DISTANCE EDUCATION: REDRAWING THE MAP OF CYBERSPACE ©Kari Boyd McBride and Laura Briggs, 2001
Abstractó It is axiomatic in historical studies of science that new technologies both produce new social relations and reproduce old ones. The question about the web in general and distance education in particular is, to what extent it will simply place more resource (information, capital, production capacity, education, etc.) in the hands of the "haves," and in what ways it offers radically democratizing potential to put resources in the control of the "have nots." In this paper, we explore some models for distance education (broadly construed) from the margins, as it were, including the "web-back" performance pieces of Guillermo Gomez Peña, the production of virtual favelas in Brazil, and our own efforts to produce an intellectual and institutional infrastructure to design a multi-university distance ed certificate program targeting predominantly rural women, thinking in particular about Native American reservations and chicano border towns in the U.S. Southwest. We ask how these various projects recruit and (hyper)textually imagine their students, and what models of virtual education and empowerment they create.Index Termsó digital divide, distance education, rural education, Women's Studies.
INTRODUCTIONWe want to begin with a confession of (y)our technological sins of omission and commission. Any gathering of corporate executives and educators relies on a profound méconnaisance, the purposeful misrecognition that masks our mutual distrust of each otherís motives and our willingness to exploit each otherís resources?indeed, to exploit each other as resources. Corporations want educators to train the next generation of cheap, skilled labor, and educators want corporations to provide them with the hardware and software to educate a labor force of critical thinkers?ideally, an articulate, unionized, highly-skilled labor force that can unite across national, ethnic, and corporate barriers. We want to persuade corporate types that the most valued employee of this century will be produced by educators who have a measure of independence from corporate culture and corporate money. Such employees will have learned how to think critically about both corporate and educational infrastructures; they will belong to neither camp. We also hope to explore how we might think creatively within and about the infrastructures of global capitalism, how e-education within that system might serve to produce something other than the poverty, cultural disruption, and social alienation that marked the twentieth century and that have launched us into the twentieth-first century on the wave of a bloody conflict.
But perhaps to begin here is to pose the problem precisely wrong; that the question of who is "corporate" and who is an "educator" is thrown wide open from the moment we begin to look at the locations of those of you who are scientists. Indeed, perhaps for most of us, even those of us in relatively insulated fields like women's studies, the question is not best answered by looking at the kinds of institutions we inhabit. We who are in the increasingly consumer-, product- and funding-oriented university frequently inhabit the "corporate" side of this divide, while there are progressive educators and scientists to be found throughout profit-making institutions.
Yet even as institutions become more hybridized, the divisions themselves are no less entrenched. Indeed, it is possible that this binary is more significant as it colonizes our minds rather than defining our institutions. We write this because we hope to discover a way to think creatively outside these divides between corporation and education?to mutually persuade ourselves and our audience that the gap between rich and poor (north and south, white and brown, industrialized and colonized) produces a world that none of us want to inhabit. We believe that we can trouble these divisions, that this project is a serious rather than utopian goal, and that how we implement e-education and (re)produce the Net has an effect on these things.
DIGITAL DIVIDES
As progressive educators, we approach the Internet with a certain amount of trepidation (a response that has been widely expressed: Halloran 2000, among others).We are particularly wary of simplistic e-welfare plans that would get the underclass online while preserving the structure of neocolonialism in which the Net is imbricated; offshore circuit-board factories and phone sex work long ago showed the failure of that trajectory. With these lessons in mind, we wonder to what extent the Net in general and distance education in particular will simply place more resources (information, capital, production capacity, skills, etc.) in the hands of the global "haves," and in what ways it might offer the potential to put resources in the control of the "have nots"? The contrast between the egalitarian ideals of many Netizens (especially before the dot-com explosion of the mid- to late-nineties), who saw the Net as a radically democratizing medium, and the real limitations of access for most of the world, even within the industrialized world, continues to haunt the Net and, now insistently, distance education. In many ways, the domination of the Internet and of information technology in general has reinvigorated hierarchies of power, contributing to the widening global economic gap between the haves and have-nots, categories that more than ever are defined along axes of race, gender, nation, and ethnicity.
