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Viewing the e-learning landscape through the lens of gender

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Title: Viewing the e-learning landscape through the lens of gender


1
Viewing the e-learning landscape through the lens
of gender
  • Gill Kirkup, Deputy Director Institute of
    Educational Technology, Open University, UK
  • URL http//iet.open.ac.uk/pp/g.e.kirkup/

2
Personal Introduction
  • Deputy Director (responsibility for taught
    courses) in particular an MA in Online and
    Distance Education.
  • Nearly 30 years as a distance educator combining
    research/practice in
  • distance education and the use of media for
    learning
  • gendered media preferences in distance education
  • the relationship between gender and technology
  • specifically gender and information and
    communication technologies (ICTs)
  • developing courses for women
  • e-learning and gender issues

3
Overview of presentation
  • What might we mean by gender
  • What might we mean by e-learning ?
  • What is gender mainstreaming-
  • and its tools and methodologies
  • What are the gender issues in e-learning?
  • Access to the technologies
  • Familiarity and confidence with the technologies
  • Interaction styles in social software (Web 2.0)
  • Educational use, preferred media and learning
    orientation
  • Gender relations and power
  • The shaping and production of knowledge (Web 2.0)
  • What are the gender mainstreaming activities for
    any e-learning implementation?

4
Hardings four aspects of gender
  • A property of individuals
  • A relation between groups
  • A property of symbolic systems
  • A way of distributing scarce resources
  • There is a debate about how far feminist theory
    has produced gender difference in identifying
    inequality.
  • Gender has not disappeared or been transformed
    -online

5
Sometimes these four attributes are collapsed
into TWO main ways of understanding sex /gender
  • 1. The sex gender system
  • a set of social relations between men which have
    a material base that enables them to dominate
    women ( Mitchell)
  • Concern with the sexual division of labour,
    social divisions around sex/gender. (
    traditionally the focus of Equal Opportunities or
    Gender mainstreaming)
  • 2. Gender identity
  • identity and subjectivity of a particular gender
  • Discourse (post-modern feminism is sometimes
    accused of collapsing everything into discourse)
  • Issues of embodiment
  • Performativity of gender ( Butler)

6
What might this mean for gender and learning?
  • Students are constantly re-defining themselves
    and performing gender through the process of
    their learning and the construction of meaning
  • As teachers, researchers, and the invisible back
    room technologists are part of this community,
    all engaged in constantly remaking ourselves, and
    our disciplines.
  • As teachers and educational designers we must
    develop activities using the tools of VLE to
    create active learning that acknowledges gender
    in a productive and respectful way?

7
E-learning defined by Wikipedia
  • An all-encompassing term generally used to refer
    to computer-enhanced learning, although it is
    often extended to include the use of mobile
    technologies such as PDAs and MP3 players. It may
    include the use of web-based teaching materials
    and hypermedia in general, multimedia CD-ROMs or
    web sites, discussion boards, collaborative
    software, e-mail, blogs, wikis, text chat,
    computer aided assessment, educational animation,
    simulations, games, learning management software,
    electronic voting systems and more, with possibly
    a combination of different methods being used.
  • It is also broader than the terms Online Learning
    or Online Education which generally refer to
    purely web-based learning. In cases where mobile
    technologies are used, the term M-learning has
    become more common.
  • E-learning is naturally suited to distance
    learning and flexible learning, but can also be
    used in conjunction with face-to-face teaching,
    in which case the term Blended learning is
    commonly used.

8
Gender Mainstreaming
  • In July 1997, the United Nations Economic and
    Social Council (ECOSOC) defined the concept of
    gender mainstreaming as follows
  • "Mainstreaming a gender perspective is the
    process of assessing the implications for women
    and men of any planned action, including
    legislation, policies or programmes, in any area
    and at all levels. It is a strategy for making
    the concerns and experiences of women as well as
    of men an integral part of the design,
    implementation, monitoring and evaluation of
    policies and programmes in all political,
    economic and societal spheres, so that women and
    men benefit equally, and inequality is not
    perpetuated. The ultimate goal of mainstreaming
    is to achieve gender equality."
  • The term is now applied to systematic processes
    for policy and institutional audit and change.

9
The three-legged stool of mainstreaming Booth
and Bennet 2002
10
Tools for Gender Mainstreaming
  • 1. Gender disaggregated statistics
  • Gender disaggregated statistics are a vital
    management tool for understanding the often
    different situations of women and men. All too
    often such data is not collected or collated.
  • It can often be entirely acceptable that one sex
    rather than another should benefit more from
    specific services or budgets, so long as this
    reflects evidence-based need, rather than being
    simply demand-led or worse, the consequence of
    chance or indirect discrimination.

From Mainstreaming Equality UK Equal
Opportunities Commission, 2003
11
Tools for Gender Mainstreaming
  • 2. Gender impact assessments
  • Should be made BEFORE a policy (or legislation)
    is implemented. It is designed to help policy
    makers understand the relative impact of the
    policy or practice upon men and women
    respectively, and address any adverse effects.
    Sometimes described as wearing a gender lens or
    having a gender reflex.
  • It should focus on three questions
  • representation (what is the gender distribution
    of relevant decision-making bodies?)
  • resources (what is the distribution of/access to
    resources for men and women?) and
  • reality (do men and women profit from the
    measure? Who gets what, why and on what
    conditions?)

