2  Methodology

This chapter outlines the theoretical foundations and practical approaches of the Cyber Dimensions methodology for creating immersive cybersecurity case studies that engage your students through posthuman pedagogical principles. First, a brief discussion of artifact-based learning (ABL), and then a more in-depth look at a posthumanist approach to developing the content.

The Cyber Dimensions approach developed through systematic analysis of the NICE Cybersecurity Workforce Framework (Straight, 2024), where traditional competency frameworks consistently positioned humans as autonomous agents who simply “apply” or “implement” cybersecurity technologies. Through this analysis, patterns emerged showing how cybersecurity expertise actually develops through ongoing entanglements with technological systems rather than individual mastery over them.

Classroom observations revealed critical moments when students struggled with scenarios where technologies appeared to “act back,” such as when monitoring systems generated unexpected alerts, when automated responses created new vulnerabilities, or when security tools enabled activities their designers never intended. These breakdown moments demonstrated the inadequacy of pedagogical approaches that position students as sovereign agents who control passive technological tools.

Artifact-Based Learning

Artifact-based learning, particularly when considering collections of deliberately fabricated items like a pedagogical dossier, draws heavily from established educational theories that emphasize active engagement and learner-centered approaches. Rooted in constructivism, it posits that learners build understanding by interacting with the world around them. Presenting a carefully curated set of “artifacts,” even if simulated, provides concrete anchors for this construction of knowledge. This method naturally fosters inquiry-based learning, as the unusual or intriguing nature of the artifacts prompts questions, encourages investigation, and drives students to seek connections and explanations. The learner becomes an active participant in deciphering the story or understanding the concept embedded within the collection. Furthermore, the direct interaction with these tangible (even if reproduction) items promotes experiential learning, moving beyond passive reception of information to a more active process of observation, analysis, and interpretation. The act of handling documents, examining photographs, or piecing together correspondence creates a more immersive and memorable learning experience compared to simply reading about a topic.

The deliberate fabrication of artifacts for a specific pedagogical purpose, such as your “realistic but fake dossier,” presents a nuanced variation of artifact-based learning. Unlike working with genuine historical artifacts, this approach allows for meticulous control over the narrative, the complexity of the information, and the specific learning objectives targeted. While traditional artifact-based learning emphasizes the authenticity and often the ambiguity inherent in historical remnants, the fabricated dossier offers a focused and scaffolded experience. The design can strategically guide learners toward specific insights or critical thinking skills without the potential for misinterpretation due to a lack of historical context that can sometimes occur with decontextualized genuine artifacts. The relationship to the broader frameworks remains: learners still construct meaning through inquiry and experience. However, the controlled nature of the artifacts allows educators to fine-tune the learning journey, ensuring key concepts are encountered and explored within a carefully designed environment.

Despite the controlled nature, the power of artifact-based learning in this context lies in its ability to make abstract concepts tangible and engaging. The “reality effect” created by a well-designed fake dossier can enhance motivation and create a sense of immersion, making the learning process more relevant and memorable. Students are essentially engaging in a form of simulated primary source analysis, developing crucial skills in observation, interpretation, critical evaluation, and synthesis – skills that are transferable to the analysis of genuine artifacts and real-world information. The key difference from traditional artifact-based learning is the intentional design and the focus on specific pedagogical outcomes rather than the open-ended exploration often associated with authentic historical materials. This controlled approach allows for targeted learning experiences that can be particularly effective for introducing complex topics or developing specific analytical skills within a defined timeframe.

The fabricated artifacts central to ABL become more than pedagogical tools when viewed through a posthuman lens—they transform into active participants in educational assemblages. While ABL emphasizes how learners construct knowledge through interaction with curated materials, posthuman pedagogy recognizes these artifacts as actants with their own agency in shaping learning experiences. The “reality effect” that makes fabricated dossiers compelling isn’t merely psychological engagement but evidence of how material objects participate in knowledge creation alongside human learners.