And even within academic disciplines, the old hierarchies have been much in evidence from the beginning of the short life of the Net, perhaps in educational sites in particular, which initially archived the most traditional and canonical of materials. For instance, feminist literary historians who led the recuperative feminist project of the 1970s to explode the canon might well feel that the task has to be taken up all over again, as elegant Shakespeare and Interactive Dante web sites (with links to "the complete works") proliferate, while the works of women authors and other uncanonized writers, particularly people of color and those outside the U.S. and Europe continue to be represented by homespun sites At the same time, it is important to note the very existence of these lesser sites and all the personal and community home pages that proliferate on the Web. (The web site of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan comes to mind in particular, but many others could be singled out.) Markers of gender, race, class, nation, language, and age are in some ways made hyper-visible on the Net, but the old protocols of "publication" are, if not gone, then reconfigured.
To conceive distance education and the Net, then, in terms of gender dualism?or class or national divide?is to mistake the problematic. If we view the Net as the (anti)incarnation of the same old enemy, we will miss the exigent struggles?and opportunities?it presents for progressive scholars, teachers, scientists, philanthropists, and corporations. Perhaps in this context it is useful to recall the genealogy of the Net, a system developed by and for the military of a dominant western imperial power during the Cold War that was designed to have no center, no single nexus whose destruction could bring down the whole system. Those founding principles continue to inform the Netís presence in the world. Yes, it is a medium for global capital and western military dominance (Haraway, 1997). But its lack of a center, its diffuse structure, make it resistant both to "outside" attack and "inside" control. Perhaps more than any other medium of mass communication, the Net has shown itself to be available to what Michel de Certeau calls "le quotidien" or "the practice of everyday life"?in this scenario, a distinction between production and the practices of everyday consumption?as well as his concept of "bricolage," those moments when "users make innumerable and infinitesimal transformations of and within the dominant cultural economy in order to adapt it to their own interests." (1984) This technological infrastructure may assist in deploying so-called smart bombs, but it has also, for example, connected progressive activists in the U.S. who are opposed to the military campaign in Afghanistan. The email forum "Professors for Peace" (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/professors_for_peace) uses not only the system of the (military-designed) Internet, but the computing and networking infrastructures of universities all over the U.S.?universities that are funded in great part by global capital and the military industrial complex?to disseminate news reports and news analyses critical of the propaganda that presently dominates U.S. media (which are, of course, also funded by global capital). This is living as a subversive art, the practice of everyday life. We cannot stop the war, but we can create transnational spaces of dissent and opposition, whose disappearance is urgently to be feared in the climate of hyper-patriotism, censorship, military tribunals, the rise of anti-Asian racism, and the erosion of civil liberties in the U.S. that has followed the September 11 terrorist attacks. However, we also acknowledge sadly that these practices of digital dissent may not be much consolation to Afghanis being bombed.
Our observations about the Net and technology are not new; indeed, it is axiomatic in historical studies of science that new technologies both produce new social relations and reproduce old ones (Latour, 1988). But we believe that acknowledging the contradictions in the effects of the Net may provide us with a way to remap the world, to reassess the old binaries of First and Third Worlds, center and margins. The Net has no center; despite its oligarchic, military, western patrilineage, it is the site for quotidian practices of usurpation all over the world. This acknowledgment also helps us to think creatively about how we might go about structuring a distance learning program at our own university. Though from the outset we aimed to reach a non-traditional group of students?rural, home-bound, and incarcerated women?we were initially caught up in a rather conventional notion of what problems we would face. Many of the faculty members involved in the project (from Womenís Studies Departments at three Arizona universities) came to the project resistant to distance learning and instructional technology in general. They (and many others) have gone so far as to argue that the Net is an essentially male domain, that enacting feminist pedagogy is dependent on the construction of a community of learners in a "woman-friendly" space that honors womenís experience and womenís voices (Herring, Fink). From this perspective, feminist pedagogy seems dependent on the presence of warm bodies?indeed, on the presence of gendered bodies. We want to suggest instead that the ways we enact education principally for women is a highly political affair, wherever practiced, and that the Internet is neither the evil empire nor the answer to all our problems. It is simply one tool among many, with its own intrinsic possibilities and limitations. Having as many people as possible as players in the Net offers the possibility of transforming the Net, provides opportunities for women and other historically underpaid and under-resourced populations to gain access to skills, jobs, knowledge, information, and empowerment. The ways people do or do not use the Net are all about power.
