A Feminist MOOC/DOCC

An unusual MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) exploring feminism and technology is being organized for the 2013 fall semester.  Unlike typical MOOCs, this one is being organized by a large collective of feminist scholars and will be offered as a credit course at 15 or more universities worldwide.  Hence, it is being denominated as a MOOC/DOCC (Distributed Online Collaborative Course). A large series of Boundary Objects that Learn (BOTL) are being developed by members of the collective, and each Professor at the participating universities will choose which BOTLs to assign her students.

The “Feminist Dialogues on Technology”  MOOC/DOCC will be a 10 week course, each week centered on a video discussion by ‘experts’ on the following topics: Archive, Body, Ethics, Difference, Discipline, Labor, Place, Race, Sexualities, Transformation.  One can enroll as a student at one of specific university sites, enroll for independent study (get your own professor to provide credit at your home university), or just be a self-directed / drop-in learner without course credit.  Info from FAQ for FemTechNet.

The collaborative, collective development of the course is being organized by FemTechNet – “a network of international scholars and artists activated by Alexandra Juhasz and Anne Balsamo to design, implement, and teach the first DOCC (Distributed Online Collaborative Course), a feminist rethinking of the MOOC. . . This project uses technology to enable interdisciplinary and international conversation while privileging situated diversity and networked agency. Building the course on a shared set of recorded dialogues with the world’s preeminent thinkers and artists who consider technology through a feminist lens, the rest of the course will be built, and customized for the network’s local classrooms and communities, by network members who submit and evaluate Boundary Objects that Learn—the course’s basic pedagogic instruments. FemTechNet invites interested scholars and artists to join this project and help build this course. “ Source: NITLE.

Related Sources

• Videos for the Course can be viewed at http://archive.org/details/FemtechnetKeywordVideos. The  3 videos on ‘Archive’ are especially thought provoking.
• FemTechNet is a private Mailing List for the “network of scholars, students and artists activated to build the first Massively Distributed Collaborative Learning Experiment.” (Subscribe at https://lists.uoregon.edu/mailman/listinfo/femtechnet)
• Fembot is a publicly accessible Web site at http://fembotcollective.org/femtechnet/ which has a blog, zine, Media Fail examples, notes re works in progress.

To learn More about this Feminist MOOC

• See Liz Losh’s interview with Alexandra Juhasz, dated 8/6/12, at http://dmlcentral.net/blog/liz-losh/bodies-classrooms-feminist-dialogues-technology-part-i
• And Liz Losh’s interview with Anne Balsamo, dated 8/9/12, at http://dmlcentral.net/blog/liz-losh/learning-failure-feminist-dialogues-technology-part-ii

Demise of Women & Computers course

I will no longer be teaching the Women and Computers course at my university; it has been dropped from the Women's Studies Major.  The WS Program wanted to strengthen its international perspectives and decided to require all majors to complete a course in Transnational Feminism.  There is a practical limit to the number of required courses, so something had to be dropped.  Certainly we would not want to drop Feminist Theory or Research Methods, so Women and Computers was eliminated.  Hard to argue with prioritizing Transnational Feminism over Women and Computers, although I believe the skills taught are a valuable addition to a student's future employment and activist tool kit.

I haven't yet decided exactly what I will do instead.  For the present, I will continue this blog, expanding the coverage somewhat to encompass computer and web skills in the classroom, web tools for activists, and gender perspectives on computing.

Are Blogs the New Zines?

Kerri_eLLe wrote an interesting post on this topic. Check it out. Do you agree that the feminist movement lost something in the move from zines to blogs?

Why Women Don't Write for Wikipedia, etc.

Last week's assignment on the Digital Divide focused on exploring alternative search engines by entering the same search term in each.  One student, using the search term  digital divide gender  at the social bookmarking site Delicious.com uncovered a Jan. 31, 2011 New York Times article "Wikipedia Ponders Its Gender-Skewed Contributions."  The article reported that less than 15% of the contributors to Wikipedia are women and explored possible explanations.  The author interviewed Jane Margolis (who has done wonderful work on institutional sexism and racism in computer science classes) who opined that women are less willing to assert their opinions in public. 

Little mention was made of WHY women might be less willing to assert their opinions in public.  The cartoonist Gabby fills in some of these blanks.  In the excerpt below from Gabby's much longer cartoon, we see the all-too-common reaction women experience when they do assert their opinions in a male dominated blogosphere.

See also the post "I’m a woman, and I’ve edited Wikipedia" on the Geek Feminism blog of 2/11/11 and the many comments by women who formerly contributed to Wikipedia but left in response to what they perceived as an unwelcoming environment.

A full size wall poster of Gabby's entire cartoon (6.75″ wide by 43″ long on rich matte cardstock) can be ordered here.  Gabby's comic books (written under the name Ken Dahl) can be purchased from Microcosm Publishing.