This shift from artifacts-as-resources to artifacts-as-actors fundamentally reconceptualizes cybersecurity education. Rather than treating fabricated documents, emails, or system logs as passive containers of information to be decoded, posthuman ABL recognizes these materials as co-participants in learning assemblages. When students engage with a carefully crafted surveillance dossier or incident response timeline, they enter into relationships with these materials that exceed simple information extraction. The artifacts “speak back” through their internal contradictions, their gaps, and their material properties, creating learning opportunities that emerge from human-artifact interaction rather than predetermined educational objectives.

The systematic worldbuilding that underlies effective ABL—the meticulous attention to character consistency, organizational relationships, and technical accuracy—creates coherent sociotechnical assemblages that can support increasingly sophisticated educational encounters. ABL’s emphasis on controlled fabrication provides the foundation for posthuman educational environments where learning emerges through ongoing engagement with complex artifact collections that maintain their own agency while supporting pedagogical objectives.

Posthumanist Theoretical Foundation

Moving Beyond Anthropocentric Cybersecurity Education

The Cyber Dimensions approach is grounded in posthumanist educational theory that recognizes cybersecurity as fundamentally constituted through human-technology assemblages rather than individual human agency operating on passive technological systems (Barad, 2007). This perspective challenges traditional cybersecurity education that positions humans as autonomous agents who simply “use” technology, instead helping you recognize that humans and technologies co-constitute each other in ongoing processes of becoming (Haraway, 1990). Within this framework, ABL’s fabricated artifacts—incident reports, surveillance documents, email exchanges—become more than learning materials; they participate as nonhuman actors that shape educational possibilities and constrain interpretive options through their material properties and internal relationships.

Systematic analysis of NICE Framework knowledge, skills, and tasks revealed how cybersecurity competencies are consistently framed through anthropocentric language that obscures human-technology entanglements. For example, tasks like “Analyze identified malicious activity” position analysts as sovereign interpreters of technological data, when ethnographic studies show that expertise develops through ongoing collaboration with monitoring systems, where alerts “speak” to analysts and analytical patterns emerge through human-machine dialogue.

Student responses to case studies consistently revealed moments when this anthropocentric framing broke down. When presented with scenarios involving AI-assisted threat detection, students struggled to assign responsibility for false positives, demonstrating how cybersecurity practice requires recognizing distributed agency across human-technology assemblages rather than individual human control.

Analysis of NICE Framework components through posthuman coding revealed systematic patterns where human-technology entanglements are obscured through language emphasizing individual competency and human control. Where cybersecurity practice involves ongoing collaboration with algorithmic systems, the Framework describes “applying” or “implementing” technologies, positioning technologies as passive tools rather than active participants in security assemblages.

This posthumanist foundation has profound implications for cybersecurity case study development:

  • Distributed Agency: Security emerges through networks of human and nonhuman actors, not individual decisions
  • Situated Knowledge: Cybersecurity practices are always embedded in specific sociotechnical contexts (Haraway, 1988)
  • Entangled Ethics: Ethical responsibility extends across human-technology assemblages rather than residing in individual moral agents
  • Emergent Learning: Understanding develops through engagement with complex sociotechnical scenarios rather than transmission of abstract principles

Postphenomenological Design Principles

Drawing from Ihde’s postphenomenological framework (1990), the methodology recognizes four fundamental human-technology relations that inform cybersecurity case study design:

Theoretical-foundationIhde's Human-Technology Relations in Cybersecurity Education

Embodiment Relations (human-technology): Cybersecurity tools become transparent extensions of human capability, as when security analysts “feel” network anomalies through monitoring interfaces. In ABL contexts, fabricated system logs and alert notifications can create similar embodiment experiences, where students develop intuitive responses to artifact patterns that mirror professional analytical capabilities.

