My dreams
        were made of fluffy clouds
        floating free of boundaries and lines.
 I  was going to….
                     create something new
                     play with worlds
                     dance with images
                     feel whole in my expressions.
 Then….
 Reality broke into…
                        shattering the magic of my dream world
                        bringing me from sky to earth
                        into…
                        instead.

        When reflecting on the process of writing my dissertation, I feel I am viewing a split between heart and mind made whole through a journey.  It begins with the research, as all dissertations must.  My interest in on-line education began six years ago.  I first focused on an administrative perspective, but it quickly shifted to instructional technology.  I took a course in Teaching On-line on-line and was appalled at its lack of quality.  I did not want to enter the space to learn.  I felt alienated and isolated.  I learned inspite of the poor environment.  The course made me determined to discover how to make these environments more humane.  How do we teach in these environments without demoralizing students?

        From my experience as a student, I began to think about my role as an on-line instructor and how to take that student experience and improve on-line education.  I took the cue from my own instincts and decided the best way to learn how to teach on-line was to explore student experiences.  From the students, I could learn how to make on-line environments better.  It became clear to me that a traditional quantitative study would not help me to discover the deeper issues involved in students’ experiences.  Quantitative studies have been done that focus on on-line environments from various perspectives.  The questions in these studies lay on the surface never probing into the depths of ontology or epistemology.  The research methodology is incapable of exploring deeper philosophical questions.

        In a required methodology class, I stumbled onto phenomenology quite by chance.  I found a way to ask the deeper questions. I found a way to express existential questions of bosy, space/place, time and relations.  Phenomenology allowed me to explore student experiences through philosophy, poetry, art, and the voices of students.  I found a research home for my questions.  Hermeneutic phenomenology seeks to discover the essence of experience—its heartbeat, its soul.  Without a grounded sense of the student experience, how would I begin to know how to approach instruction on-line?  Given my own experience, I could not assume that I knew how to teach on-line.  I could not assume I could approach teaching on-line the same as I would in a traditional classroom.  I just could not assume.

        Phenomenology as a way of doing research is learned in the doing of it.  Perhaps all research is truly learned only by doing a project or following a question through a series of steps.  In hermeneutic phenomenology, the process is a reflective one that begins with researchers questioning from a deep personal place the experience within themselves.  It began for me when I discussed the tap-root of technology in myself.   I started to see in this exploration how deep the question of experience with technology and the computer plunged into my life.   My self-reflections and curiosity naturally led me out into the world outside.  How could this lived-experience of students in a WCC be understood from poetry, literature, philosophy, or from authors exploring education, sociology, psychology, and anthropology?  How did students who took online courses in other venues, my own classmates, what was it like for them?  How could I understand the experience through the metaphors offered from the outside?

        If you ask the students who enter a phenomenology class, “What is phenomenology?”  They would not be prepared to give you an answer.  If you ask them at the end of the class, they can begin to give you an answer that lies in self-reflection and the exploration of Other, but it would still be uncertain—still fragile.  What is there about phenomenology as a method that makes it so difficult to put into words?  What is there about it that makes it so challenging to do?  What is it?  I have discovered that the nature of the search for the essence of lived-experience transcends our familiar way of pursuing a question.  It is a circling around, finding ways to dig deeper, always questioning and questioning the questioning.  It is not a method of answers or at least answers that are definitive.  It is a method that searches.   It calls upon the researcher and the reader to dig deep into themselves.  It is not easy and not always clear.  It is a journey of discovery through description.

        I discovered the method of phenomenology within my own willingness to pursue the question, “What is the lived experience of students in a WCC?”   On the surface it appears to be quite a basic question, surely a list of answers compiled and presented would give me the answer.  Why does it take over 300 pages to describe what seven students experienced in a WCC?  And after 300 pages, have I described the essence of student experience in a WCC?  Can I assume I know whether this experience is the same for all students everywhere?  Do I even want to assume I know what that experience is?  The amazing thing about phenomenology is that it is not my responsibility to know what that experience is for every student.   It is my responsibility to describe the essence of the experience as I find it in myself and the experiences of the students who shared the journey with me.  I invite you to listen to the experience and see if you can say, “Yes.”  Or, does it draw you into questioning your own experiences on-line?  Does it call you to reflect on what it is like for you?  Does it start you asking yourself about your own teaching?  Does it call you into the text and into yourself?

        The best phenomenological pieces I have read always draw me into the writing.  They call me to reflect and to question my own experiences.  They present me with new ways of viewing the world.  After I read them, I am changed.   I am compelled to look beyond the surface of the everyday and question it.  It becomes a curse and a blessing.  I have to become responsible for what I see.  I can’t help questioning my world and my role in it.

        One of the most amazing things about my phenomenological study is the surprises.  It’s like watching a film you can’t predict.  The plot has a surprise and the surprise makes the film out-of-the-ordinary or extraordinary.  Phenomenology is unpredictable.  Often I find myself discovering something underneath--revealing a truth like a nugget of gold.  For example, I was surprised to realize how time is experienced on the screen.  I thought the focus of time revolved around synchronous and asynchronous.  However, presence of Other and the present are closely tied to the location of information on the screen.  Once the idea opened before me, I thought, “Of course!  Of course!”

