Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology Newsletter
Real vs. Virtual Dissections:
Brilliance and Transparency or Encumbrance and Disruption?
Norm Friesen
Friesen is Canada Research Chair in E-Learning Practices and Director of the New Media Studies Research Centre at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, British Columbia. A longer version of this essay is published in a special issue of Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology. That essay will be a chapter in Friesen’s forthcoming book, The Place of the Classroom and the Space of the Screen: Relational Pedagogy and Internet Technology (Peter Lang, 2011). nfriesen@tru.ca. © 2011 Norm Friesen.Originally published in EAP, vol. 22, no. 2 (spring 2011), pp. 6-10.
In his influential essay, “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants,” writer on education Marc Prensky (2001) encourages digital simulations and educational video games for all curricula. He boasts there is no subject too involved or too sensitive for which there is no “game or other Digital Native method for learning it”:
Classical philosophy? Create a game in which the philosophers debate and the learners have to pick out what each would say. 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, as opposed to the films like Schindler’s List (ibid., 6)
In this essay, I consider some experiential limits of simulation technology and their significance for education. I focus on real versus digital animal dissections carried out in high school and college biology. I begin by describing the experience of these two modes of dissection and follow with a more general analysis of the “virtual” or “hyperreal.”
The Dissection Experience
In debates
about animal dissection, studies using qualitative methods
have examined the laboratory dissection experience and
student responses. Classroom accounts typically follow a
common sequence of events, punctuated by experiential
moments of particular prominence.
One moment is the initial encounter with the animal carcasses. Students typically notice them as they walk into the classroom, spotting “flattened rats in a jar,” “little dead pigs lying in the sink,” “a jar of pickled animals,” or a creature simply “tossed... into a plate” (Solot & Arluke 1997, 34). Such observations are accompanied by strong olfactory impressions, including the smells of formaldehyde (which “refuses to leave your hands”) and rotting flesh (said to “get a little riper with each passing session”).
A second significant experiential moment in laboratory dissection is the act of touching the carcass and making the first incision:
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 (ibid., 35).
Student comments give special emphasis to the embodied, intercorporeal character of this moment. Here is one high school student’s account involving 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).
There are good pedagogical reasons for including laboratory dissections in basic science and biology curricula: for example, learning “the structure and function of organs” (Jordan School District 2004) and being able to safely use dissection “apparatus and materials” (Sackville High School 2008). From an experiential perspective, however, impressions of disgust, nausea, and repulsion often overwhelm other, less visceral and more intellectual aspects of the dissection.
A virtual frog dissection provides a clear contrast. One example is the frog-dissection simulation at http://www.frogguts.com, which begins when the student clicks on a link. Once the dissection program has loaded, the student sees an animated homepage indicating several demo simulations. After choosing the frog option, the student encounters an image of a life-size bullfrog filling much of the browser window. First, the student is asked to fasten the frog to a dissection tray, an action accomplished through a series of mouse clicks. Next appears a dotted red line running the length of the frog’s abdomen. The student is instructed to make three incisions on this line by clicking and then dragging the cursor along the frog’s underbelly.
Any unease one might feel is muted, since there are no accompanying unpleasant sounds or unusual feelings of resistance. There is no elasticity, no moist membrane to puncture and incise—only the frictionless gliding of the cursor across the computer screen.
Following the stomach incisions, the dissection software provides clickable scissors with which the student is to “cut upwards… through the muscle tissue.” Halfway up the stomach, the cutting is suddenly interrupted by a pop-up that instructs the student to “twist the scissors to avoid cutting the heart under the ribs.” The student clicks on another icon, and the scissors slip to one side, allowing the “cutting” to continue. Immediately, the internal organs of the frog are visible, to be examined and identified by a “magnifying glass” and “writing pad” now present on the screen. When the student locates an organ through the magnifying glass, an identifying label appears; another click of the mouse “enters” the name of the organ on the notepad.
As pointed out earlier, the manifold sense impressions assaulting students in the laboratory dissection are absent or muted in the digital simulation. There is no smell of formaldehyde or rotting flesh; there is no need to fear that the carcass might spurt blood. The student’s first impression is not a dead creature but an advertisement for the dissection program. Handling and cutting the carcass is a question of clicking the correct buttons in sequence and gliding the simulated scalpel across the screen.
Another conspicuous moment in the laboratory dissection is what has been called “distantiation” or “de-animalization” (Solot and Arluke 1997, 35) whereby the identity of the creature as creature is largely obliterated. Barr and Herzog (2000) report that some “students cover[ed] the face of the animals they were dissecting,” with one student 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 (ibid., 59).
