disrespect for life, see (e.g., Orlans, 1991; Sapontzis, 1995; Oakley, 2009). Douglass Allchin argues the opposite: that it is in fact simulations that teach disrespect for life by presenting animal bodies as easily and cleanly dismantled, thus objectifying them. He writes, “A proper aim is discovery, not destruction. One should separate and clarify: Trace pathways, find boundaries, encounter connections—quite impossible if things are pre-cut and disappear as preformed units in a single mouse-click” (Allchin, 2005, 370). While initially persuasive, it is exactly this kind of argument that does not hold up in the face of what expanded simulations could deliver. Like Kline above, Allchin’s arguments assume that the goal of simulation must be to reproduce the experience of corpse dissection. I have shown that on the contrary the proper comparison is instead between corpse dissection’s limitations and advantages and computer simulation’s own distinct limitations and its still-expanding advantages.


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Less is More: A Response to Ihde, Rosenberger, Borgmann, Barney and Sørensen

Norm Friesen

Thompson Rivers University

Abstract This response paper begins by countering the contributions of Don Ihde and Robert Rosenberger to this special issue, making its case in existential terms. Then, addressing Darin Barney, these arguments are developed further in aesthetic terms, making use of the “modernist” educational theory of René Arcilla. This response article concludes by returning to the realm of the educational with the help of Albert Borgmann's and Estrid Sørensen's feedback. Keywords: simulation, phenomenology, pedagogy, aesthetics, kitsch, alterity I have enjoyed the rare privilege of being placed in dialogue with a range of highly accomplished scholars, with a common focus on concerns and arguments that have preoccupied me for some time. It is not easy to answer to this rich variety of theoretical, methodological, and personal responses. However, I will try to do so first by countering the contributions of Don Ihde and Robert Rosenberger, making my case in existential terms. Then, addressing Darin Barney, I develop my arguments further in aesthetic terms, by making use of the “modernist” educational theory of René Arcilla. Finally, I conclude by returning to the realm of the educational with the help of Albert Borgmann and Estrid Sørensen. In my original paper, I argued that to undertake high school dissection using a computer simulation is to omit important experiential elements that are available only in the dissection laboratory. I used Albert Borgmann’s (1992) characterizations of hyperreality as “pliable,” “discontinuous,” and “brilliant” to argue for the fundamental conformity of the hyperreal and its interfaces with intentionality as defined in the phenomenological tradition: Software is carefully designed to anticipate and accommodate intention and habitual action at every turn—to cultivate a “liv[ing]-in-certainty-of-the-world”—whereas an animal carcass used in lab dissection offers little by way of instructionally convenient “brilliance,” and, indeed, is not “designed” at all. The systematic exclusion of elements of deprivation, interruption and upheaval in hyperreal interfaces provides students with an on-screen experience of transparency and intentional flow with which they are likely already all too familiar. The experiential elements of deprival and interruption, I conclude, are by definition unrecognized and unrecognizable in the rational processes underlying an instructional simulation’s development. Ihde and Rosenberger respond to this by advancing two important and interrelated claims: that the hyperreal brings more than a single modality of engagement to students, and that the kinds of skills and experience involved in these modalities are constitutive (in part) of natural scientific knowledge itself. Ihde for example writes:

My first point here is that today’s biology education, as with today’s scientific practices, takes up a wide set of variant instrumentally mediated perspectives, each producing different ranges of knowledges …physiological, neurological and other… which synthesized produces a much richer and robust result than the limited dissection/simulation example given (2012, 224).