Hermeneutic Relations (human → technology → world): Students learn to “read” cybersecurity situations through technological mediation, interpreting threat landscapes through security information and event management (SIEM) systems. ABL’s curated document collections enable hermeneutic practice where students interpret cybersecurity scenarios through artifact analysis, developing skills in reading technological inscriptions that translate directly to professional contexts.

Alterity Relations (human ↔︎ technology): Security systems appear as quasi-other entities with apparent agency, requiring recognition of technological agency in security assemblages. Well-designed ABL artifacts can demonstrate this agency by “acting back” through internal contradictions or unexpected revelations that resist student interpretations, forcing recognition of material agency in learning processes.

Background Relations (human [technology/world]): Cybersecurity infrastructure creates environmental conditions that enable and constrain professional action without explicit attention. ABL creates similar background conditions through systematic worldbuilding, where fabricated organizational policies, technical constraints, and regulatory frameworks form environmental contexts that shape analytical possibilities without explicit pedagogical attention.

These relations inform your case study development by ensuring that your fictional scenarios reflect the complex ways cybersecurity professionals actually engage with technological systems in practice, moving beyond simplistic models of human control over passive technologies.

Worldbuilding as Assemblage Creation

Systematic Worldbuilding as Theoretical Practice

The Cyber Dimensions methodology employs systematic worldbuilding not merely as narrative convenience, but helps you recognize that effective cybersecurity education requires creating coherent sociotechnical assemblages where human and nonhuman actors co-constitute learning experiences (Latour, 2005).

During development of the Cyber Dimensions textbook, the centralized worldbuilding system repeatedly demonstrated its own agency in unexpected ways. Character relationships automatically updated across cases, creating narrative connections that the author hadn’t explicitly planned. When fictional organizations evolved through multiple scenarios, their histories constrained new story possibilities, forcing recognition that fictional entities possess agency in shaping educational possibilities.

The R/Quarto technical infrastructure revealed computational agency through automated content generation that sometimes produced meaningful connections between cases that emerged from data relationships rather than authorial intention. These breakdown moments—when the system “spoke back” through unexpected outputs—provided concrete experience of how technological systems participate in educational design rather than simply executing human plans.

The centralized _worldbuilding.yml system represents more than technical data management—it embodies posthumanist recognition that fictional worlds possess agency in shaping educational outcomes. Characters, organizations, and technological systems you define in this centralized architecture become actants that participate in educational assemblages alongside your students and you as instructor.

For instance, when the character Dr. Sarah Chen appeared across multiple cases in the Cyber Dimensions textbook, her accumulated history began constraining new narrative possibilities. A case involving quantum encryption research had to account for her established expertise in AI ethics from previous scenarios. This constraint wasn’t a limitation but evidence of the fictional world’s agency—Chen as a character-actant “insisted” on narrative consistency that enhanced pedagogical coherence across the textbook’s interconnected scenarios.

Pedagogical-considerationAssemblage Thinking in Educational Design

Traditional instructional design treats educational “content” as information to be transmitted from instructor to student. Assemblage thinking helps you recognize that learning emerges through dynamic interactions among human actors (your students, you as instructor), nonhuman actors (fictional characters, organizational systems, technological artifacts), and material-semiotic networks that connect them. ABL’s fabricated artifacts participate as crucial nonhuman actors in these assemblages, where documents, system logs, and communication records gain agency through their capacity to shape interpretive possibilities and resist predetermined educational outcomes.

Your systematic worldbuilding approach creates stable assemblages that can support multiple learning encounters while maintaining internal coherence and agency. ABL’s emphasis on artifact collections aligns with assemblage creation by recognizing that effective learning environments require multiple materials working together—where individual documents gain meaning through their relationships with other artifacts, creating networks of significance that exceed the sum of their parts.

Pre-render Scripts as Posthuman Infrastructure

The technical implementation through R pre-render scripts and RDS caching represents posthuman infrastructure that recognizes the agency of computational systems in educational delivery (Winner, 1980).