As we began to think about how we could use it, we initially looked to traditional models for our program, thinking that perhaps we could simply offer existing courses in a Web format, creating "a distance learning operation that differs only in its technology from operations that have been carried on for years" (Hiller and Jones). And, to be honest, we discovered that was precisely what most U.S. universities were doing: offering very traditional materials in traditional formats, with LCD standing in for printed words, monitors for codex books, and keyboards for pencils. In the end, these kinds of models not only sell the Net short, but also make it very hard to explain what e-education has to offer that is not just an inferior model of classroom education. These paradigms are, we think, short-sighted, and, we hope, transitional.
E-EDUCATION AS E-COMMERCE
What, then, are the alternatives? First, there are the new e-education models that draw principally from e-commerce to promote more flexible, more student-responsive models?"a more adaptable mode of learning." The work, many argue, is to narrow the "gap between what industry expects and what a University delivers." While this model has much to offer, educators must do so without simply becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of the corporate world that produces increasingly expendable "knowledge workers." When flexible learning "increases the learnerís control over [her] own learning and enables [her] to develop increased responsibility and independence in [her] . . . study" (Halloran), then we will be continuing to uphold our responsibilities as educators.
As we develop our e-certificate, the concept of flexible learning has consequences both for the form of our program and for its content. We like the flexibility implied in an educational "MarketPlace" (Woolf)?especially as that concept encourages us to think outside the traditional degree program composed of 3-unit courses (Windall)?but we want to resist the kinds of "education as e-commerce" where "forms of learning" become "commodities." We do not rejoice in the notion that "customer pull (student demand) will obtain effective influence over a market that for 600 years has been shaped only by the producer push (instructor offerings)" (Woolf et al.). Our sense is that, first, "instructor offerings" have in fact been largely, to use Althusserís language, ideological state apparatuses over that period of 600 years; much of what universities have offered has always functioned as "commodity" in that sense. At the same time, faculty concerns about copyright of Web-based materials and ownership of scholarly intellectual work (concerns that discourage many educators from participating in distance learning programs) might very well be solved by the incorporation of e-commerce into distance education as a replacement for the cumbersome infrastructure of registrar and bursar (Hiller and Jones). Such a system might be consonant with traditional notions of academic freedom that have always had the potential (sometimes realized) to prevent scholarly work from merely echoing the banalities of empire and capital. Insofar as our proposed e-certificate attempts to reach students on the wrong side of the digital divide, we think it carries on that tradition.
Second, our experience as professors teaches us that most students are remarkably passive about their learning. We suspect, in fact, that "student demand" ventriloquizes the desires of global capital and that "customer pull" is a stand-in for short-term corporate labor needs. And yet this gesture to students seems to be one place where universities and corporations might find some common ground. While students, in our experience, are unlikely to "demand" opportunities for critical thinking if allowed to shop the educational marketplace unchaperoned, those skills are what the best teaching offers and also what the most viable industry needs. Rather than wishing to turn universities into wholly-owned subsidiaries of global corporations, CEOs and boards of directors should be doing everything they can to insure that truly independent education not only survives, but thrives. For our part, we who are inside the universities need to engage the project of educating for fulfilling work outside the ivory tower.
In this context, it is useful for us to think about the curriculum we initially imagined for our e-certificate. We enthusiastically designed 3-credit courses on the history of the southwest; civil rights struggles in the U.S.; and women, health and medicine?all very important material if our goal is to make these students critical thinkers and to give them a sense of agency about their place in history and contemporary culture. It wasnít until recently, however, that we began to think about the Net as being more than a transparent delivery system for the course content that might then lead students to pursue traditional degree programs at the university. We now realize that the competencies our students will gain in the process of participating in the program?the computer and Internet skills they will need merely to complete course requirements?will provide them with a significant measure of immediate employment advancement and security (Sharma). In other words, we need to emphasize the "e" in the e-certificate, making it not simply an alternative program in Womenís Studies (however desirable we may hold that to be) but a program in Internet computing as well. We need to make the computing experts at the university not simply "tech support" but full partners in teaching and certifying a program that explicitly combines critical thinking about the individual and society with computing skills?what Han and Gilbert call a "holisitic" approach to (see also Garrison). Approaching our e-certificate from this perspective will also, no doubt, lead us to reflect creatively on our pedagogy (Giraffa and Móra; see also Collins; Combs; Carver; Blum; Evans). Students who have earned an e-certificate that effectively integrates computing as both skill and content have a shot at earning the kind of money that would allow them to pursue a bachelorís degree in any number of fields. Or not. Either way, we will have done the kind of radical work that represents the best in university education.
