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.
** Our internal conversations are held on Slack. To join Slack, please email femtechnetinquiries AT gmail DOT com with “Slack” in the subject line and a sentence about how you are associated with the Network. **
SITUATED Critical Race and MEDIA Committee (SCR+M)
The Situated Critical Race and Media Committee (formerly Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, CRES) creates interdisciplinary conversations, curriculum, and workshops by developing materials and activities that address issues of racialization, ethnic and cultural formation, power and identity. Our focus is on intersections of digital media and ethnic studies. Anchored in the legacy of critical race and ethnic studies, we are community activists engaged in practice-based scholarship and cultural work. We aim to engage public audiences with accessible media, community outreach, and feminisms inside and outside of the academy.
For the 2017-2018 year, the committee is continuing work on a podcast/teaching module series on the intersections of race, feminism, and technology. We plan to eventually release a full-semester worth of content, but our goal for this year is to release about 4-5 modules, most covering topics of games and sound.
Operations Committee (OPS)
The Operations Committee maintains and thinks critically about the platforms that the network uses to communicate. At present these include our public website, our internal Slack channel, TinyLetter newsletter and various social media accounts. We approach these platforms with intellectual curiosity and practical needs, keeping the network working and informing our research and pedagogical projects. In 2015-16 members created a teaching module on digital privacy and in 2016-17 we presented a paper on “Maintaining Difference” at “The Maintainers” conference. In 2017-18 we aim to keep maintaining.
Pedagogy Projects Committee (PedProCom)
The Pedagogy Projects Committee (PedProCom) is on hiatus, though work on Wikipedia continues on occasion. It has supported the various pedagogy projects of the network including the DOCC, an Introduction to Online Safety & Risk activity; the Critical Race & Ethnic Studies Workbook; the Situated Knowledges Map; Keyword Videos; Town Hall Meetings; Online Pedagogy Workshops and other teaching projects. PedProComhas worked to mentor FemTechNet faculty, develop curricula, coordinate inter-institutional collaborations, and support community engaged learners. We are also a site of collaboration, whether for research-creation or to develop publishing projects on pedagogy related topics. Questions? Email FTNPedProCom AT gmail DOT com
** If you are unfamiliar with the Blue Jeans online meeting platform, please take a few minutes before your first meeting to go through Connecting to FemTechNet with Blue Jeans **
As part of our 2014-15 Collaborations in Feminism & Technology programming, FemTechNet has hosted two online Town Hall meetings. These two Town Hall meetings are an opportunity for FemTechNet to gather — students, faculty, interested community members — and to consider two key issues: 1. Building International Collaborations and Online Feminist Networks, and 2. the relationship between Open Learning and Feminist Praxis.
Questions?
Contact T.L. Cowan, Chair of FemTechNet’s Pedagogy Committee (cowant AT newschool.edu)
Each week during course periods, we will host an Online Open Office Hour (OOOH) for anyone involved or interested in FemTechNet to join. The OOOH times differ from week to week, so please take note of these dates and times. The schedule for OOOH 2015-2016 will be posted here.
Unless otherwise stated, we will host the OOOH and Town Hall Meetings on Bluejeans. All OOOH and Town Hall links will be posted to the FemTechNet website.
Questions?
Contact the course director: T.L. Cowan, Chair, Pedagogy Committee, FemTechNet (cowant AT newschool.edu)
This is an open invitation to all writers, learners, teachers, scholars, gamers, designers, inventors, artists, activists, archivists and advocates and other community members engaging in research, pedagogy and practices in the area of feminism, technology, science, arts and media to collaborate with FemTechNet on existing and new projects.
Who We Are
FemTechNet is an always-shifting distributed network of feminist scholars, educators, artists and organizers working together on projects in feminist technological research, experimentation and innovation. We create resources and pedagogical tools for our open source “course” in Feminism and Technology studies (the DOCC project). In addition, our network fosters other art, activist, research and pedagogy projects in the area of feminism and technology.
What We Do
Our DOCC project–the Distributed Open Collaborative Course–launched in 2013, creates a new model for online learning. To date, we have offered the course at numerous higher education institutions, and it is also available as open sourced curriculum online, for use in non-institutional venues.