Development of pre-render scripts revealed computational agency through unexpected system behaviors that enhanced rather than hindered educational design. When automated character consistency checks identified contradictions across cases, the system wasn’t simply executing programmed rules but participating in quality assurance through pattern recognition that exceeded explicit programming. Cache invalidation logic demonstrated temporal agency, “deciding” when content updates required regeneration based on dependency relationships that emerged from the data structure rather than predetermined rules.

These systems:

  • Enable Dynamic Content Generation: Fictional worlds respond to parameters and contexts, demonstrating technological agency through content that emerges from data relationships rather than explicit authorial control
  • Maintain Cross-Case Continuity: Automated systems ensure narrative coherence across multiple scenarios, with dependency tracking that reveals how changes ripple through interconnected educational content
  • Support Scalable Development: Infrastructure enables systematic case study creation while maintaining theoretical sophistication, with computational processes that augment rather than replace human creativity
  • Embody Computational Pedagogy: The R/Quarto workflow demonstrates how educational effectiveness emerges through human-technology collaboration, where automated consistency checking and content generation participate in pedagogical design rather than simply executing predetermined instructions

This technical approach embodies posthumanist recognition that your educational effectiveness emerges through human-technology collaboration rather than human control over passive educational “tools.”

Design-Based Research Methodology

The Cyber Dimensions methodology employs Design-Based Research (DBR) principles that help recognize educational innovation as systematic inquiry into learning processes within authentic contexts (Barab & Squire, 2004). This approach moves beyond traditional instructional design toward research-based educational development that contributes to both practical effectiveness and theoretical understanding.

DBR implementation in cybersecurity case study development involves:

Implementation-guidanceDesign-Based Research Cycles

Design Phase: You develop case studies grounded in posthumanist pedagogical theory and postphenomenological understanding of human-technology relations

Implementation Phase: You deploy cases within authentic cybersecurity education contexts while collecting systematic data on learning processes and outcomes

Analysis Phase: You examine how your student learning emerges through engagement with fictional sociotechnical assemblages

Refinement Phase: You modify case studies based on evidence of pedagogical effectiveness and theoretical consistency

Evidence-Based Pedagogical Innovation

Unlike generic case study development, the Cyber Dimensions approach helps you generate systematic evidence about how posthuman pedagogical principles enhance cybersecurity education. Research implementation has generated multiple forms of evidence supporting this methodology’s effectiveness:

Evidence-baseResearch Foundation

Pilot studies using posthuman pedagogical approaches in cybersecurity education demonstrate enhanced student engagement with complex sociotechnical scenarios. Student reflections consistently show deeper appreciation for technological agency and distributed responsibility in cybersecurity contexts compared to traditional case study approaches that position humans as sovereign agents.

Systematic review of cybersecurity education literature reveals gaps in pedagogical approaches that acknowledge human-technology entanglements, with most existing methods treating technologies as passive tools rather than active participants in security assemblages.

The Five Pillars Reconsidered Through Posthuman Lens

Immersive Fiction as Material-Semiotic Practice

Rather than treating “immersive fiction” as narrative technique, the posthuman approach helps you recognize fictional worlds as material-semiotic practices that co-constitute learning experiences (Barad, 2007). ABL’s “reality effect” exemplifies this process—fabricated artifacts achieve educational effectiveness not through psychological illusion but through material participation in learning assemblages. Your effective fictional cybersecurity scenarios:

  • Create Agential Cuts: Establish boundaries between actors and networks that make specific phenomena observable for learning. ABL artifacts perform cuts by foregrounding certain relationships (email chains revealing organizational tensions) while backgrounding others (technical implementation details), making specific cybersecurity phenomena available for analysis.
  • Embody Situated Knowledges: Reflect positioned perspectives that resist universal claims about cybersecurity practice. Fabricated documents naturally embody situated perspectives through their authorship, organizational context, and material properties that reflect specific institutional positions within cybersecurity assemblages.
  • Enable Intra-active Learning: Provide contexts where human learners and fictional assemblages mutually constitute understanding. ABL creates intra-active learning when students’ analytical questions reshape their engagement with artifact collections, while material properties of documents simultaneously reshape analytical possibilities.