Over time in the laboratory dissection, the strong intercorporeal link between student and dissected animal shifts. The visceral, acutely empathic response is replaced by a more distanced, intellectual attitude. For example, one student described a 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 (ibid., 63) note such student comments as:
-
“God, his liver is like a mushroom or something. His heart’s kinda tough. Feel that.”
-
“Look at that. Oh, it’s got a weird texture.”
In spite of a broadening intellectual awareness, however, one notes in these comments that a sensory richness remains, with tactile sensations emphasized especially.
Virtual vs Organic
The contrasting possibilities and limitations of real and
simulated dissections can be further explored by considering
how virtuality (the “hyperreal”) is considered in
philosophy. In a critique of “hyperreality,” philosopher
Albert Borgmann (1992, 87–102) characterizes virtual
contexts and objects in terms of pliability,
discontinuity and disposability, and brilliancy.
Pliability refers to the fact that hyperreal objects can be “entirely subject[ed] to…desire and manipulation” (ibid., 88). In the virtual dissection, pliability is well illustrated by the ease with which the virtual frog can be sliced open, its organs revealed, then inspected with a magnifying glass, and finally noted with pencil and paper. No one tool or task in this virtual process requires a particular disposition or comportment different from any other. There is no scalpel piercing tissue, no eye peering through magnifying glass, no pen writing. Rather, all that is required is a series of repetitive mouse-clicks and relative immobility in front of a computer screen.
Borgmann describes the discontinuity and disposability of hyperreal objects and environments in terms of contextual relationship:
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 (ibid., 95–96).
The laboratory dissection is rife with encumbrance and confinement, including persistent odors; parts of the preserved animal’s “context”; and the irreversible incisions that, if made incorrectly, might render an organ absent or unidentifiable. Neither the process nor the product of laboratory dissection lend themselves to the discontinuity and disposability that Borgmann associates with hyperreality: The toxic remains of the dissection are all too persistent and must be dealt with in terms of cleaning, disposal, and safety.
In contrast, the “undo” and “redo” options of a virtual dissection are not so much convenient features as intrinsic properties of a virtual world in which an object can be refreshed, rebooted, or simply shut down at will.
Borgmann describes the third hyperreal quality of brilliance as “absence of noise” and a heightening of an object’s “attractive” features. The “truly brilliant reality,” Borgmann says, “would exclude all unwanted information,” resulting in an experience providing only those aspects of explicit relevance. In the online dissection, all encumbering intercorporeal aspects are removed; what remains is 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.
Inclusion & Exclusion
The virtual
inclusion of “brilliant” features and the systematic
exclusion of all forms of encumbrance and confinement
are remarkably consistent with the conceptualization and
design of instructional simulations.
Specialists in instructional design sometimes use a
quasi-mathematical formula to capture these processes of
inclusion and exclusion. As Jacobs and Dempsey (1993, 200)
explain:
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… and later by Clariana in the following formula:
Simulation = Reality – Task irrelevant elements.
Using Borgmann’s terms, this formula means that the virtual dissection excludes “noise” that would encumber and confine the user. And it includes those features—e.g., labels, pins, scissors and magnifying glass—only when their presence is instructionally desirable.
The end product is a simulated experience of a world as “pliable” and as accommodating of “discontinuity” and “disposability” as possible; it is as fully deracinated and uprooted from any real-world environment as design will allow. In short, the simulation can be said to be “brilliant” in a way that is specifically instructional.
But important differences remain. First, the object of concern in the laboratory dissection is organic in its origin, development, and growth. Online, in contrast, the object in question is designed according to specific objectives. The real-world development and growth of a frog, for example, does not revolve around explicit, educational objectives but occurs for “reasons” (if they can be called such) that are entirely different. In simple terms, 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 not directly reducible to human ends.
As one does with any software, students engage with the simulation via an “interface.” An examination of the language used in the literature of interface design reveals that words like “seamlessness,” “transparency,” “translucency,” “playability,” “learnability,” “flow” and “intuitiveness” are often used to designate desirable design qualities (Usability First 2010).
As these terms suggest, a key goal of interface design is a kind of comfortable certainty and familiarity. Interestingly, this mode of experience resonates with the language that Husserl and later phenomenologists use to describe intentionality, which refers to the everyday purposes, plans, and categories connecting us with our world prereflectively. Intentionality renders a lived familiarity, enabling us to “live in certainty of the world” (Husserl 1970, 142) and to sustain the everyday, commonsensical “natural attitude.”