The DOCC course is organized as a network of participants who interact in diverse contexts from colleges and universities, to community centers, to open, online learning. This model explicitly departs from the typical “MOOC” approach, organized around the delivery of information from an “expert” faculty to the uninformed masses. The organization of a DOCC emphasizes learning collaboratively in a digital age by enabling the active participation of all kinds of learners–as teachers, as students, as media-makers, as activists, as trainers, as members of various publics and/or social groups. Both faculty and students share ideas, resources, and assignments as a feminist network: the faculty as they develop curricula, and deliver the course in real time; and the students as they work collaboratively with faculty and with each other at their institutions and beyond.
FemTechNet’s DOCC course, on themes related to Feminism and Technology, is made up of shared materials and connected learning activities. The DOCC also enables the extension of classroom experiences beyond the walls, physical or virtual, of a single institution.DOCC participants can choose among our video dialogues and other resources, designing the course to meet their educational needs and agendas, and may coordinate collaborations with other DOCC nodes offered in another locale or context. Participants may engage on-site or on-line at an institution-offered course, or at-large as self-directed learners. For the DOCC project, network members have filmed original video of feminist scholars and artists in dialogue on key issues in technology, art, science, media and feminism. We continue to expand this curriculum, and seek to expand our video and other DOCC materials to reflect foundational, current and emerging themes, debates, and forms within the overlapping STEAM/M (science, technology, engineering, arts, math & media) fields.
How to Participate
Host a DOCC class As a faculty member, you can work to offer the DOCC course at your educational institution, artist-run center or community-run organization.
Join a DOCC class You can participate in FemTechNet by joining a DOCC class (at a participating institution, as a self-directed learner, or as a drop-in learner who tunes in for a particular discussion or topic.).
Participate in the network
Volunteer: Join others on committees to produce curriculum, support materials, collaborative research on communication and other technologies, etc.
Transforming Higher Education with Distributed Open Collaborative Courses (DOCCs): Feminist Pedagogies and Networked Learning
By the FemTechNet White Paper Committee
femtechnet.org | September 30, 2013
[ Download PDF version here ]
FemTechNet White Paper Committee
Anne Balsamo, The New School, School of Media Studies
Penelope Boyer, ¡Taller! [Workshop] San Antonio, San Antonio, Texas
CL Cole, Media and Cinema Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Megan Fernandes, Brown University
Radhika Gajjala, School of Media and Communication Studies and American Culture Studies, Bowling Green State University
Sharon Irish, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Alexandra Juhasz, Media Studies, Pitzer College
Elizabeth Losh, Culture, Art and Technology Program, University of California, San Diego (Committee Chair)
Jasmine Rault, Culture and Media Studies, Eugene Lang College, The New School
Laura Wexler, Yale University
Executive Summary
Previous feminist initiatives to transform higher education have introduced approaches that are now recognized as best practices in higher education. In contrast, the “reform” efforts represented by the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) trend actually do little to change the status quo and can even be counterproductive because MOOC promoters oversimplify questions of access, underestimate investments of labor in instructional technology, deny the importance of infrastructure and its human and discursive aspects, and reinforce ideologies about technology being values-neutral. Distributed Open Collaborative Courses (DOCCs) that are “distributed” and “collaborative” — as well as “open” — recognize the complexities of the learning situation in designing platforms both locally and collectively, and they represent new models from which many stakeholders will learn.
For many decades, feminist teachers have been an influential force within higher education calling for the reform of classroom practices based on assessments of how asymmetrical power dynamics in the classroom often inhibit learning. The creation of the DOCC, and the things it then creates, represent a feminist retooling of the popular form of the networked learning course known as MOOCs. A MOOC is typically created by one or two instructors as a course to be offered to a massive number of students by a brand-name institution, or through a third-party mediating institution, such as Coursera, Udacity, or EdX. Using a feminist critique of the dominant form, our pedagogical approach embraces multiple techniques for engaging student attention and for acknowledging and understanding diverse learning styles and lived histories. Feminist teachers strive to create and support egalitarian relationships in the classroom by valuing students as individuals who make choices about what and how they learn. This approach pays particular attention to classroom communication structures and practices, especially in highly mediated digital environments. Feminist pedagogy, therefore is not merely or only a set of practices for teaching women, but rather a pedagogical framework built on the analysis and exploration of visible and invisible modes of learning. We believe this is the necessary foundation for understanding how to best serve and engage all students, particularly those who are socially and materially underprivileged, so that they can acquire skills and knowledge to achieve their aspirations.