Interconnected Narratives as Actor-Networks

When you create systematic narrative continuity across multiple case studies, this creates stable actor-networks (Latour, 2005) that enable increasingly sophisticated analysis of cybersecurity phenomena. Recurring characters and organizations become obligatory passage points through which your students must navigate to understand complex ethical and technical relationships. ABL’s systematic artifact curation amplifies this effect—when fabricated documents reference previous incidents, organizational policies, or character relationships, these textual connections create material actor-networks that bind fictional elements together through documentary evidence.

This approach helps you recognize that effective cybersecurity education requires your students’ understanding of how security practices emerge through ongoing relationships among diverse actors rather than through isolated technical interventions. ABL artifact collections embody this principle by creating documentary evidence of relationship networks, where email chains, policy documents, and incident reports demonstrate how cybersecurity challenges arise through complex interactions among human and technological actors.

Multiple Perspectives as Posthuman Ethics

When you include diverse stakeholder perspectives, this reflects posthuman ethics that recognizes ethical responsibility as distributed across assemblages rather than located in individual moral agents (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2012). Your cybersecurity case studies must demonstrate how:

  • Response-ability: Ethical obligations emerge through relationships among humans, technologies, and organizational systems
  • Care Networks: Security practices require attention to vulnerable entities across assemblages
  • Distributed Responsibility: Accountability extends beyond individual actors to include technological and organizational systems

Realistic Complexity as Emergent Phenomena

Rather than managing cognitive load through simplification, the posthuman approach helps you embrace complexity as emergent phenomena that arise through assemblage interactions. ABL’s carefully controlled fabrication enables this complexity by creating artifacts with built-in ambiguities, contradictions, and gaps that mirror real-world cybersecurity challenges. Your effective case studies:

  • Preserve Emergent Properties: Maintain the unpredictable outcomes that characterize real cybersecurity environments. ABL achieves this through artifact collections that contain internal tensions—where different documents suggest conflicting interpretations, forcing students to work with rather than resolve complexity.
  • Support Distributed Cognition: Recognize that understanding emerges through human-technology-organization networks. Fabricated artifacts support distributed cognition by requiring students to synthesize insights across multiple document types, time periods, and organizational perspectives.
  • Enable Posthuman Problem-Solving: Develop capabilities for working with rather than controlling complex sociotechnical systems. ABL develops these capabilities by presenting students with artifact collections that resist simple analysis, requiring ongoing engagement with material complexity rather than definitive resolution.

Flexible Assessment as Posthuman Evaluation

When you assess within posthuman pedagogy, you recognize that learning outcomes emerge through assemblage participation rather than individual cognitive achievement. ABL provides concrete mechanisms for this assessment approach through student engagement with artifact collections that reveal learning processes rather than predetermined outcomes. Your effective evaluation:

  • Assesses Assemblage Participation: Measures how your students engage with complex human-technology-organization networks. ABL enables this assessment by evaluating how students navigate relationships among artifacts, trace connections across document types, and recognize material agency in their analytical processes.
  • Values Situated Understanding: Recognizes that cybersecurity knowledge is always embedded in specific contexts. Artifact-based assessment naturally embodies situated understanding by requiring students to work with positioned documents that reflect specific organizational, temporal, and technological contexts rather than abstract principles.
  • Supports Ongoing Becoming: Treats your assessment as formative participation in educational assemblages rather than summative measurement of fixed knowledge. ABL supports this through iterative engagement with artifact collections, where student interpretations evolve through ongoing encounters with materials that continue to reveal new possibilities for analysis.

