What Type of Relations are the students having in

class?

Embodiment

• In A Material Hermeneutic, by Verbeek, he states that an embodiment relation is where “human beings take technological artifacts into their experiencing, and thereby broaden the area of sensitivity of their bodies to the world.

An example of an embodiment relation from the

classroom

• Some students are allowed to use headphones in order to listen to the book that they are reading on tape.

• The students are not listening to the headphones but they are listening through them. The audio is what they are able to hear by using the headphones.

Hermeneutic

• Verbeek states that a Hermeneutic relation is where “the artifact does not withdraw from our relation to the world but provides a representation of the world.

An example of hermeneutic relations from the classroom

• The students often read the clock to answer their own questions about how long is left in the period. Although the students are not involved with the clock, they are involved with the world by telling what time it is.

Alterity

• Verbeek describes alterity relations as ones where “humans are not related, as in mediating relations, via a technology to the world; rather, they are related to or with a technology.”

An example of an alterity relation from the classroom

• The computers that they use in the lab do the searching of information for the students. They simply type the keywords to what they are looking for and the computer finds and presents many different sources of information.

• In addition, the timer that we use on the SmartBoard, does the counting for us. We merely tell the timer how much time we want and it counts the nanoseconds so that the teacher doesn’t have to

Background

• In his article, Verbeek discusses background relations as relations where “we are related neither explicitly to a technology nor via a technology to the world; instead, the technologies shape the context of our experience in a way that is not consciously experienced.”

Examples of background relations from the

classroom• The students are impacted by the

temperature of the classroom. The air conditioner/heater system shuts itself on and off depending on the current temperature of the classroom.

• Additionally, the computer will go into a “save energy” or “sleep” mode to save energy that is being used by the computer. These examples both show the unconscious ways in which the technologies shape the context of our experience.