For many decades, feminist teachers have been an influential force within higher education calling for the reform of classroom practices based on their assessment of how asymmetrical power dynamics in the classroom often inhibit learning. The key principles of feminist pedagogy rest on a foundation of “learner-centered instruction.” This pedagogical approach embraces multiple techniques for engaging student attention and for acknowledging and understanding diverse learning styles and lived histories. Feminist teachers strive to create and support egalitarian relationships in the classroom by valuing students as individuals who make choices about what and how they learn. This approach pays particular attention to classroom communication structures and practices, especially in highly mediated digital environments. Instructors focus on the everyday experiences of students to create learning paths that enable students to make connections between the understandings they already have and new insights.
In 2013, FemTechNet designed, developed, and launched an experiment in networked learning called a DOCC: a distributed open collaborative course on the topic of “Dialogues on Feminism and Technology.” The DOCC is a large multi-campus initiative that employs feminist pedagogies to respond creatively both to recent changes in higher education in the United States and Canada, and to the opportunities presented by greater access to networked digital media.
Research indicates that many aspects of feminist pedagogy improve learning outcomes. Feminists often describe their classrooms as collaborative, engaged, and interdisciplinary. A key commitment of these classrooms is understanding tacit ways of knowing by paying attention to the multiple layers of human experience. Examples of feminist pedagogical strategies include: the design of learning communities, service learning projects, community learning initiatives, diversity education, education in transnational thinking, and curricula that incorporate collaborative assignments and projects. All of these efforts have been validated by the American Association of Colleges and Universities as “high-impact educational practices” (https://www.aacu.org/leap/hip.cfm). Task forces have argued that undergraduates need to be treated as researchers rather than spectators and play an active role in the making of new knowledge (https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED424840). The U.S. Department of Labor advocates teaching what are often referred to as “soft skills,” including “communication,” “teamwork,” and “networking” to prepare students to work in professional environments (https://www.dol.gov/odep/topics/youth/softskills/). Philanthropic organizations have promoted effective new media literacy programs while confronting more directly the challenges of participatory culture (https://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/2713). Advocates for the public humanities and for engagement with visual culture have also urged the university to change from a top-down model of pedagogy to a more horizontal, peer-engaged learning and teaching model. This shift from “sage on the stage” to “guide to the side,” celebrated in so-called “flipped” classrooms, has a long pre-history in feminist teaching and research which shows, however, that superficial flipping does little to deconstruct true power divisions.
Interaction and presence are important components of effective pedagogy; yet these components are often highly constrained in the use of networked technologies as learning platforms. The FemTechNet DOCC rests on a pedagogical framework that we identify as “cyberfeminist.” For the past twenty years, cyberfeminists have worked diligently on projects to provide broader access to technology for women in diverse global contexts. They have developed strategies to transform Web 2.0 environments into generative spaces for dialogue by drawing on feminist theories in the creation of new digital applications and web places, to focus explicitly on the quality of interaction among web users and the creation of infrastructures of synchronous learning. This cluster of courses draws on the experiences of cyberfeminist teachers, scholars and artists who have worked to develop skills and literacies of traditionally marginalized groups such as women and people of color and people working from the under-resourced majority world.
Our use of network technologies aspires to enable wide access to all interested participants. The course developed through the hands-on involvement and sustained attention of more than 30 instructors. Our approach to teaching, even when it is fully online and distributed, centers on the body and embodied skills. Moreover, we understand that the process of learning and teaching is a relational process, not only between teacher and student, but among students as peers. This explicit focus on access, not primarily technological access, but more importantly the access that is made possible through embodied practices and collaborative relationships, differentiates the DOCC approach from a typical Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) model. By paying close attention to embodied practice we learn to identify tacit practices of knowledge production to better understand how skills can be learned across varied contexts.
