Welcome

©Anderson Spencer Giles 2006

Holes in the net are openings for the imagination                                             —Taylor & Saarenin, 1994

A moment of welcome is elusive, risking familiarity, habit or indifference, as we peer beyond the cyberspace threshold to see who is peering at us. Whose face is reflected in the glass monitor?  A celebrity? A next-door neighbour? A curious ex-lover? You?

The act of welcome is troubling on the net; at what point is a greeting extended, a welcoming received:

on arrival at the gateway, coming to an image that momentarily locates us in a particular environment—such as a heron that skims the water of English Bay in Vancouver—

Educational Insights became an on-line journal in 1995, and, in its desire to interrupt conventions of scholarly text, became an early explorer of the intertextual multi-media opportunities that the medium invites. Educational Insights is our welcome to you as fellow adventurers of the net, reaching across boundaries, yet located in the particularities of individual and communal experience, location, and relationship.

Educational Insights is an embodied response to the invitation of Imagologies: Media Philosophy, a text written in the early ‘90’s that sought to articulate the emergent phenomenon of the Internet. Philosophers Talor & Saarenin recorded their experiences and fledging media philosophy as they set up and conducted a transatlantic video conference seminar with email communications between graduate students located in Saarenin’s classroom in Finland, and Taylor’s in the United States. What happens in relationship and process between those engaged in Internet communications? What meaning-making and communal collaborations become possible? The technology was in its infancy, expensive, and daunting. (Unlike today’s instant messaging and casual three-way webcam conversations, such as the one currently happening, as I write this text, between my daughter, her brother, and his girlfriend in Toronto, Vancouver, and Rotterdam respectively.)

In a playful textual moment, Taylor and Saarinen cite the famous London tube’s Mind the Gap, and leave white space within their text for our own creative critical response. We, at Educational Insights, have come to receive that warning as a welcoming, a challenge, an opportunity to be mindful, to take care, to pay attention, to embrace the gap.

This issue, Artificial Educational Insights and Virtual Dystopia, is a celebration of all that is possible within intertextual explorations, and yet simultaneously impossible, in our journeys as scholars, artists, poets, and explorers of the net—a liminal space within which the sharing of creative and critical response and co-production is one of complexity, complicity, and invitation.

It is in the meeting places between when we become
Here and Now, something happens.

Our welcoming you to Educational Insights is realized in the act of entering and receiving—each arrival, each interaction, each performance, cyber-connections that invite, response, curiosity, illumination—reciprocal awakenings between inter-texts of invitation and response.

Pause for a moment. You are welcome. Mind the Gap.

Lynn Fels
Coordinating Editor, Educational Insights
Centre for Cross-Faculty Inquiry in Education
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, Canada