by Dr. Ryan Straight
At each and every step, education in an online modality is necessarily mediated by innumerable technologies. In a variation on the traditional postphenomenological understanding of technological mediation, we will trace the experience through the learner, into the technology, the design of the instruction, to the content, and back again. At these “enigma points,” we find we end up playing a kind of pedagogical ‘telephone,’ potentially divorcing what is actually being experienced from what and how it was intended. Like designing a user or learning experience, you can’t design the experience, only for it.
Dr. Ryan Straight is an award-winning educator, writer, and researcher. He currently serves as an Associate Professor of Practice at the University of Arizona. He teaches in the Applied Computing and Cyber Operations undergraduate programs and directs College of Applied Science and Technology’s extended reality research laboratory, the MA{VR}X Lab. He also teaches an annual freshman seminar, Life in the Metaverse, in the Honors College.