We seek to activate a learning process that recognizes and extends across global and cultural contexts. Engaging people from diverse backgrounds and working consciously to respect the richness of this diversity requires significant effort on everyone’s part. While the use of the world-wide-web and internet infrastructures enables communication among people at great geographic distances, it also strains the capacity for respect and the appreciation of the nuances of diverse backgrounds which increases the intensity of the work that must be done by teachers and organizers of the learning process. Our model of teaching is labor-intensive and depends on a great amount of invisible work that is often not recognized as part of the “teaching enterprise”: for example, the “back-channel” communication to coordinate activities and to enable collaborations, the provision of emotional care and the tending of relationships, the active facilitation of equal participation, and the creation of learning materials that demystify abstract concepts. Participating in this effort has required all DOCC instructors to learn new teaching skills, to develop new communication practices, and to engage more closely with the diverse processes of student learning.
Feminist pedagogy, therefore is not merely or only a set of practices for teaching women, but rather a pedagogical framework built on the analysis and exploration of visible and invisible modes of learning. We believe this is the necessary foundation for understanding how to best serve and engage all students, particularly those who are socially and materially underprivileged, so that they can acquire skills and knowledge to achieve their aspirations.
2) Several currently existing reform efforts do little to change the status quo
While we applaud the many past and current efforts to enhance access to and completion of quality education, there remains considerable room for improvement; excellence and inclusion are often uneven or completely unrealized for many students. Although courseware companies such as edX, Coursera, and Udacity promise to advance reform efforts, the assumed ability of the software to transmit information effectively is often the central feature of massive open online courses (MOOCs) and tends to ignore the importance of knowledge as embodied learning. The video coursecasts, interactive quizzes, and peer grading activities provided to hundreds of thousands of students from around the world largely reinforce the constraints of conventional education and promote outdated ideologies of scientific management. Crowd-sourcing and peer evaluation are used as a labor management techniques rather than as opportunities for educationally transformative collaborative engagement – both student to student and teacher to student.
Students in MOOCs may be eager to take advantage of seemingly lowered barriers to sign-up, thus providing numerical “evidence” of the effectiveness of access to MOOCs. Indeed, the courses themselves may promise to provide a quantum of social justice as well as valuable information and first-rate teachers, but as these promises have become more ambitious, they may be harder to fulfill through the portals themselves. For one thing, as these initiatives have proliferated, there is relatively little variety in strategies to recruit and retain students. Standardization of technical interfacing, while it organizes and makes manageable a top-down information flow and grading process, is not necessarily effective pedagogy. Further, the basic design of the educational software interface, and the assumption that “massive” numbers of students means better and broader access, remain largely untested with regard to equity issues and concrete student learning outcomes.
Massive Open Online Courses claim to be all things to all people— simultaneously. They project themselves as distance learning for the many, niche teaching to the masses, Silicon Valley versions of TED talks, Ivy League lectures for the ten thousand, online lessons for the overseas-living lifelong learner. They are pitched as entrepreneurial schemes, alternative revenue streams, or marketing devices promoting products to the “common folk.” MOOCs strive to be blind to borders, class systems, economics, gender, and race; although MOOCs have tried to defy the digital divide, they actually reinforce it. They place the burden of learning almost entirely on the lone learner. The teacher, it seems, only needs to transmit his information through digital distance technologies. And the masculine pronoun does dominate, because MOOC courses tend to have much poorer records on equity than embodied campuses and provide less support to female faculty and instructors of color in promoting courses with star faculty, according to their own catalogs and listings of their highest enrollment courses.
MOOC efforts often represent a step backwards, by promulgating a standardization of format rather than a focus on processes that support global access to learning and the reciprocity of teaching and learning. Interaction is recorded in terms of data “hits” and downloads rather than as engagement between teacher and learner and within communities of learners. Frequently there is little common ground between the autonomous, anonymous, and isolated skill-and-drill exercises of the solo student and the flame wars breaking out in student forums where feelings overflow in such a large scale arena that course managers have largely given up on moderation. Early efforts in the open learning movement have become overshadowed by Coursera~Harvard/MIT~Stanford edX models, some of which may have developed through social media but are now primarily focused on information transfer with the burden of actual learning placed fully on the learner. This learner isolation disenfranchises students, most of whom need context to succeed. Current MOOCs do not use the interactive potential of social media but rather are rooted in older broadcast media and emphasize the transmission of visuals, video, and discussion forums. Their main innovation is that they do this on a massive scale and use the latest technological bells and whistles. Unfortunately, they continue to be asocial learning management systems anchored in the narrowest forms of “content.”
