Virtual Laboratories and Posthuman Learning

Abstract: The increasing use of virtual laboratories in education raises new philosophical—and perhaps especially phenomenological—questions related to how this
type of technological mediation affects the user’s sense of situated embodied being:
sensory perception. The empirical basis of this phenomenological inquiry is a case
study conducted in a Danish school setting. This allows us to compare analog laboratory work with virtual. Inspired by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, we describe how pupils’
bodily and multisensory interactions with laboratory tools differ across physical and
virtual settings. Virtual laboratories are complex, sociotechnical, often opaque practices that affect the pupils’ sense of embodiment, thus prompting the need for in situ
development of hermeneutical strategies for bridging the gap between the simulated
laboratory and the physical world. In the final section, we discuss how these strategies
can be considered posthuman learning processes