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Rosenberger similarly argues that hyperreal dissection need not “reduce to the context of classroom laboratory dissection: there are other contexts made possible by computer simulation” (2012, 40). What Rosenberger refers to as “expanded simulation” could facilitate a much wider range of experiences and possibilities, he implies, by including also imaging different types of representation and remote action. Rosenberger and Ihde cite examples of “robotic surgery,” “external imaging [of] a frog… catching insect prey,” and a “3D tour within vessels or along [the frog’s] nerves” as examples of the expanded, “variant instrumentally mediated perspectives” and modalities that are possible (Ihde and Rosenberger, 2012). The claim that hyperreality would, in these terms, provide a student so much more than the “inherently inert object” (Rosenberger 2012, 219) of a preserved animal is consistent, I believe, with my original argument that simulations, when designed effectively for predefined outcomes, can manifest instructional brilliance: The “truly brilliant hyperreality,” I quote Borgmann as saying, “will exclude all unwanted information” (1992, 97), and would heighten, enhance, enrich, and expand the information that is wanted. As an inherent quality of hyperreality, this type of brilliance is manifest in my original descriptions of the frog simulation, however technically modest this example may be. The appearance and disappearance (as appropriate, or on command) of prompts, instruments, and even the entire dissection exercise itself for multiple users, anywhere all evince a convenience, pliability and disposability that this relatively simple simulation would share with much more technically impressive and sophisticated technologies of hyperreality. In its ability to facilitate enhanced representation and remote action, the computer does indeed open up a wide field of exciting possibilities for education. And to reference Rosenberger’s and Ihde’s second claim, many of these possibilities are of great relevance and value to natural sciences and other knowledges currently in high demand. The ability to master computer interfaces of various kinds is certainly a prerequisite for work in the 21st century as Ihde suggests, from the activities of a remote, micro or “Nintendo” surgeon, to the labours of a franchise short-order cook. I do not hesitate in granting all of these points. Highlighting, pointing, enhancing, enabling, and simplifying are all indispensible pedagogical acts, and in granting them flexibility, ubiquity, flow and interchangeability, the instructional potential of the Internet and of hyperreality is indeed enormous. But all of this misses an important point: What is valuable in an educational experience is not just a matter of Ihde’s “richer and more robust results” and Rosenberger’s vastly “expanded simulation.” Experiences of educational value do not simply involve engagement with more -- enrichment, augmentation, highlighting, or increases in flexibility and interchangeability. Education also involves experiences of less: deprivation, limitation, disruption and finitude. Relevant examples provided in my article include the confinement and inconvenience presented at various stages in a laboratory dissection. The examples I mention also include a rather different simulation (referenced only in a footnote): The virtual representation of the “true horrors of concentration camps” that educational gaming enthusiast Marc Prensky suggests has potential value for instruction on the Nazi era. This last example is perhaps troubling, and probably not just because of Adorno’s interdiction against poetry after (or aesthetic representation of) Auschwitz. The trouble with Prensky’s example can indeed be articulated in aesthetic terms, but it is also a matter of the inherent logic of hyperreality. It has to do with the impossibility of simulating the deprival, encumbrance, disruption and finitude that may be a part of an experience. There are many commonplace experiences—both in and out of the classroom—where limitations and encumbrance (much less extreme than those of a death camp) are both inherent to the experience have evident educational value. Think simply of what is involved in working competently with physical materials --the patience and cultivated attunement called for in working with wood, or in repairing an obstinate


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mechanical malfunction. Think also of engaging with phenomena of the natural world, the patience and care required—and sometimes rewarded—in growing bean seeds in the classroom or in gardening at home. Finally, think of simply engaging with others as co-present embodied beings—subject to the reciprocal restrictions (and possibilities) presented by the time and space that our bodies are always inhabiting. In all of these examples, limitation, encumbrance and deprival are to varying degrees an inescapable part of the experience; they are not an arbitrary, external imposition. Instances where deprival and confinement are extrinsic to the experience or matter at hand are equally illustrative. Outside of the context of games or competitions (where handicaps are a common device), to arbitrarily deprive or to limit someone’s ability generally has the significance of a punishment or penalization. I would argue, contra Rosenberger (2012), that this is how limitations imposed in hyperreality, like the disabled “undo” button that he envisions, would be experienced: It would turn the simulation into either a punishment or a game (both reducing its manifest content to a matter of secondary concern). Simply put: A simulation, as a technology or tool, is by definition a means to an end; elements not consistent with this means-ends structure are alien to its character as a tool. This is why arbitrary limitations on a simulation’s functions and capabilities would be experienced as impositions, not as themselves part of the simulated reality. Still, Rosenberger (and Ihde) might reply that the representation and simulation of experiences of encumbrance, limitation and finitude could avoid this problem by being richer, more expansive and robust through the deployment of more advanced technologies and techniques. I would argue, though, that this only reinforces what I understand as the inherent logic of the simulation. This is a cumulative, multiplicative logic that looks to add features and heighten immediacy, consistently taking the simulation every further from encumbrance and finitude that might be intrinsic to what is being simulated. To follow this argument further, I now move into the aesthetic domain, and consider the dissection simulation (and its variants) in terms of the responses they produce in their viewers or audience. Referencing Adorno, I’ve already mentioned the “troubling” implications or possible responses associated with Prensky’s death camp simulation. In his recent book Mediumism: A Philosophical Reconstruction of Modernism for Existential Learning (2011), René Arcilla articulates a modernist critique of representation and simulation that reflects some aspects of Adorno’s aesthetics. Adapting modernist critiques of aesthetic realism to apply to a generalized notion of simulation, Arcilla suggests that one aesthetic category in particular would be relevant to simulation; he refers to this as kitsch. Kitsch “…is an art and a culture of instant assimilation, of abject reconciliation to the everyday [and] of avoidance of difficulty…” (Arcilla, 2011, 7, quoting T.J. Clark, 1985); it is “…formulaic art calculated to trigger automatic, unthinking reactions” (Arcilla, 2002, 462). Arcilla then goes on to explain why simulation and its cumulative, multiplicative logic of “more” are emblematic of kitsch:

...the most efficient form for accomplishing this [instant, convenient assimilation] is one that conveys the strongest sense of immediacy. The more the work enables us to feel that we are there, as if in the blink of an eye we had been whisked to some other scene, the more irresistible its diverting power. ...Our thirst for the startlingly new and distracting is apt to be quenched, and rearoused, more by works, or channels, that overwhelm us with the sheer quantity of their ...bits of information... (2011, 70, 72; emphasis in original).