We acknowledge that MOOCs today do fulfill needs that might otherwise go unmet – within limits. Content provided by MOOCs can indeed be valuable. For instance, MOOCs may effectively and economically expand offerings for less-commonly-spoken languages. And live specialist lectures can be disseminated internationally rather than limited to a single campus audience. But what MOOCs obviously and inherently lack is good old-fashioned student-teacher contact. Furthermore, except for The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s MOOC Research Hub, there has been very little empirical MOOC study, intensive ethnographic research, or analysis or formal critique beyond blog-based declarations of like and dislike. In promoting the DOCC model we are not advocating a complete dismantling of the MOOC model – rather we are asking for a critical engagement with and focus on the learning process. Our goal is not to attack all teachers who offer MOOCs; rather it is to point to the flaws in the model that come from its lack of emphasis on teacher-student engagement and the relational nature of learning.
Academic personnel are often cash-poor and strapped for resources, despite rising tuition costs. Nonetheless, the educator must do her work as teacher, nurturer, collaborator, team-member, peer, mentor, facilitator, partner, problem-solver, and challenger. MOOCs and Google hangouts cannot replace the teacher’s work. A growing number of engaged educators (including feminist educators) want to respond to the sudden ubiquity of massive online courses that apparently have minimal accountability. Institutions of higher learning — including community colleges — and other centers for lifelong learning can provide safe spaces for learning and affirm that ideas need time to gestate and mature. Impatience and get-rich-quick schemes are at odds with the hard work of critical thinking and respectful dialogue.
3) Access to technology does not guarantee access to knowledge, and respecting the investment of labor is critical to facilitating real learning
The most compelling thing about MOOCs, and the main companies that facilitate them (Coursera, Udacity, Edx), is the promise of “free” and therefore accessible education. This promise is particularly striking for feminist scholars who have been advocating for and innovating accessible education for decades. We can think back to the early 20th century settlement work of Victoria Earle Matthews in New York City and of Jane Addams in Chicago, to provide free basic and advanced education for African-American and immigrant populations; or to the Cambridge Women’s School which taught hundreds of free feminist courses to thousands of students in Boston from 1971-1992; to feminist ‘bridging programs’ throughout the US, offering courses and university resources to encourage low-income students to start and continue their higher education; as well as the ongoing practices of transformative feminist pedagogies, which have developed as critical correctives to the economic, social, political and physical barriers which continue to haunt higher education in the US. Indeed, the promise of free and accessible education appeals to no one more than feminist educators and scholars, who have been working towards precisely these goals for well over a century.
However, feminist scholarship has also taught us that technological innovations alone do not make structural changes – just as new cleaning technologies have not reduced the average amount of time that women spend on unpaid domestic labor. The “freedom” of cyberspace is not free of racism or sexism; the portable computers, smartphones and tablets that liberate us from the office do not free us (particularly women) from unremunerated overtime work. The celebration of MOOCs discounts the financial and affective costs that they in fact require.
Researchers studying other techno-missionary projects, such as the One-Laptop-Per-Child initiative, have observed that focusing only on delivery systems obscures how learning functions in a larger media ecology, and that “solutions” that privilege personalized consumer electronics as supposedly friction-free commodities are often doomed to fail. Studies of users of informal social computing, the role of infomediaries in the majority world, and the creative appropriation strategies of inner city residents in the United States — who may in fact be the “early adopters” of certain tactics of technology use — indicate that technology companies often fail to predict behavior or to understand participants’ desires.
While MOOC courses may be free to non-tuition-paying students, they are not free to the universities or the people developing and teaching them. The 2010 “Choices Report,” created by the University of California Systemwide Academic Senate, outlines the escalating costs of administering such massive courses, as well as the many millions of institutional dollars wasted on online teaching experiments in the 1990s and early 2000s. Beyond these costs, or even the price of institutional subscription to these software and support resources, we are concerned by the cost in professors, instructional teams (often consisting of graduate students), and tuition-paying students.
Given that all of the high-impact educational practices identified by the AAC&U rely on small class sizes and regular face-to-face contact hours with faculty and instructional teams, it seems that the resources going to the development, maintenance, and teaching of massive online courses could be better used to increase the number of faculty and graduate students (i.e. teaching assistants) working with smaller groups of students, and to support the development of existing feminist instructional infrastructures, like the network of DOCC professors, students and instructional technology designers.
