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.”)
By Sharon Irish, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
On January 22, 2014, I arrived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, courtesy of Lisa Nakamura, for a two-day event, “Feminist Digital Pedagogies,” that she organized with colleagues at the University of Michigan. Jessie Daniels (CUNY) was not able to make it to Ann Arbor in time to give her keynote—due to storms in New York–but she did make it for a dinner with us that evening.
Dinner with participants in Ann Arbor, Michigan, prior to Feminist Digital Pedagogies conference. L to R: Faithe Day, Andre Brock, Jessie Daniels, Carrie Rentschler, Sharon Irish, Lisa Nakamura, Jessica Moorman
The FemTechNet seminar at Brown University has had an exciting and productive semester thus far! The class is composed of both graduate and undergraduate students interested in a wide variety of issues related to feminism and technology including electronic art projects, new media theory, and feminist pedagogy. In addition to a rigorous curriculum of readings, our course assignments and events include wiki-editing, keyword video production, creative assignments, student reflections about “feminist” terminology, and a guest lecture series. Please visit our course website here (and check back for updates!):
On October 15th (Ada Lovelace Day), our FemTechNet class participated in a campus wide wiki-editing event. The event was led by Maia Weinstock of Wikimedia New England as well as Professor Anne Fausto Sterling. Together, participants edited 70 existing articles and added 20 new articles about prominent female scientists, engineers, and other important cultural figures. The event was covered by a number of local press publications.
FemTechNet students are also making their own keyword videos around topics of their choice which have thus far included Agency, Performance, Cyberfeminism, and Women-Only Art Spaces. We are currently in the stage of post-production, but we hope to have the videos uploaded by the end of November. The videos emphasize student interests related to the course readings including analyzing computer music composition/innovation, investigating technologies such as Snapchat and Siri, and discussing the labors of bodily and opensignal performance. Students will also be completing creative assignments at the end of the year which will include, zines, photography projects, documentary work, poetry, etc. A summary will be written up at the end of the semester.
Students continue to write reflections about terms such as Stacy Alaimo’s “trans-corporeality,” Priscilla Wald’s “outbreak narrative,” and contemporary events related to issues on feminism and technology such as the Hysterical Women’s Project and subRosa. Some of our most interesting discussions have been around Wendy Chun’s work on software, Judith Butler’s essay on vulnerability and mourning, Eugene Thacker’s “biomedia,” Mel Y Chen’s “animacy,” and Melinda Cooper and Kalinda Vora’s discussion of transnational reproductive labor and technology.
Lastly, we are hosting a number of exciting guest lectures including video artists, animators, and DJ’ s, including the following:
Asha Tamirisia, graduate student in MEME (computer music) at Brown University
Asha gave a presentation on her role as a computer music artist, tracing her development and interests in both analog and digital music production through her childhood, her undergraduate education at Oberlin, and finally, her work here at Brown as a PhD student. About one of the videos she showed, which can be found on our course website, she said:
This project was made in collaboration with dancer Alayna Wiley in 2010 in an old, unused men’s locker room at Oberlin College. The movement and video processing hinge on ideas of disappearance, intangibility, and distortion. As I revisit this project many years later, I see ties to ideas of material feminism: a means to create the sensation of porousness between the body and its environment, reconceiving the body in a way that recognizes it as a place in process.
Jessamyn Swift,graduate student in English at Brown University
Jessamyn gave her presentation on her evolving dissertation research including investigating theories of agency and the nonhuman in the work of Charles Darwin. In particular, Jessamyn close-read sections of Darwin’s observations about the possible “sentient” or “intentional” behavior of certain organisms including worms.
Samantha Calamari, DJ and Instructional Technology Expert and Aaron Apps,graduate student in English at Brown University.
Samantha will be presenting about her career as a female DJ in the 90′s in San Francisco and New York City. In particular, Samantha remarks on how the change from analog to digital DJ technologies changed the gender landscape in music culture.
Aaron is a published poet. He will be presenting work on his poetry book, Intersex, and discuss issues of queer identity and gender politics.
Elisa Giardina Papa, digital artist, Rhode Island School of Design and Brown University Elisa is an Italian digital artist. She will presenting her work on animation and portraiture.
November 26th, 2013: Maura Smyth, Junior Fellow at Harvard University’s Society of Fellows
Maura is giving a presentation about her co-founded digital collaborative story-telling project called The Blaitholm Affair. From the press release:
The Blaitholm Affair’s interface will seamlessly integrate the world’s stories, art, and music, enabling artistic collaboration and allowing each visitor to have a different experience of the world, depending on how you navigate it… The scope of the world is boundless, the opportunities for collaboration never-ending.
December 3rd, 2013:Malavika Jayaram, Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society
Malavika works broadly in the areas of privacy, identity, free expression and internet policy in India. A practicing lawyer specializing in technology law, she has a particular interest in new media and the arts, and has advised start-ups, innovators, scientists, educational institutions and artists. A Fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India, she follows legislative and policy developments in the privacy and internet governance domains. For the last few years, she has been looking at he evolution of big data and e-governance projects in India – particularly the world’s largest biometric ID project – and their implications for identity, freedom, choice and informational self-determination.