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It is precisely the aesthetic of a simulated dissection—perhaps especially in its “extended” sense—that is illustrative of Arcilla’s characterization of kitsch. Such an enhanced simulation would seek to convey the strongest sense of immediacy, enabling us to feel that we are there: in the frog’s habitat, or in the lab, slicing its abdomen to reveal its highlighted organs, or even miniaturized and weightless flying along its vessels and nerves. In addition, for Arcilla, this sense of readily accessible presence (as the term “im-mediacy” suggests) involves a kind of sleight-of-hand concerning the medium or the technology that makes it possible. The medium underlying the experience of the simulation or hyperreality, Arcilla argues, must become a kind of “occult technique,” a technology that “withdraws into invisibility” behind the simulation’s manifest, im-mediate content (2011, 71). “The work’s miraculousness,” according to Arcilla, “is a function of how well it cloaks its medium” (2011, 71). The problem with this type of medium or technology, and the responses it cultivates is that it alienates the viewer not only from the technology underlying it, but also from his or her situation and embodied finitude. In this sense, media of hyperreality by definition bear the traits of inauthenticity. The immediacy of digital kitsch, Arcilla explains, acts as “transporting force, and transport in this sense... is flight from our authentic condition” (2011, 72). It “requires me [the viewer or user] to be distanced enough from the event that nothing about it reminds me of myself or of my condition” (2011, 70). To return to the original example of the frog simulation, the student does not need to seek out the inert bean-like mass of a reptile heart within a shrivelled corpse, and in this sense to confront the certainties of finite, physical embodiment—destined also to inertia and decay. Instead, taking a “view from nowhere” (see Nagel, 1989) she is able to fly along arteries, see the frog move in slow motion, or practice remote microscopic interventions—experiences unimaginable within the limits of her quotidian embodied existence, and unachievable without sophisticated technologies of hyperreality. In contrast, education should provide students with a view from somewhere, specifically from their own developing identity, and their own “authentic condition,” as Arcilla puts it. This is the condition presented by the student’s own existence. Correspondingly, Arcilla describes to this kind of education as individual “existential learning.” The process of existential learning, according to Arcilla, is above all one of interrogation and questioning --a questioning directed towards the authentic conditions of our “existence:”

Existence is questionable: it calls us to exercise our freedom, to understand its meaning for us. [It leads us to ask questions like:] Is there truly no reason for existence or for why I exist? ...Who am I [in this existence]?...How should I live concretely with [the fact and the] sense of existence? (2011, 23, 25)

Answers to such questions of existence, of freedom and identity are of course ultimately undecidable: there is no one, “right,” answer to any of them. They do not present problems to be solved, but predicaments to be confronted. And like any predicament requiring action towards an uncertain outcome, they also involve risk. Such characterizations converge remarkably with Darin Barney’s response in this issue. In particular, the kinds of questions and uncertainties raised in Arcilla’s “existential learning” are strikingly similar to those that are implied by what Barney calls “actual politics:”

When politics happens, the shape and operation of power is exposed, and questions are raised about justice and the good life, questions whose answers cannot be given in advance, questions whose very undecidability calls upon us to make judgments and to act. ...expos[ing] us to differences that disrupt our certainties, [these issues] thwart


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immediate gratification of our desire for convenience, and impose burdens of consideration, care, judgment and action that cannot be shed without draining the situation of its political character (2012, 210).

Occult mechanisms are exposed, undecidable questions are raised (and addressed) through unavoidably risky endeavors, and burdensome conditions are confronted. The questioning and knowing implied in this real and existential engagement is a very different from the “scientific knowledges” invoked by Ihde—and the “variant instrumentally mediated perspectives” that would be used to produce them. In one type of knowledge, as Ihde describes the student confronts something fully transformed into a “scientific object,” and learns modalities of “human-instrument interactivity” (2012, 203) in the other, the student confronts (on some level) his or her own finitude, and encounters aspects or consequences of the human domination of the natural world, as well as the limitations of this domination. And the student does so precisely through (and not at all in spite of) the desultory paltriness of the frog’s shriveled corpse. Other experiences of the body are central to Barney’s actual politics (and arguably, to experiences of “existential learning” as well). In Barney’s case, these experiences are described specifically in gustatory terms, in terms of the aesthetics of taste (in one’s mouth) and the unavoidability of one’s own “gut response:”

It is when the disgusting taste, sight, smell, sound or feel of injustice turns our stomachs that we are given over to empathy and outrage, and thereby incorporated into a political event that might otherwise present itself as an imprudent wager. . . . Politics, like actual dissection, takes guts (2012, 212).