The promise of low- or no-cost MOOCs also dovetails with the increasing institutional reliance on low- or no-cost academic labor (in our era of unprecedented increases in tuition costs). Given that seventy-six percent of university and college courses are taught by underpaid and insecurely employed contingent (adjunct) and non-tenure-track faculty who earn an average of $2,700 per course, our universities and colleges are already dependent for a vast majority of their instructional services on uncompensated or poorly-compensated labor. This faculty majority join their tenure-track and tenured colleagues in an industry of “sacrificial labor” where the catch-all category of “service” effectively obscures the amount of unpaid work inherent in required career activities like journal publishing, policy writing, student advising and course development. Indeed, research on academic labor conditions shows that with dramatically less institutional and monetary support for faculty, this is an industry that demands and obscures dramatically more work from all faculty, contingent or not. Further, it remunerates its male workers at a much higher rate than its female workers: tenure-track or tenured men make an average of $18,000 more than equally positioned women and non-tenure-track men make an average of $2,650 more, despite there being many more women working in these positions.
Moreover, with the presumed ubiquity of smartphones and personal laptops, all faculty are subject to the pressure of 24-hour service – the expectation that faculty will be digitally available for work at every hour every day, responding to emails, updating shared (google) documents, posting on academic blogs, joining video meetings – but when the domestic division of labor by gender remains stubbornly unchanged by technological innovation, this pressure has proven particularly hazardous for female faculty. As a network of feminist researchers and instructors working with various non- academic organizations and academic institutions and in various conditions of unpaid, contingent, non-tenure-track, tenure-track and tenured employment, the DOCC participants build on existing feminist pedagogical methods, technology studies, and labor studies to develop a feminist “disruptive innovation” within current academic labor conditions.
4) Technoscientific choices are not values neutral, and building infrastructure is not simply about choosing components among corporate, consumer products
Choosing to invest resources, including faculty time, in MOOC initiatives is not a neutral proposition. These decisions inevitably involve discounting other forms of articulation that oblige institutions of higher education to relate meaningfully to their surrounding communities. These priorities devalue teacher-student relationships, embodiment, labor, difference, and diverse hands-on skills and tacit practices across contexts, as well as rhetorical engagement of multiple participants. Although justification of MOOCs often appeals to claims of bringing rationality to higher education, to divert so much attention from core responsibilities to educate, and to expend so much energy on branding efforts, undermine relationship-building processes and efforts to increase access. Such divergent priorities may pose a public relations disaster too. If universities commit to partnerships with inexperienced start-ups lacking a sustainable business plan or funding model, this disaster is compounded, and public trust in scholarly institutions deteriorates further.
Although universities often make large investments in hardware, building the infrastructure that we need in higher education actually involves rethinking traditional notions of ownership of property. Many cyberfeminist educators, therefore, continue to be interested in performing what might be called an “infrastructural inversion” to express resistance to the fact that infrastructure is so behind-the-scenes as to be invisible. Indeed we see that sometimes even the need for the presence of such an infrastructure is made manifest only through its absence. In other words, infrastructure goes unnoticed unless it is broken. By recognizing the politics of knowledge production that contributes to systems of standards, we can begin to see infrastructure, make it an object of study, and analyze support structures that provide the basic framework of a postsecondary institution. As feminist scholars and computer scientists note, infrastructure can be both abstract and concrete. It can be composed of inanimate material objects and human actors. In addition to being a “what,” infrastructure can be a “how” and a “who” . . . and even a “when.” Thus many of these researchers express considerable skepticism about distance education that promises to strip higher education down to its “essentials”, because the false efficiencies of standardization often ignore the importance of low status aspects of the traditional campus — such as services delivered by libraries, advising offices, and learning centers — and weaken necessary infrastructures in the process.
5) DOCC design recognizes complexity
The use of online teaching and communication platforms is important to the DOCC innovation but, unlike with the MOOCs, we do not assume that the online platforms, tools and content transmission will solve the problem of access to education world-wide, or even within the U.S. and Canada. As noted earlier, our central focus remains on the pedagogic engagement – which requires much invisible work/labor on the part of the designers and teachers before, during and after the course content creation through online formats.