In other words, computers, particularly their interfaces, are designed to anticipate and to facilitate what we want to do, when we want to do it. Thus in the computer dissection exercise, scissors appear precisely when an incision is required, and a magnifying glass takes their place when closer inspection is desired.
This smooth transition from one tool to another aims to provide students with an experience of uninterrupted transparency and flow—in other words, a sustained but prereflective assurance of “living-in-certainty-of-the-world.” The figurative “threads of intentionality” that Merleau-Ponty says are “slackened” through the phenomenological reduction and suspension of the natural attitude (2002, xv) are, in this case, carefully kept as short and taut as possible. Any potential experiences of strangeness, otherness, disruption, or surprise are assiduously avoided. The student remains in the world of computer controls and images.
Simulating Encumbrance
Attempts to
simulate digitally the experience of encumbrance and
inconvenience highlight further important differences
between laboratory and virtual dissections. Each involves a
particular experience of care. One example is the digital
warning to “carefully twist the scissors to avoid cutting
the heart under the ribs.” What the simulation is actually
asking for is a mouse click that is no more careful or
skillful than any other. To simulate care and the
encumbrance and confinement that it presupposes would be to
work against the very logic, design, and purpose of the
computer and its interfaces. Attempts to simulate
encumbrance and confinement (and other experiences like the
deprivation and suffering proper to Prensky’s example of
concentration camps) reduce themselves to futility or
triviality. They become arbitrary or unnecessary irritations
rather than challenges inherent to the task itself.
If the simulated dissection unavoidably confronts the student with familiar aspects of her own self and world, the laboratory dissection presents the student with that which is not herself and with that which is “other.” According to philosopher Bernard Waldenfels (2007), the “other” is something that is manifest as a disruption of the self, its world, its plans and intentions. Waldenfels goes so far as to describe the encounter as an “upheaval” and explains: “As far as such upheavals are concerned, one can only yield to them or withdraw from them” (ibid., 30).
Learning as Encounter with World
Like all
experience, learning involves an encounter between self and
world. This experience can involve upheaval or disruption or
can be planned and optimized in advance, down to the finest
detail. Both modes of experience—inconvenience, encumbrance,
and disruption as well as familiarity, pliability, flow, and
brilliance—are important in education. For example, the
elimination of irrelevance or noise and foregrounding most
relevant qualities and eliminating “noise”—what Borgmann
terms “brilliance”—is an indispensible part of lesson
planning and instructional design.
We should not conclude, however, that brilliance alone represents the sum total of what is desirable pedagogically. Opacity, disruption, and upheaval also need to be understood and cultivated as important lived dimensions of education. Experiences that are emphatically embodied, both affectively and viscerally, are intrinsic to education. By definition, disruption and upheaval are inimical to systematic planning and design. These experiences run against the grain of the virtual interfaces through which planned instruction is increasingly delivered.
Instead, the upheaval and uncertainty that opacity, encumbrance, and disruption imply are disclosed only through slackening the figurative threads of intention, categorization, and planning. As a rigorous means through which these threads can be understood and the grip of intentionality relaxed, phenomenology offers valuable first steps in bringing this experiential and educational realm into focus.
References
Barr, G. & Herzog, H. A., 2000.
Fetal Pig: The High School Dissection Experience, Society
& Animals, 8 (1), 53–69.
Borgmann, A., 1992. Crossing the Postmodern Divide. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Froguts.com., 2001–09. Froguts. Retrieved Jan. 15, 2011, from http://froguts.com/.
Gagné, R. M., 1962. Psychological Principles in System Development. NY: Holt Rinehart & Winston.
Husserl, E., 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univ. Press.
Jacobs, J. W. & Dempsey, J. V., 1993. Simulation and Gaming: Fidelity, Feedback, and Motivation. In J. V. Dempsey, & G. C. Sales, eds., Interactive Instruction and Feedback (pp. 197–227). Englewood Hills, NJ: Educational Technology Publications.
Merleau-Ponty, M., 2002. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge.
Prensky, M., 2001. “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants”. On the Horizon, 9 (5). Retrieved Jan. 15, 2011, from: http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf.
Solot, D. & Arluke, A., 1997. Learning the Scientist’s Role: Animal Dissection in Middle School, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 26 (1), 28–54.
Usability First, 2010. Usability Glossary. Retrieved Jan. 15, 2011, from: www.usabilityfirst.com/glossary/main.cgi.
Van Manen, M., 1997. Researching Lived Experience, 2nd ed., London Ontario: Althouse Press.
Waldenfelds, B., 2007. The Question of the Other. Hong Kong: Chinese Univ. of Hong Kong.