Prometheus

During our discussion, I learned many things in terms of ‘online-based research’ and ‘face-to-face’. There are many critical questions and fights in my mind when I think about the conditions and context of online learning. We can make a long and endless list of both advantages and disadvantages of ‘online-based’ and ‘face-to-face’ research. Even though I am not professional and knowledgeable person on new emerging research applications and methods, I am going to look at some practical and critical concerns for both in this post.

Face-to-Face and online research are not alternative for each other for me since both of them have its own ontological and epistemological settings. Positively, online technological developments enable researcher free and independent from the time-space. In other words, we do not need to worry about accessing to the rest of the world with the help of new research applications and environments. Survey, interview, naturally-occurring data are easily organized and developed in online environments. The nature of transactional distance and theory have been leading to change the traditional nature of ethnographies/inquiries. On the other hand, online environment is too open to be manipulated, distorted and controlled by the hegemonic power. This power emerges from the social-political-economic relations. For example, when we employ the online environment, we are assumed to be ‘already-there’ costumers. We cannot escape from being informed about the commodities and nature of capitalism. As we, all, know and experience that conducting research in online environment and data in those environments force us and our participants to be part of economic and defined strategic actions.

On the other hand, when I think that the disabled person who might potentially be researchers, participants, collogues, and collaborative academicians can design, conduct, improve their research the way in which ‘equality’, ‘equity’, ‘liberty’ and ‘democracy’ as research practice become more doable and visible in terms of ‘excluded’ individuals and societies. Let’s assume that we are conducting ‘co-coordinated’ research and knowledge labor practice by including disabled individuals, the member of other nations, and others in terms of gender and race. In such a research conducted in the online environment, we can reach more common and god sense truth for the sake of humanity. From this point of view, I want to keep my utopian dream for reaching the spirit of humanity by re-constructing and co-constructing the idea of academia as Prometheus.