Boys are Like Microwaves

Need a good laugh?  Check out this video.  Based on actual lessons from an Abstinence Education course.  The video can be found on YouTube.

I showed in class on Feb. 16 as illustration of the Xtranormal.com free online tool which allows anyone to create a "movie" by choosing from small selection of characters (has some people as well as these bears) and typing in the dialog.  The website converts into a spoken "movie."

Fourth Wave Feminism - Learning from Students

One of the reasons I enjoy teaching this class so much is the opportunity it provides to learn so much more - about feminism and about computers.  When discussing a video interview with a Lebanese activist in her blog, one of my students raised the issue of Fourth Wave feminism - which I had never heard of before.


Fourth Wave feminism "is made of online bloggers and internet communities. We are the most inclusive movement yet, and we understand that all oppression is connected. We believe that my liberation is tightly tied to your liberation. We aren’t just fighting to end sexism; we’re fighting to end racism, classism, ableism, body shaming, cissexism, heterosexism, and other harmful -isms." says a blogger on Tumblr.

As my student said in her blog, how can Fourth Wave feminism boast of its inclusivity if it is limited to those who are using the Internet.  Internet access is very limited for women in Lebanon and elsewhere.

On a side note, how is a person supposed to understand Tumblr?  I have to get some more explanations from my students.

Corvida Raven: Geek Girl

For the last week of class, I assigned students to research a woman who has made an important contribution to the development of computers and/or the Internet. I also asked them to present their findings in an interesting digital storytelling mode - perhaps by using Voicethread or Prezi. In any event, they were not to use a traditional bullet-style PowerPoint.

One of the students chose to research Corvida Raven, one of the youngest contributors. I thought the student did an excellent job of matching the style of her presentation with Raven's style. And I thought others might enjoy it also.

Geek girl storybook

View more presentations from kerri.

About WS445 Women and Computers Class

I just completed a short slideshow designed to recruit students to the Women and Computers class I teach for Women's Studies. Only 20 slides long, it presents a few snippets of the issues we explore in 3 major aspects of the course:

Gender, Race, and Class Perspectives on the Web and computers
How Feminists and Social Justice Activists use the Web
Hands-on Training with free software and online Web tools

I am using the slideshow to give short speeches in several classes to inspire (I hope) students to enroll. If interested, you can view the show at Slideshare.net

Digital Diversity - Whose Contributions are Recognized?

As part of our unit on the Digital Divide, we are also exploring Digital Diversity. How are women using the Web? What are communities of color contributing to the Web? To what extent are the contributions of women, of people of color, and of other marginalized groups recognized?

We are starting by studying the slide show below and will be exploring the web to assess its accuracy and to see if there are more examples that should be added.

Digital Divide

This week we will be studying the Digital Divide. In the past, the digital divide has been viewed mostly as a matter of access to computers and/or the Internet. Today, however, many argue that physical access is not sufficient; we must focus on the "gap between those who benefit from digital technology and those who do not." [DigitalDivide.org] In the U.S, almost everyone has access to a computer - if not at home or workplace, then in a public library. But many are not in a position to benefit from this access:

• Information may not be presented in a way that is easily understood by those with limited formal education - text written at college level, too much text and not enough audio & visual material.
• The Internet affords access to vast stores of information, but if people don't know how to use search engines, they are unlikely to benefit from the information.
• Every school may have a computer lab, but are the students encouraged to create content for the web or are they limited to spelling and arithmetic drills?

The slide show below addresses some of these issues. Our class will be trying to update the statistics and find additional examples so we can improve the slide show.

Digital Divide

View more presentations from cronegeek. (tags: ws445 bias)

Is the Feministing.com Banner Sexist

We had quite a spirited debate in class about the banner or logo atop the home page at Feministing.com (a great feminist blog) is sexist. Some students thought this logo really objectified women and just reinforced all the stereotypes about how women must be thin and curvaceous to be real women. One student even argued that this logo would turn off stocky women from visiting the site.

Other students supported the use of these images in the banner, arguing that the effect is to reclaim the stereotyped "sexy airhead" for feminism.

We related these differing viewpoints to Patricia Hill Collins' discussion of standpoint epistemology - how a person's worldview is influenced by their own life experience, the groups (by race, class or gender) that they are part of, etc. We noted that a person's reaction to this logo might be strongly influenced by their own personal experiences - a woman teased for being overweight might have a different reaction than a woman who focuses on graphic design and frequently writes satirical articles.

The authors of Feministing.com explain the logo in their FAQ "The Feministing logo is meant to be ironic. We wanted to take a traditionally sexist image - the mudflap girl - and subvert her. Hence, the middle finger. We like to think of her as saying "fuck you" to the sexist beauty standard she is supposed to represent."