Having said that, the careful selection and design of online tools is essential to the success of our collaborative efforts. We have yet to find a single platform that accommodates and supports our pedagogical principles or our commitment to accessibility and collaboration. Indeed, existing platforms and tools such as Blackboard, Google Hang-out, Skype, Canvas, and Coursera are be optimized to enact a transmission model of teaching (what is often referred to as the “sage from the stage” approach) that is not only ineffective in stimulating engaged learning, but also antithetical to feminist pedagogy. For example, if a platform includes the capacity for video calls, it accommodates a very limited number of participants and only one speaker – group conversation overwhelms the video and audio capacities of the software, forcing even small group discussions into the hierarchical structure of the lecture hall. With institutionally subscribed platforms (like Blackboard or Coursera) that might allow resource building and sharing (ie. videos, written assignments, teaching exercises, etc.), all course content is administered and organized by the few people authorized by the host institution (ie. professor and teaching assistants) and this content finally ‘lives’ within just that one institution – restricting the sort of open-access, collaborative and distributed user-generated growth for which we aim. Alternatively, when the platform is open-access and theoretically capable of being designed – through plug-ins and custom coding – for the accessible content-building, -sharing and – archiving that we need, our home organizations and/or institutions have dedicated their IT resources (human and monetary) to supporting the closed platforms to which they subscribe, leaving us with limited support for the design, development and maintenance of our online feminist pedagogical space. Without pre-existing platforms, our online teaching and learning architecture for the DOCC is itself an experimental research-creation site, through which we hope to enable and foreground these processes and to encourage multiple pathways for this work to emerge.
6) The FemTechNet DOCC is an innovative experiment from which many stakeholders will learn
The DOCC project by FemTechNet is an innovative experiment in the use of networked technologies that engage multiple communities and will yield important lessons for many stakeholders: learning institutions, teachers, students, members of the public, learning faciltiators, feminist researchers. The DOCC 2013 engages many institutions, disciplines, modes of media production, and types of learners to generate multiple points of comparison and contribute to a constructive dialogue about improving learning. This project also engages seriously with the possibility of failure as part of the process of the spirit of thoughtful and nuanced experimentation. We understand that the analysis of why things failed offers opportunities to build new knowledge and refine understandings.
Many corporate-run MOOCs often minimize failure in order to please shareholders and promote public relations rather than study it in the name of better iterative course design. MOOC faculty are also often woefully naive about the instructional technologies that they use, and many are very new users of online video. Thus MOOC media production efforts progress without the critical expertise of those in media studies, who consider how the gaze, the apparatus, and other components of the situation of reception function to shape how “content” is processed.
In recent years, scholars in feminist critical sci-art and feminist science and technology studies have investigated emergent modes of citizen science that enable people to test hypotheses and experiment. The FemTechNet DOCC brings to the learning situation this participatory spirit of inquiry-based scholarship. In contrast, MOOCs remain largely untested and disengaged from the accountability of learner-centered assessment, as the recent MOOC research initiative indicates. They often depend on the directives of venture capitalists rather than experienced curriculum designers. Frequently the justifications upon which they rely lack references to a scholarly literature of peer-reviewed research. They also do not take into consideration years of research about student to student interaction in perceived anonymous spaces where instances of harassment and bullying occur sometimes unknown or un-monitored by the instructor.
The DOCC draws on the collective intelligence of many scholars working with each other and in partnership with their students in a model that is open to critique and open to participation. In assessing the results of this experiment, we plan to focus on achieving the outcomes for students that are most meaningful over time rather than just the results that are easiest to numerically quantify. We are also committed to using multiple measures of assessment. Fortunately, our cohort has a strong commitment to peer-reviewed research on best practices and can speak from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. Perhaps the most tangible outcome of this project will be the large pedagogical archive of curated materials generated by teachers and students that will be available for reuse.
This is a pragmatic initiative of dedicated feminist educators who are interested in the use of new technologies and emerging platforms of networked knowledge creation. This initiative was built from the formal networks of our professional associations at professional meetings and the informal networks of mentorship, co-teaching, collegiality, and friendship nourished over the years. To date hundreds of participants have invested thousands of hours and, with this white paper, we hope to attract more collaborators.
Note: You may download PDFs of the (Fem)Manifesto in three languages. Scroll down to see the links.
