Professor Emeritus - University of Alberta
Catherine Adams and Max van Manen
College Quarterly, Vol. 9, No. 4, Fall 2006
In this paper we discuss how online seminar participants experience dimensions of embodiment, virtual space, interpersonal relations, and temporality; and how interacting through reading-writing, by means of online technologies, creates conditions, situations, and actions of pedagogical influence and relational affectivities. We investigate what happens when seminar participants (mostly doctoral and postdoctoral level students) reflect phenomenologically on the meaning of a human experience (phenomenon) that fascinates them. In writing online, participants are engaged in a spatial complexity of virtual experience: the space of the text and the space of the computer screen-these yield access to a non-physical space lying somewhere between the here and the there. We propose that Blanchot’s early work on the imaginal space of the text provides a way of perceiving and raising questions, and a new way of understanding the nature of scripture and orality in technologized contexts and relations of teaching and learning.