Last weekend, Susie Ferrell and I represented FemTechNet at the Reclaim Open Learning Symposium at the University of California – Irvine.
The Reclaim Open Learning contest invited innovators whose work embodied the principles of connected learning to submit their work. We applied for this Innovation Contest over the summer, and we were thrilled to hear that FemTechNet was one of five winners selected from around the world.
We are proud that FemTechNet is working from a place that aligns with these connected learning principles, makes use of open-access and open-license technologies and business models, and involves students as leaders and partners in innovative learning (such as learner-created projects). Our application stood out in the way that FemTechNet incorporates digital resources and practices in novel ways, presents an alternative to the MOOC, and most importantly, is a work in progress that is adapting to the emergent practices of our learners as we go.
Jade Ulrich (L) and Susie Ferrell (R) by the poster announcing their winning proposal to support their FemTechNet projects.
The two-day event really kicked off with a bang. The keynote speaker dialogue included scientist, artist and strategist, John Seely Brown, and Amin Saberi, a professor of management science, computational and mathematical engineering at Stanford, and now CEO of NovoEd (a MOOC startup). They discussed questions such as: where are we in the MOOC hype cycle, and does it matter? What are the relative strengths and weaknesses of online and offline interaction for learning?
That evening, Susie and I had the opportunity to enjoy dinner with the rest of the winners. This informal space allowed us to hear more about the amazing projects of the other winners. Fellow winners included DigiLit Leicester, Digital Storytelling 106, Jaaga Study (based in India), and Photography BA Hons and Phonar-Ed (based in the UK). It was a great experience to get to network with these educators who are doing work so different from FemTechNet, but within the same frame.
Of particular interest to me was the Digital Storytelling course. It is based on the notion, “a domain of one’s own.” It connects registered students and open participants (like our Self-Directed Learners!) in an ever-evolving online community where they submit, complete, and collaborate on assignments in writing, mash-ups, design, video, audio, and other media. The course lives online as a live-streaming radio station, a sub-reddit, a G+ group, and Twitter feed. There are many parallels to the pedagogy of FemTechNet here, but with a vastly different academic focus. Reclaim Open Learning managed to pull together a highly diverse group of projects, which nevertheless share similar principles of connected learning.
It was particularly exciting to see that FemTechNet is not just talking the talk, but walking the walk: Susie and I were the only student winners. I think this fact speaks very highly of FemTechNet’s efforts to encourage strong leadership amongst its students. I would like to think that despite the fact that Susie and I are both still undergrad students, we represented FemTechNet in the best possible way.
If you are interested in seeing the panel that Susie and I were on, here is the link.
On Thursday morning, September 19, Professor Alexandra Juhasz’s Feminist Dialogues on Technology class held its first Wiki-a-thon. As the Teaching Assistant for the class, I coordinated the event. Coming together at 9am, the class of ten organized themselves across the room. For three hours, we diligently worked on a diverse array of Wikipedia pages.
One student, who was working on professional female athlete’s pages, remarked that she was surprised how much of the information on some of the pages was inaccurate. She promptly got started on correcting these errors. The students quickly learned how to add citations to pages, and how to reference their sources. In only a few hours, students made dozens of corrections, drafted pages for women without Wikipedia pages in their sandboxes, and, most importantly, people were enthusiastic about the Wikipedia editing process.
Partway through the Wiki-a-thon, students began collaborating amongst a bounty of Trader Joe’s snacks. People started pairing or teaming up, as they were working on similar projects. One student recommended an archive of women’s history to a small group that was searching for sources, and many helped each other out with the technical questions that arose from editing Wikipedia. This organic collaboration and teamwork reminded me a lot of FemTechNet’s purpose.
FemTechNet’s feminist pedagogy supports connected learning that effectively links different areas of knowledge and ways of learning. I observed this Wiki party in a different way as a TA than when I participated as a student new to the project last spring, I was happy to see connected learning principles come to life. The atmosphere of the room was open and curious, while at the same time, rigorous and focused.
When noon rolled around, students were reluctant to leave, apologizing that they had to get to their next class. A few students stayed well into their lunch period, excitedly planning how they would move forward with their Wiki work. Thanks to this Wiki-a-thon, a young, fierce Seattle-based female rapper will soon have a Wikipedia page that showcases her career and work. Thanks to the work of one of our students, the Miss Saigon page will have a more balanced representation of the political controversy that is quickly gaining notice. In a relatively short amount of time, ten students got serious work done.
The students will continue their Wikipedia work for a couple more months, choosing to focus their efforts in areas that specifically interest them personally. When it comes time for each student to submit a reflection on their work (these will be posted on the FTN Commons, by the way), I have no doubt that their contributions will be hugely inspiring.