From Mainstreaming Equality UK Equal
Opportunities Commission, 2003
12
Tools for Gender Mainstreaming
  • 3. Equality indicators
  • Raw data, even when disaggregated by gender, are
    limited in what they show without baseline
    statistics to set and measure performance
    targets. Equality indicators need to be
    developed for benchmarking purposes so that
    comparisons can be made over time or space. The
    identification of equality indicators should be
    an on-going process with new information about
    how gender inequalities are maintained enabling
    the development of new indicators and the
    refining of existing ones.

From Mainstreaming Equality UK Equal
Opportunities Commission, 2003
13
Tools for Gender Mainstreaming
  • 4. Monitoring, evaluating, auditing
  • Gender equality needs to be regarded as a
    performance indicator, and treated the same way
    for evaluation purposes as, say, balancing the
    books. It is thus essential to monitor the
    effectiveness of policy.

From Mainstreaming Equality UK Equal
Opportunities Commission, 2003
14
Tools for Gender Mainstreaming
  • 5. Gender balance in decision-making
  • A gender balance in decision-making is needed to
    address the democratic principle of gender
    mainstreaming. In the Research Directorate of the
    EC, there is a rule that all the scientific
    committees of the Directorate must have at least
    40 of both genders.

From Mainstreaming Equality UK Equal
Opportunities Commission, 2003
15
Tools for Gender Mainstreaming
  • 6. Engendering budgets
  • Budgets can, and indeed, need to be engendered.
    It is legitimate to ask what proportion of public
    budgets in all areas, are spent on men and women,
    and girls and boys respectively.

From Mainstreaming Equality UK Equal
Opportunities Commission, 2003
16
Tools for Gender Mainstreaming
  • 7. Visioning
  • Visioning is at the heart of mainstreaming and
    requires the imaginative reconsideration of the
    use of resources, time, or public space, in
    gendered terms. The tools just described are
    designed to help with this process.

From Mainstreaming Equality UK Equal
Opportunities Commission, 2003
17
What are the gender issues in e-learning?
18
General access to the Internet and ICTs
  • In the developed world women and men have equal
    internet access. University students have the
    same ICT access and are familiar with all sorts
    of devices- mobile and wireless devices
  • Differential access has more to do with age, race
    and economic class than gender.
  • But men and women have different patterns of how
    they use the internet and what for.
  • Men spend more time online than women.
  • Women are enthusiastic online communicators and
    they use email more a more robust way.
  • More men than women perform online transactions
    buying and selling.
  • Men pursue and consume information online more
    aggressively than women.
  • Men use the internet more than women for games,
    sports and hobbies.
  • Men are more interested in technology than women,
    have more confidence in their knowledge and
    technical skills.
  • Source Deborah Fallows, How Women and Men Use
    the Internet. Washington, DC Pew Internet
    American Life Project, December 28, 2005.

19
Familiarity and confidence with the technologies
  • Women are very small and in some countries
    decreasing proportions of student studying ICTs
    becoming expert with the technology
  • In households women access technology but dont
    own it or chose it
  • There is a long tradition of women students being
    less confident them men with the technology even
    when they are performing similarly.

20
Interaction styles in social software
  • Gendered patterns of language use in computer
    mediated communication
  • Women attenuated language and positive
    socioemotional content
  • Men more authoritative language and negative
    socioemotional content.
  • Women engaging in emotional labour online
  • Blogging- as many women with blogs as men, but
    women more likely to be using blogs to keep in
    touch with people, and be relating personal
    experience. Men try to entertain.
  • Differential use of social software such as
    facebook and myspace- girls use for keeping in
    contact with friends boys for making new contacts
    and flirting- sexual behaviour

21
Educational use, preferred media and learning
orientation
  • Student support issues women look for support
    and connectedness with others ( Kirkup Price)
  • E-learning, he-learning, she-learning ( Selwyn)?
    -Women use computers and the internet more for
    study purposes than men-
  • Confidence with technology,

22
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23
Gender relations and power
  • Classroom ambience and access to equipment
    gendered.
  • Effect of mixed and single sex groups- boys
    perform well on technical tasks when in groups
    with girls and girls perform poorly.
  • In CMC, language can maintain/produce power
    differentials
  • In email interactions men and women respond
    differently to people in different power

24
The shaping and production of knowledge (Web 2.0)
  • Second-life, and online networks and communities
    extension of gendered behaviour ( myspace and
    Facebook use)
  • Gender difference in online interactions and
    language reproduce power differentials, which
    could produce gendered credibility and authority.
    ( Haraway Modest witness

25
How to
  • Bring sensitivity to these issues to Gender
    mainstreaming processes in your work?

26
How can you use the following mainstreaming tools
in your e-learning policy and practices?
  • 1. Gender disaggregated statistics
  • 2. Gender impact assessments
  • 3. Equality indicators
  • 4. Monitoring, evaluating, auditing
  • 5. Gender balance in decision-making
  • 6. Engendering budgets
  • 7. Visioning
  • ( See Checklist hard copy)

27
End Thank you for spending your Friday afternoon
engaging with the topic of gender and e-learning.
Gill Kirkup
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