Implementation Framework

Establishing Posthuman Learning Environments

Your successful implementation of the Cyber Dimensions methodology requires creating educational environments that support posthuman pedagogical principles:

Scaffolding-tipCreating Posthuman Learning Spaces

Decenter Human Agency: Structure activities that require your students to recognize technological and organizational agency in cybersecurity scenarios

Embrace Complexity: Resist simplification that eliminates the emergent properties characteristic of real cybersecurity assemblages

Support Collective Intelligence: Design collaborative activities that distribute cognition across human-technology networks

Value Situated Perspectives: Recognize that different positions within assemblages enable different forms of cybersecurity understanding

Worldbuilding-First Development Process

The methodology employs a worldbuilding-first approach that helps you establish coherent sociotechnical assemblages before developing specific learning activities. ABL’s systematic artifact curation aligns perfectly with this approach, as effective fabricated documents require coherent background worlds to maintain believability and internal consistency:

  1. Assemblage Mapping: You identify key human and nonhuman actors that constitute the cybersecurity domain, including the types of documents, communications, and technical artifacts that circulate among these actors
  2. Network Architecture: You establish relationships and dependencies among assemblage components, creating the foundation for ABL artifact collections that reflect authentic organizational communication patterns and technical documentation practices
  3. Agency Distribution: You recognize how different actors contribute to security outcomes, enabling creation of artifacts that demonstrate technological agency alongside human decision-making processes
  4. Scenario Generation: You develop specific learning encounters within established assemblages, with ABL artifacts serving as entry points into complex sociotechnical scenarios
  5. Assessment Integration: You create evaluation mechanisms that measure assemblage participation, using student engagement with artifact collections as evidence of posthuman learning outcomes

Quality Assurance Through Theoretical Consistency

Development of the Cyber Dimensions textbook revealed the inadequacy of traditional instructional design evaluation criteria that focus on learning objectives achievement and content accuracy while ignoring how educational materials participate in learning assemblages. When case studies consistently “acted back” through narrative constraints and character agency, traditional evaluation frameworks couldn’t account for these posthuman dimensions of educational effectiveness.

These quality criteria emerged through systematic attention to moments when fictional worlds demonstrated agency in shaping learning experiences, requiring evaluation approaches that recognize both human and nonhuman contributions to educational outcomes.

Unlike generic case study evaluation, the Cyber Dimensions approach helps you employ quality criteria grounded in posthumanist theory:

Assessment-strategyPosthuman Quality Indicators

Theoretical Consistency: Case studies accurately reflect posthumanist understanding of human-technology relations. In practice, this means scenarios where security emerges through assemblage interactions rather than individual human control—for example, cases where AI-assisted threat detection produces insights that exceed human or technological capabilities alone.

Assemblage Coherence: Fictional worlds maintain internal consistency as sociotechnical networks. Applied in the Cyber Dimensions textbook, this meant ensuring that technological systems, organizational structures, and character relationships formed coherent networks that could sustain multiple case studies without contradiction. ABL artifact collections must demonstrate similar coherence, where fabricated documents reference consistent organizational policies, character relationships, and technical environments across multiple learning encounters.

Agential Recognition: Scenarios demonstrate technological and organizational agency alongside human agency. This appears in cases where monitoring systems “alert” analysts to unusual patterns, where automated responses create unintended consequences, or where organizational policies shape available actions.

Situated Authenticity: Cases reflect positioned perspectives rather than universal cybersecurity truths. Each scenario acknowledges specific cultural, organizational, and technological contexts that shape how cybersecurity challenges emerge and can be addressed.

Emergent Complexity: Learning environments preserve the unpredictable outcomes characteristic of real cybersecurity practice, refusing simplification that eliminates the assemblage properties essential for developing posthuman cybersecurity capabilities.

Next Steps

Now that you understand the posthuman theoretical foundations, you can:

  1. Explore the detailed theoretical foundations to understand the research base supporting this approach
  2. Examine systematic worldbuilding as assemblage creation and infrastructure development
  3. Work through practical implementation while maintaining theoretical sophistication
  4. Design posthuman assessment approaches that recognize distributed learning outcomes