In a recent grant application that I wrote on behalf of FemTechNet, I noted: “FemTechNet involves students as leaders, offering them the unique opportunity to help shape the direction this project takes (they are given the option to serve on designated planning boards, alongside faculty), be creative in their coursework (by way of open-ended projects), as well as incorporate their work into widely utilized resources (i.e. Wikipedia).” I can proudly say that FemTechNet continues to stand by these inclusive and welcoming values, as a student TA who witnesses young undergrad students integrating their scholarship into huge repositories of knowledge such as Wikipedia.
The Distributed Open Collaborative Courses and their learning projects, especially the activities around editing Wikipedia, have received a fair amount of coverage over the last month, in online news, blogs, and video.We have collected the Media Mentions that we know about here.
To ensure that all of us involved with FemTechNet provide consistent and thoughtful responses to inquiries about our work, the Steering Committee wrote these talking points over the weekend of September 7-8.
On Wikipedia editing, collaboratively or collectively creating knowledge, and “Storming Wikipedia”
All Wikipedia editors are guided by the “neutral point of view” policy, one of Wikipedia’s three core content policies.
*Neutrality in editing entails understanding and communicating the full range of a debate or discussion on a topic.
*As the Wikipedia page on “neutral point of view” notes – “Wikipedia aims to describe disputes, but not engage in them…As such, the neutral point of view does not mean exclusion of certain points of view” – this means that responsible editing includes representing feminist perspectives.
All Wikipedia editors are similarly bound by the other two core content policies “verifiability” and “no original research” *Consequently, the editing that is part of the FemTechNet effort is not an “injection” of individual opinion or bias, but an effort to more fully represent existing knowledge on a range of topics, including, but not limited to the lives and works of women.
The Wikipedia community itself recognizes their problem of system-wide bias, both in terms of contributors and content. They note: The Wikipedia project strives for a neutral point of view in its coverage of subjects, but it is inhibited by systemic bias that discriminates against underrepresented cultures and topics. The systemic bias is created by the shared social and cultural characteristics of most editors, and it results in an imbalanced coverage of subjects on Wikipedia.
The FemTechNet community takes seriously the need to learn about and engage with the Wikipedia community *We worked with well-established Wikipedians during the pilot phase in Spring 2013.
*Now in the official launch phase, we’ve had the good fortune to have Wikipedians create training videos for the group and lead a summer workshop for all of the instructors.
*We are actively engaging with the Project Feminism Wikipedia community, as well as with others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Feminism
The FemTechNet effort to help transform Wikipedia content, culture, and community is not about publicity. It is about engaging in the creation of knowledge in ways that are responsible and governed by feminist principles, including equal representation of all cultural and social groups.
*One of five key learning projects, the Wikipedia activity is a concerted effort by a critical mass of feminist thinkers to improve the scope of Wikipedia.
*The Wikipedia activity aims to teach critical media literacy to our students, useful for everyone who engages with the Internet and other information sources, independent of political persuasion.
On feminist pedagogy in institutions of higher education:
Gender and Women’s Studies (GWS) as an academic field in higher education in the US has been in existence, and engaged in substantive intellectual pursuits, for 45 years. *While there is disagreement about the role of feminism(s) in GWS, as in any area of inquiry, these debates are often productive for new scholarship.
*In the US, there are over 700 departments/programs in GWS; ~50 master’s degree programs and 15 doctoral programs. See https://www.nwsa.org/
Feminist scholarship is interdisciplinary, intersectional, global and comparative, deriving methods and ideas from many fields and movements. *The scope of feminist studies is broad, including scholars in many other disciplinary areas. In other words, GWS approaches are used in STEM fields, history, sociology, etc. Comparisons across disciplines also enrich the field.
*Saying that feminist scholarship is intersectional means that social systems (like educational institutions, for example) as well as personal interactions are complex; any analyses of them must include issues of race, class, sexualities, and gender, among other identities, to approach understanding of past and present conditions.
*Feminists have been actively engaged in settings all over the world, from the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association, to the Asian Women’s Studies Congress, to the Federation of South African Women, to name only a few efforts.
Feminist teaching and learning—which, of course, is related to scholarship—connect with lengthy traditions of intellectual freedom and educational alternatives: taking a stand, respecting diversity, democratic processes, expanding possibilities.
*Online, face-to-face or “hybrid” courses are in the news as methods of content “delivery” are in development, along with the means to fund/support them.
*The Distributed Open Collaborative Course (DOCC) being offered in Fall 2013 at 16 institutions is a feminist rethinking of the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). We intend to contribute to the larger conversation about educational equity and excellence.
*We are thinking about and developing strategies to work within, across, and with attention to difference, place, and privilege.
*Whether our students are feminist or not, and regardless of the different ways we professors are feminists, or teach feminism, we are introducing our students to a lively, thoughtful, complex, lengthy, and self-critical body of knowledge about technology that asks them to think about their own role in its history, production, and analysis.
