The project

Our Project

We are interested in producing a 12-credit certificate program In internet computing and women's studies targeted to women (and men) in underserved communities in Arizona, predominantly in rural areas. We intend to fill a gap in access to higher education and technology for this population through distance education. These students are marginalized with respect to education for a variety of reasons: (1) they come from profoundly underfunded schools, and even a court-mandated remediation plan has not resulted in significant improvements; (2) a related fact is that the communities served are disproportionately Chicano and Native American, and low-income, compared to those served in wealthy school districts, particularly the Phoenix suburbs; (3) people in these rural communities are not well-served by the community college system, whose facilities, while extensive, are concentrated in more populous areas; and (4) those with the least access to education in these communities are the home-bound, those who for reasons of disability or caretaking responsibilities for young children or ill or elderly relatives cannot seek educational opportunities. Those in the last group are disproportionately women. We see this project as an opportunity to reach these underserved communities.

Well-to-do and middle-class white men in urban areas of wealthy countries dominate in technological knowledge and learning. This is partly a function of access: this is the demographic group most likely to have jobs or be in educational settings that allow them to learn how to use the toys while being paid, or as part of the normal course of their education. They are also the group most likely to have the disposable income to spend on private access to technology. However, it is also true that girls and women in technologically saturated societies like the U.S., Japan, and Sweden grow up with similar (although not identical) household and educational access to technology, but continue to lag in usage and skill-levels. (fn!) One theory about why this is, or perhaps more accurately, how women and girls use technology, is that as a gross generalization, women and girls are more content-driven in their use of technology. That is, they are more likely to use technology for a specific end than male counterparts, who might surf the web, for example, with no particular goal in mind, hence acquiring general knowledge and specific skills that are applicable at later times. (Similar patterns have been documented in differences in how African-Americans use the internet compared to white people in the U.S.)

A large caveat is in order here: this is a leaky generalization, with plenty of exceptions in the behavior of individual women, girls, men, and boys; we make no claims about the predictive power of this generalization into the future; and we assume that gender-divergent behavior with respect to technology has nothing to do with innate abilities or biology, but rather derives from gender-dimorphic socialization and acculturation (as my 13-year old daughter once said, "I never thought I'd like computer games, because they're for boys. But I do!"). Furthermore, at least in the U.S., parents are warned to supervise, limit, and worry about daughters' internet use, claiming that it is full of sexual predators, which is another significant source of women and girls' relatively lower levels of technological literacy. Similarly, we assume that racial differentials in computing have to do with access and expectations, not intelligence or ability.

With this caveat in mind, we see the combination of content that is empowering to women, U.S. racial minorities, and transnational migrants, and using the web to deliver it, as embodying both sound pedagogy for the content we wish to share, and also a good way to teach internet computing to those who usually have less access or confidence in using it.