LOW RIDING THROUGH THE INTERNETA
Our goal, however, was to harness the Netís potential for decentralizing power and producing new social formations, not simply reproduce the corporation or the university, both of which are significantly imbricated in producing the kinds of racism, imperialism, sexism, and class and national divides we wish to challenge. To this end, we want to explore some transgressive models for distance education (broadly construed), including the "web-back" performance pieces of Guillermo Gomez Peña, the production of virtual favelas in Brazil, rural education models from the Philippines and Malaysia, and our own efforts to produce an intellectual and institutional infrastructure to design a multi-university distance ed certificate program targeting predominantly rural and place-bound women, thinking among other things about those with family-care responsibilities or transportation issues, incarcerated women, and those far from traditional educational institutions, including people on local Native American reservations and in Mexican-American border towns in the U.S. Southwest. We ask how these various projects recruit and (hyper)textually imagine their students, and what models of virtual education and empowerment they create. (See also Layton, Manrique, and Matthewson.)
From Guillermo Gomez-Peña's writing about the "virtual barrio," we accept the challenge of thinking about how the imagined utopias of the Net can feel like the same old disempowering, discouraging, lonely, racist, and hostile places to those historically excluded from political power and cultural authority in European and American public and civic spaces. What does it mean that English has become the lingua franca of the web? Are cyborgs white? Things like courseware and web design tell a story of who we expect (and want) to find in these spaces. How do we re-encode them as less hostile? "Less hostile," however, ought not to mean dumbed down, as for example the "Barbie" site that is meant to increase girls' technological competence by letting them engage in "familiar" activities like changing the doll's hairstyle or makeup. We need to transform the Net without engaging in condescending practices that assume that some peopleóread: women, people of color, people inhabiting or migrating from the global southóare somehow culturally handicapped when confronted with IT.
When Gomez-Peña writes of "low-riding through the interneta" on his laptop with a 3-D Virgin of Guadelupe sticker on it (1997), he may be describing precisely what we all, in fact, doóbring our wholly racialized, gendered, place-specific selves to the practices of internet computing. For those of you unfamiliar with the barrio vernacular of the U.S. Southwest, this may be an untranslatable phrase, but we will try. A "low-rider" is a very cool car, rebuilt with hydraulics to lift and drop, an expression of individuality and artistry, and the police believe everyone who drives one is a criminal. To "low-ride" is to engage in an extremely hip, gendered male, usually harmless activity that nevertheless subjects you to police harassment. The Virgin of Guadelupe, of course, was a specific, mestiza incarnation of the Virgin Mary in Mexico, who has become the patroness of Mexicans and their descendents, protector and nationalist symbol. The "interneta" is Spanglish, that proud, edgy, postmodern, transnational language invented by Spanish-speakers in the U.S., especially youth, that irritates parents, teachers, English-only policy-makers, and all humorless defenders of pure languages and identities alike. Peña's point is crucial to how we invite students to use the Internet, to appropriate it, engage it, challenge it, and transform it, with their full, funky, troubling selves. Far from entertaining conceptions of the Net as a gender-less, race-less, disembodied place, a cyberspace of pure digital stream and binary logic, we need to conceive of it as having a culture (obviously: why else would we have needed to invent words like "netizens" and "netiquette"), albeit a culture that imagines itself as neutral and transparent, as simultaneously mainstream and endlessly multi-sited, the "culture of no culture," in Sharon Traweekís phrase (1988).
We also need to acknowledge the other problem that Gomez-Peña points to: not all people are equally "netizens." Well-to-do and middle-class white men in urban areas of wealthy countries dominate in technological knowledge and learning. Forty-one percent of all Internet users are in the United States, but even within the U.S., Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, and women of all races are underrepresented as users, but especially as creators of form, content, and infrastructure. This problem is partly a function of access: white, urban men in the global North make up 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, though they continue to lag in usage and skill-levels, and that Black and Latino students show similar patterns of disenfranchisement with respect to the Net compared to white students in the same classrooms. Gomez-Peñaís model suggests something of why: some of us experience ourselves as illegal aliens in the world of the Web.
