Welcome! What is a Self-Directed Learner? A self-directed learner is a participant in a Distributed Open Collaborative Course (DOCC) who is not formally enrolled in or teaching a current course but who wants to engage with some focus, and even participation, in the DOCC. Unlike a MOOC, you will not be receivingknowledge from a DOCC, but rather, participating in designing and directing your own experience with DOCC materials and with other participants.
A number of courses were offered in the Fall of 2015; see the list here for what is currently going on.
One thing we learned last year was that we need to improve access to publications, on- and off-line. To that end, one student assembled a listof resources related to open access and accessibility. FemTechNet is committed to these principles, and we will continue to work toward them.Penny Boyer has written a great guide to getting a node started. She also pulled together reading materials from various syllabi that you are welcome to consult.
We also add topical links to the FemTechNet Flipboard Digest. That’s a great way to get an overview of many issues that interest us across the network.
Rather than a day of boosterism, we enjoyed a well-orchestrated series of long talks where the two other featured speakers exhibited how FemTechNet‘s critiques of technology linked with our feminist theories of pedagogy can sit productively with other schools, methods, and projects of critical Internet analysis and teaching. It was great to discuss the Distributed Open Collaborative Course (DOCC) in a room full of Education scholars: a conversation we should be having as frequently as possible.
After my presentation on the DOCC, Ben Williamson from Stirling and Norm Friesen, currently at University of British Columbia, Vancouver, applied respectively, a sociological and a media archeology lens to the current and past states of technologized education. Williamson presented recent interpretations and theories of the Algorithmic Digital University, enumerating the many possible fabrications that are constituitive to a Big Data Epistemology where “partial oligarchic vantage points” of data science, venture capital, and social-media companies become structuring logics for visions of contemporary social science research and the quantified selves who produce it.
Meanwhile, Friesen carefully detailed the historical persistence of a set of learning technologies used within education—the tablet, lecture, and the textbook—all demanding symbolic competencies and familiar cultural techniques.
A Letter from Tushratta of Mitanni, Ancient Texts Relating to the Bible
All three critiques of educational technologies played to a receptive and committed crowd of European scholars of education who, as is true for FemTechNet, seek to embrace, develop and challenge simple techno-deterministic understanding of the digital, and instead are working towards, as we pronounce in FemTechNet’s manifesto, a more “accessible, open, accountable, transformative and transforming university of our dreams.”
Check out the MSc in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh’s related “Manifesto for Teaching Online” here!
While it may make the most sense to start at the beginning, I have to say, I never expected two hundred and fifty words posted to HASTAC to spark such a flame.
When I first thought about feminism and programming languages in the beta DOCC (Distributive Open Collaborative Course) I was inspired. I had found an idea that spoke to me; an idea that I knew was big and complicated and important. Before that class I hadn’t spent much time at all thinking about feminism. The DOCC helped me uncover critical, feminist frameworks through which to interpret the world. Frameworks that provided me with structured (yet unstructured) ways to theorize about things that I had already been trying to describe, frameworks I felt a kinship with.
Thank you so much to everyone who was able to participate in the FemTechNet Summer 2014 Workshop last week! I have put together a table of contents document that links to the notes taken over the week. This document also contains links to some of the Blue Jeans recordings that were captured over the week. You can also find a folder with these recordings here.
Come to the FemTechNet DOCC 2014 Summer Workshop!
Dates: Mon Jun 9 – Thurs. Jun 13
In fall 2013, FemTechNet, a coalition of feminist scholars and teachers, launched its first DOCC: Distributed Open Collaborative Course (DOCC). An explicitly feminist response to trends in teaching and technology (including MOOCs), the decentralized approach to technology and pedagogy puts participants in dialogue with one another and fosters multi-directional learning relationships. Much of the distributed work for this project was done over a one-week summer workshop in July 2013; over this week, we also built personal connections that have sustained us as we have worked together throughout the year.
It is with grief and shock that FemTechNet marks the untimely death of our remarkable collaborator and colleague, Dr. Adrianne Wadewitz. Within our community of feminist scholars, artists and activists, she was a leader, innovator, and expert. Her work for FemTechNet, collaborating with other instructors and students on our Wikistorming Committee, had deep impact for our community, and will have lasting effect as feminists around the world continue to follow her lead as they add feminist voices, influences, histories, and theories into Wikipedia.
FemTechNet, collaborative makers of “the anti-MOOC,” were graciously, no I’d even say studiously received by leaders of the bellies-of-the-beast at last weekend’s Online Learning Summit, hosted by Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, and Stanford (the great research institutions who put money and a spotlight on what would first be the year, but quickly the boondoggle of, the MOOC.). President Hennessy of Stanford started us off by indicating that the Massive of MOOCs should really be rethought as the moderate; and Open ended up generating a host of problems people hadn’t quite predicted (particularly the great differences of skills, knowledge, and attention of the masses who came; demonstrating “a dynamic range of ability.”)
My last post, MOOCing the Liberal Arts? concluded with this suggestion: “For those of us in higher education, including our students, our work is to provide MOOC alternatives by using technology, and other means, to improve what we do and to open access to what we have.”
Today, along with four of my students and a visiting scholar, Gabrielle Foreman, we taught our first of seven classes on Technology at the Norco prison. A little background: our class is one of many being offered through the PEP program (Prison Education Program), run through the visionary leadership of Dr. Renford Reese at Cal Poly Pomona. “The overarching philosophy of PEP is to use the resources in the backyard of each of the state’s prisons to make change e.g. university student and faculty volunteers. There is a college within a 15-20 mile radius of each of the state’s 33 prisons. PEP’s goal is to collaborate with these colleges to assist the CDCR in reducing recidivism in the state by 1% by 2015.” Our class “Technology in Prison,” is a seminar connected to the yearly speaker’s series that I run as director of the Munroe Center for Social Inquiry at Pitzer, this year’s theme being Technology. For seven weeks, some of my speakers and students from the seminar will move our inquiry in place to see how our conversations change, and expand, when engaged with a student population denied access to most of the (digital) technologies that those of us on the outside now take for granted.
On Friday, January 31, 2014, Susie Ferrell and I attended “High Impact Practices: Interdisciplinary collaborations and creative connections,” an experiential learning conference at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). We presented on a panel entitled “DOCCs: The Dialogues on Feminism and Technology Project” along with Professor Liz Losh (UCSD) and graduate students Monika Sengul-Jones and Erika Cheng (both UCSD). This was Susie and my third time representing FemTechNet at academic conferences; and this conference certainly didn’t disappoint.
Participants in UCSD conference; photo by Jade Ulrich
Enjoying a much-deserved drink with highly-Twitterate Jessie Daniels (@JessieNYC) after a few days of talk, workshops, and video dialogues in Ann Arbor, Michigan about Feminist Digital Pedagogies, I was discussing with her the changing culture of blogging, and other social media forms in relation to our own ever-changing digital metronomes. Which is a fancy way to say here what I said there: “I always used to blog about conferences, but now it feels like it takes too long to blog; the work is too hard. What’s the deal with this quickening?”
Digital Pedagogies Panel, University of Michigan, L to R: Inderpal Grewal, Laura Wexler, Lisa Nakamura, Maria Cotera