FemTechNet is committed to making the accessible, open, accountable, transformative and transforming educational institutions of our dreams. We are feminist academic hacktivism.
FemTechNet is an international movement of feminist thinkers, researchers, writers, teachers, artists, professors, librarians, mentors, organizers and activists sharing resources and engaging in activities that demonstrate connected feminist thinking about technology and innovation.
FemTechNet understands that technologies are complex systems with divergent values and cultural assumptions. We work to expand critical literacies about the social and political implications of these systems.
FemTechNet is cyberfeminist praxis: we recognize digital and other technologies can both subvert and reinscribe oppressive relations of power and we work to make these complex relations of power transparent.
FemTechNet is hard at work creating better tools.
FemTechNet has no observers, only participants.
Accountability is a feminist technology.
Collaboration is a feminist technology.
Collectivity is a feminist technology.
Care is a feminist technology.
Irony, comedy, making a mess, and gravitas are feminist technologies.
No one holds the trademark on feminist pedagogy—it is collective intellectual property.
FemTechNet is part of and bigger than the contemporary university.
FemTechNet is fueled by our civil rights, anti-racist, queer, decolonizing, trans- feminist pedagogies as we work within the belly of the beast of neoliberal austerity, normalized precarity, neo-colonial techno-missionary evangelism and MOOC fever towards the radical redistribution, reinvention, and repurposing of technological, material, emotional, academic, and monetary resources.
FemTechNet is a power tool.
FemTechNet is distributed expertise.
FemTechNet is an experiment in solidarity.
FemTechNet recognizes the often-prohibitive tuition fees and other costs associated with post-secondary education and so works both within and well beyond university and college classrooms to open learning opportunities for and from a wide range of participants.
FemTechNet knows that the majority of us are not paid a sustainable wage, and works for economic justice as a feminist principle.
FemTechNet knows that ultimately none of us is protected by our institutions, so we need to take care of each other.
FemTechNet works across rank, to record feminist genealogies and technological innovations of the past, present and future.
We are a work group.
We are a social network.
We are many genders.
We are an innovative learning technology.
We are FemTechNet.
FemTechNet.org
For further information (including press inquiries), contact the Communication
FemTechNet is an always-shifting distributed network of feminist scholars, educators, artists and organizers working together on projects in feminist technological research, experimentation and innovation. We create resources and pedagogical tools for our open source “course” in Feminism and Technology studies (the DOCC project). In addition, our network fosters other art, activist, research and pedagogy projects in the area of feminism and technology. There are a number of ways to get involved in FemTechNet.
You may join our Slack for internal conversations; to join, please email femtechnetinquiries AT gmail DOT com with “Slack” in the subject line and a sentence about how you are associated with the Network
Consider starting your own node, making it as modest or ambitious as you have time and energy
Other ideas? Please share. Questions? femtechnetinquiries AT gmail DOT com
Since the launch of Distributed Open Collaborative Courses in 2013, many FemTechNet participants have developed Key Learning Projects in collaboration across the network. New activities are in development too, but you may check out those that have been developed so far:
What is a Key Learning Project? Our intention is that these projects will have the most support from the FemTechNet Pedagogy Committee, and therefore will be easiest to access and easiest to collaborate around across nodal sites. Like everything in the DOCC 2013, these are buy-in: instructors will use them in their courses if and as best suits their students and learning objectives.
For examples of student projects in response to these and other assignments during the Beta classes and DOCC 2013, please see the Student Projects Gallery.
What about other Projects/Assignments? Any instructor can assign her/his/their own projects at any time.
Examples of Other Projects/Assignments
Annotated Readers: In the Spring 2013 Beta class, undergrad students at Pitzer and grad students in a digital pedagogies seminar at USC participated in two collaborative projects where the grad students produced annotated digital readers for undergrads, around the course themes Transformation (reading by Haraway, Lord, and da Costa) and Race (readings by Nakamura and Fernandez), using two authoring tools, Comment Press and Scalar.
Making: AJ Strout, Pitzer Beta Class, created a detailed record and a blog of the many in-class, hands-on “making” exercises that Pitzer students participated in during the Spring of 2013.
Conference: UCFemTechNet Conference, with UCSD (and other UC) grad student volunteers and day of panels and workshops: https://feministit.ucsd.edu/
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!