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 the 13-year old daughter of one of us said, "I never thought Iíd like computer games, because theyíre for boys. But I do!" In addition, at least in the U.S., parents are warned to supervise, limit, and worry about daughtersí internet use, claiming that it is the domain of sexual predators, which is another significant source of women and girlsí relatively lower levels of technological literacy. Furthermore, it is not just parental supervision that keeps girls out; girls learn very quickly that the Net is an agora where they are circulated as a sexualized commodity (If this claim sounds exaggerated, we recommend doing a Web search on "Russian Women.") Similarly, we assume that racial differentials in computing have to do with access and expectations, not intelligence or ability. Yet with that said, it remains true that there is more to shrinking digital divides than building infrastructure. We also have to figure out how to turn the Net into a social and cultural space that can welcome many of the people not currently online.
Next, to turn to the paradigms of CDI in Brazilís favelas, we want to make their point about how much difference it makes, nevertheless, just to build infrastructure. In 1994, the group that was to become CDI (the Committee for the Democratization of Information) opened a computer center in the Santa Marta favela, one of Brazilís infamous shanty-towns that have virtually no schools and only irregular electrification, water, and utility services. The project was the brain-child of Rodrigo Baggio and an ever-expanding corps of volunteers; within a few years they had created 10 centers/schools with no budget?just volunteers and donated equipment. The goal was to teach children and adults computing and Internet skills, to expand their employment prospects, and to connect the favelas" often socially and politically marginalized residents to each other and to the wider world (Hart). Now, in 2001, CDI is running diverse programs with sponsorship from corporations like Microsoft and Esso. They run preschools, projects for people with disabilities, 208 schools in 30 cities, and an online newspaper. An initiative inspired by CDI-Brazil, called CDI Americas, has now opened offices in Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay and seeks to expand activities to other countries of Latin America and the Caribbean.
What we like about this model is the extent to which it assumes neither hardware access nor computer experience of its students, and makes its first task to provide those things. We have had to think in these terms to imagine how to be accessible even to some of the students we wish to involve in Arizona, despite it being in the midst of the most "wired" nation on earth, as for example many residents of local Indian reservations do not have phone service. Of course this issue is crucial world-wide; the Philippines, to take one example that is neither particularly good nor particularly bad, has 9 phones per 100 residents. Part of the privilege and responsibility of being at a university or corporation is that we have some power and financial resources to change that reality. Northern Arizona University, for example, has been at the forefront of efforts to insist that the vast areas of land in our state that are federal Indian reservations get "wired." The other piece this has forced us to think about is how to set up proctored computer labs throughout Arizona that would enable people to have access to computers that they need not personally own, and where we could provide "just in time" teaching for Internet computing skills?skills that might lead these students to earn university degrees in the long run but that, in the short run, could improve their employment prospects immeasurably.
We are also intruigued by the distance learning model developed by the African Virtual University. Since its founding in 1997, the African Virtual University has offered classes in English and French to students in learning centers in 15 African countries. Faculty in media studios around the world offer classes that are then beamed by satellite to the learning centers, which are equipped with at least 50 computers and an on-site moderator. Students have the opportunity to interact with the professor in real time via email and phone. AVU also offers access to free email accounts and a database with online journals. It includes a "crossroads" threaded discussion list and offers programming and other computer classes. One of its primary goals has been teaching teachers, who in turn can pass knowledge to their students.
AVU suggests the possibility of serious transnational partnerships in which distance truly does not matter. It challenges us, in our profoundly place-based model, to be open to the possibility that the "rural" students we target may be in India or Kenya as much as Snowflake, Arizona. The AVU paradigm also encourages us to think broadly about our resources in imagining and producing course material; that our brick-and-mortar universities need not define our faculty, our guest lecturers, or our interlocutors.
Another important model for rural education is provided by CEBU: Philippines Secondary Education Distance Education Project and Universiti Sains Malaysia. As Zuraidah Abdul-Rahman notes in a discussion of UMS and Veloso et al. echo in their analysis of CEBU, these are projects that have relied on print, paper, and pen resources that they give to their students. Students then have the opportunity to email faculty with questions. In other words, it is decidedly low-tech, and in many ways not much different from extension programs, particularly agricultural extension programs as they have been running in the U.S. since the 1930s. Such low-tech distance education programs also resemble the university-without-walls plans that have been available since the 1970s, albeit with the important difference that email now allows for communication without the time lag of mail or traveling. (However, in places with low technological density, itís possible to overstate how instantaneous virtual communication is.) While, after some consideration, we decided that packet and pencil delivery systems were not what we were after, it is important to keep these kinds of models in mind, lest we think we have invented the world anew with e-education, or that web-based learning is the best paradigm for all settings.