        As I sit writing the final paragraphs of my dissertation, I feel there is so much more to say, so much more to write.  It raises the question, when is a dissertation finished?  Is it finished when the ideas have been fully explored?  Is it finished when a deadline dictates an end?  Is it finished when the committee says its enough?  Is it finished when the student has exhausted themselves in the process and finally finishes?  Is it ever finished?

        As I dreamt my dissertation, I had wonderful dreams.  I saw a dissertation that was freed from the bondage of the constraints of book.  Using the web as a spatial palette, the dissertation was to be a place to play, to create, to think differently.  I wanted to provoke the reader to create a dissertation choosing from movement, interest, and learning style.  Each person could choose from poetry, images, sound, and text to build their way to understand the center of my research.  Each time the dissertation is read it can be constructed anew--different.

        The dream world is spun from hopes, memories, and magical moments.  One day there was a flash—one of those creative moments where things come together in a new and unique way.  I saw my phenomenological dissertation not in a traditional writing format, but in a web format.  As I began to reflect on this vision, I began to see it as a post-modern design that reinforced choice for the reader.  I did not want to use the web to replicate literary conventions of a book.  I wanted to create a space that reinforced the spatial and graphical potential of the web.  I would have to create a set of web conventions for my writing.

        My first design was flat.  There were graphics that reinforced choice, but no movement.  It was linked to web pages that offered different ways to understand a theme: poetry, student voices, graphics and text.  However, the pieces did not step far from the written page.  My thinking at this point was still focused on conventional writing that was chunked and enhanced with hypermedia.  It was at this point in my pre-proposal meeting my dissertation committee pushed me.  If I was going to use the web, I needed to dance on the edge of its possibilities.  Otherwise, there was really no reason to pursue this format for my dissertation.

        I left the meeting energized, but not certain what it meant to push the edges of the Web.  A friend introduced me to Macromedia’s Flash and a world of animation and surfaces with shadows and depth emerged.  I started to reflect on,  “What makes the web a space that is unique for representing information?” What can I do on the Web that I can not do in a traditional paper environment?  What can the Web uniquely reveal about the essence of the phenomenon?  Hermeneutic phenomenology is a written art.  The essence of a phenomenon is revealed through the interplay between questioning and the writing-rewriting process.  Can writing be recast into a hypermedia format?  What does linking text, movement, graphics and sound add to revealing the essence of the phenomena?  Is it possible to question with a graphic?  What unique opportunities of representation does a web format offer phenomenology?  What is a web hermeneutic?

        In my proposal meeting, the committee struggled with phenomenology as a research method.  While I demonstrated a theme represented in a web format, the discussion was minimal.  I proposed evaluation criteria that did not meet with resistance.  It was time to move forward in the research and the representation of it on the Web.

        The invention process was exciting and frightening.  How do I orient the reader in an environment where they can start anywhere and end anywhere?  How do I create navigational and orientation systems that maintain a spatial postmodern design?  How do I keep them from getting lost?  Perhaps, being lost would in itself offer insight into the phenomenon.  How do I cast the text to avoid a sense of page and book?  How do I create continuity between elements of a theme?  How do I?  How do I?  The questions pounded against my creativity demanding innovative answers.  The challenges of design have pushed me.  They have forced me to think outside of the box, to create a web “voice.”  My creative ideas were only limited by time and technical expertise.  How to implement the structure I created was at times overwhelming.  I continued to invent, create, and shape my written pieces into hypermedia web pieces.  I had learned so much by the time I had put up the first “chapter,” Within the Matrix.  All I needed was enough time--enough time to translate and “re-write” the text into a hypermedia environment.  All I needed was enough time.

        It has been a tough year.  It has been a year when I thought my dissertation would have been completed.  It has been a year of chronic fatigue, allergies, and discouragement.  I started recovering--regaining momentum--in the Spring.  I finally believed I could finish writing and finish the web format.  Reality began to creep into the expectation I set myself.  With a faculty job starting in the Fall, I needed to finish before August.  Personal committee schedules demanded a date in June.  I began to think of my dream of a web based dissertation as a reduced prototype--an example of what could have been.

        I have tried to console myself with a commitment to finish the dream I have lived and breathed for the past two years.  Still, I could finish the dissertation.  I had time set aside to write the last pieces.  My committee would be able to read the dissertation.  It was written with a hypermedia environment in mind (e.g., linked words were underlined, links and maps replaces transitions between pieces, etc.).  Then a sudden and unexpected tragedy struck, my mother died.  Emotionally thrown, I found writing difficult.  Focus was almost impossible.  I struggled to find my way back --pushing myself to function.  I lost two weeks of writing--two precious weeks.  I have a wonderful committee.  They have supported me with short last minute reading deadlines as I have scrambled to finish the writing, putting aside the grief to another tomorrow.

        Instead… my dissertation has moved from a dream to a reality.  I had hoped to have a full dissertation in a web format, but I have accepted a portion to represent what could have been.  Instead, my dissertation could have been more.  I was told when I started my dissertation by others who had survived the process, “At some point, you decide to finish.”  Perhaps, we become ready to finish?  Perhaps, it is the process of seeing myself as a Ph.D.?  I know it signals my emergence from the cocoon of school to freedom and the challenges it brings.