But exactly what kind of curriculum would be adequate to the “gutsy” politics advocated by Barney? An answer is adumbrated in my response to Albert Borgmann’s and Estrid Sørensen’s contributions. Borgmann concludes his piece in this issue by stressing the need for an “alternative that can take the place of instrumentalized and virtualized education:”

To reject the conventional instrumental view of education that is so easily commandeered by technology is a good thing, but rejection can mean rebellion or replacement. Rebellion in the name of disruption and upheaval may be a helpful beginning, but it is not enough, and it is less than that if it is extended to the teachers, the pupils, and the parents as a choice between yielding or withdrawing (2012, 201).

An adequate alternative to simple rebellion, if I read Borgmann correctly, would be more specific than what Arcilla describes as “existential learning” or what I have just mentioned concerning Barney’s “actual politics.” An adequate alternative would offer teachers, pupils, and parents a curriculum which (for example) would help differentiate the educational differences separating a dissection and simulation rather than cloak them through claims of technological necessity or superiority. In the monograph in which a version of my original paper on dissection has subsequently appeared (Friesen, 2011), I take the time to outline at least some of the alternative “non-instrumentalized” curricular possibilities. These possibilities, I show, are grounded in embodied relation, subject to the reciprocal encumbrances (and possibilities) presented by our bodies, and the singular place and time we are always necessarily inhabiting. Through further examples that build on the descriptions of dissection featured in this issue, I show this alternative curriculum to be realized not so much in the form of individualized “learning” as through an asymmetrical pedagogical relationship between students and teacher. On the teacher’s side, this relationship is marked by a greater responsibility than is held by the student or child. And I emphasize that this responsibility is exercised just as much by what is not done, by what is withheld or muted, as by what is explicitly emphasized and enacted. Following Dewey, I refer to


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this witholding as “negative capability:” a non-specialized capacity to suspend intentionally focused awareness and action. In addition, I oppose this capability to what are generally seen as positive, specialized instructional abilities, such as instructional planning, behavior modification and other instrumental techniques. This negative capability, to conclude, can only be manifest contextually, in relationship with a particular student or child. And it is in this connection that Sørensen’s response is particularly illuminating; for she reminds us that in education, particular

…children [are always] present in flesh and blood, and through their activities with the computers and stories around them, they [come] to relate a great variety of facets of their lives to the digital technology. Digital technology is always embedded in rich social practice (2012, 207).

The instructional brilliance of hyperreal technologies can add a great deal to the richness of social practice in which they are embedded. However in this embedding, it is the surrounding social and embodied practice ultimately stands out as primary. The very interchangeability, renewability, and convenience of the hyperreal gives it an educational value that is easy to recognize and affirm in an already-technologized educational world. It is more difficult to recognize and affirm educational places and experiences that are embodied, particular, non-interchangeable, and flesh-and-blood. However, it is to these places and these experiences that we are repeatedly and unavoidably forced to return, by our own bodies, and through our relations with others and with the world around us. References Arcilla, R.V. (2002). “Modernising Media or Modernist Medium? The Struggle for Liberal Learning in Our

Information Age.” Journal of Philosophy of Education. 36(3): 457-465. Arcilla, R.V. (2010). Mediumism: A Philosophical Reconstruction of Modernism for Existential Learning. Albany NY:

SUNY Press. Barney, D. (2012). “Gut Feelings: A Response to Norm Friesen’s ‘Dissection and Simulation.’” Techné: Research in

Philosophy & Technology 15(3): 209-214. Borgmann, A. (1992). Crossing the Postmodern Divide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Borgmann, A. (2012). “Response to Norm Friesen.” Techné: Research in Philosophy & Technology 15(3): 201-202. Clark, T.J. (1985). “Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art.” In F. Frascina (ed.) Pollock and After: The Critical Debate.

New York: Harper and Row, 47-63. Friesen, N. (2011). The Place of the Classroom and the Space of the Screen: Relational Pedagogy and Internet

Technology. New York: Peter Lang. Ihde, D. (2012). “Dissection and Simulation: A Postphenomenological Critique.” Techné: Research in Philosophy &

Technology 15(3): 203-205. Nagel, T. (1989). The View from Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rosenberger, R. (2012). “A Phenomenological Defense of Computer-Simulated Frog Dissection.” Techné: Research in

Philosophy & Technology 15(3): 209-221. Sørensen, E. (2012) “Comment on Norm Friesen’s: ‘Dissection and Simulation: Brilliance and Transparency, or

Encumbrance and Disruption?’” Techné: Research in Philosophy & Technology 15(3): 206-208.