CONCLUSION
With these paradigms in mind, we offer some general conclusions about distance education. First, the cultural and political climate of cyberspace is not neutral. It welcomes some people and is hostile to others, and these differences are defined through hierarchies of race, nation, gender, and class (as well as other less prominent division: age, for example, as well as indefinable and unpredictable individual habits of mind, like technophilia and technophobia). We need to think hard about ways of making cyber-classrooms friendly to all our students, or as nearly all as possible. Second, the question of who has a phone, access to a computer, or comfort using IT is political. Unless we want to use the Net only to put more resources in the hands of those that already have a great deal, building infrastructure, making hardware available, and providing remedial tutorials has to be an integral part of any distance learning initiative. Finally, we need to think outside the literal "box" of our institutions, finding our students and our faculty everywhere.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We want to thank Elizabeth Kennedy, our colleagues in the Women's Studies programs of Arizona's three state universities, and all the participants in the summer 2001 conference on new learning technologies at the University of Arizona for help in thinking about these issues.
REFERENCES
AVU: The African Virtual University. http://www.avu.orgBlum, K. D. "Gender Differences in Asynchronous Learning
in Higher Education: Learning Styles, Participation Barriers
and Communication Patterns." Journal of Asynchronous
Learning Networks 3 (1999).
Carver, Carol Young. "The Application of Pedagogy and
Technology to E-Education: An Analysis of Factors
Affecting Success and Failure." SSGRR 2001.
CDI: Comitê para Democratização da Informática. http://www.cdi.org.br/
Collins, Michael. "The Importance of Electronic Communications in Successful Web-Based Courses." SSGRR 2000.
Combs, Leon L. "Web-Based Education Utilizing Learner Styles." SSGRR 2001.
De Certeau, Michel. Arts de Faire [The Practice of Everyday Life]. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
Evans, Karen. "Barriers to Participation of Women in Technological Education and the Role of Distance Education."1995. http://www.col.org/barriers.htm
Fink, Laurie. "Women: Lost in Cyberspace?" http://enhanced-learning.org/prox/paper5.htm
Garrison, D. "Distance Education for Traditional Universities: Part-Time Professional Learning." CADE 13 (1998). http://cade.athabascau.ca/vol13.2/garrison.html
Giraffa, Lucia M. M., and Michael da C. Móra. "Virtual Classes Instead of Traditional Classes: Is It True? Is It Possible? Is It Desirable?" SSGRR 2000.
Gomez-Peña, Guillermo. 1997. "The Virtual Barrio@The Other Frontier, (or, the Chicano Interneta). http://www.telefonica.es/fat/egomez.html
Halloran, Pat. "ëThinking Outside the Squareí: A Strategic Approach to Learning." SSGRR 2000.
Haraway, Donna J. 1991 "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.
ó. Modest_Witness@Second. Millenium New York:
Routledge, 1997.
Hart, Daniela Katzenstein. "Combating Technological Apartheid in Brazilian Favelas." Disability World 3 (June-July 2000). http://www.disabilityworld.org/June-July2000/Tech&Access/Apartheid.htm/
Herring, Susan. "Gender Differences In Computer-Mediated Communication: Bringing Familiar Baggage To The New Frontier." http://www.cpsr.org/cpsr/gender/herring.txt
Hiller, John, and Wendy Jones. "The Virtual University and the Internet. SSGRR 2000.
Latour, Bruno. The Pasteurization of France. Translation of Microbes. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Layton, Monique. "Educación a distancia e América Latina." CADE 5 (1990). http://cade.athabascau.ca/vol5.2/16_review-layton.html
Malaysian Distance Education Program: Universiti Sains Malaysia. http://www.usm.my/
Manrique, Francisco Pereira. "Universidad sin Clases." CADE 8 (1993) http://cade.athabascau.ca/vol8.3/14a_b_rev_casas_caracas.html
Matthewson, Claire. "Whose Development, Whose Needs? Distance Education Practice and Politics in the South Pacific." CADE 9 (1994). http://cade.athabascau.ca/vol9.2/09_matthewson.html
Sharma, Motilal, et al. "Information Technology for Poverty Reduction." SSGRR 2001.
Traweek, Sharon. Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physics. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Veloso et al. "Infrastructure for E-Education on the Internet: Response to Total Access to Philippine Education Via Distance Learning." SSGRR 2001.
Windall, Gill, et al. "Design Patterns for E-Education."
SSGRR 2001.