Gendered narratives: reading between the lines

Recently I have been tasked to take a lead on enhancing the participation, recognition and support of women in STEM: particularly electronics and computer science. I may not be making much impact on the approaches and attitudes if my colleagues, but my own radar has been notched up to fine tuned!

My observations:

• I hear stories of everyday realities in education, learning, teaching and subject disciplines frequently presented as heroic narratives with male heroes.
  
• I attend seminars when slides are illustrated by images of male authors, occasional female authors referred to by initials with no images - thus becoming invisible.
  
• In presentations, references to female students encountering difficulties.
  
• Female academic 'actors' referred to in passing, male 'actors' portrayed as the ground breakers and pathfinders.
  
• Faculty discussions to ameliorate the position of female academics and postgrads are characterised by a model of deficits, the women are broken, help them mend themselves.
  
• Discussions focussed on increasing the percentage of female participants focuses on undergraduates and outreach rather than implementing structural changes across the board.
  

The result?

I find myself

• increasingly frustrated recognising the 'broken record' effect of this portrayal and discussion.
  
• wondering about how to make change happen. This stuff is too important to be left to a few (mostly female) evangelists.
• Seeking to identify and champion structural methods af making change happen
• Seeking patronage for change
• Being willing to hand over the kudos for making change happen to anyone else ;-)

 

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Revisiting technology, organisational change and how we research it

One area that I am particularly interested in is the impact of technology on organisational change. I have been spending a little time recently researching into this area, and there are number of publications which I think are worth revisiting, particularly in the context of research methods generally and those concerned with Web Science in particular.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Social Interactions in the Web,  in CACM, Hendler et al 2008

For now this post is mostly a note to self, but will repay some further thought and development. If you have comments or pointers to other work, that would be excellent.

A few years ago, when wanting to present some of my findings to a conference, my paper was rebuffed by (what I thought to be a low grade and shallow) reviewer, whose comments on the work was sparse, but which began 'I don't much care for this sort of research'.

As someone who takes an interdisciplinary approach my research typically uses a mixed methods approach. I am aware that in the area of technology enhanced learning, we are often at an intersection between researchers from the social sciences (often education, psychology, anthropology) and those from the more logical positivist traditions of the hard applied sciences such as computer science. The challenge is always to find ways of overcoming epistemological differences between disciplines and engaging in useful and constructive dialogue across any perceived divides.

its interesting to note that this issue is at the core of a large part of what we are tacking in Web Science - which was described in one of the earliest papers (Berners-Lee et al, 2006) as being concerned with  the Engineering, Technology and Analytics of the web as well as being "The science of decentralised information systems". It is however also pointed out that that Web Science is fundamentally a study of socially embedded technology (and thus my implication inherently inter-disciplinary). Subsequent publications (for example Hendler et al 2008) identify the role of 'social machines" and talk about the inter-relationship between the Engineering and Technology and the Social Dimensions

In that context, these publications which come from the field of management science and information science, which, in themselves represent fields of study which have probably already experienced Biglan's hard applied/soft applied intersection.

There are a number of approaches which have arisen following on from Gidden's work on structuation which are of interest. Orlikowski has been influential in discussion of research methods appropriate for this area.

References:

Berners-Lee, T., Hall, W., Hendler, J. A., O’Hara, K., Shadbolt, N. and Weitzner, D. J. (2006) A Framework for Web Science. Foundations and Trends in Web Science, 1 (1). pp. 1-130. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13347/

Hendler, J., Shadbolt, N., Hall, W., Berners-Lee, T. and Weitzner, D. (2008) Web Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Understanding the Web. Communications of the ACM, 51 (7). pp. 60-69.

DeSanctis, G., & Scott Poole, M. (1994). Capturing the Complexity in Advanced Technology Use: Adaptive Structuration Theory. Organization Science, 5(2), 121-147. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2635011

Giddens, A. (1986). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration

Also available in the Hartley Library Southampton

Orlikowski, W. (2000). Using Technology and Constituting Structures: A Practice Lens for Studying Technology in Organizations. Organization Science, 11(4), 404-428 http://www.springerlink.com/content/r21881t5637408h5/

Orlikowski, W.J. and Baroudi, J.J. (1991) Studying Information Technology in Organizations: Research Approaches and Assumptions. Information Systems Research, 2 (1), 1-28 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.103.107&rep=rep1&type=pdf


Orlikowski, W. J. and Barley, S. R. (2001). Technology And Institutions: What Can Research On Information Technology And Research On Organizations Learn From Each Other? MIS Quarterly, 25(2), 145-165. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3250927

OER, bootstrapping a culture of change

Its always heartening to hear that you have a paper accepted, especially when its by an IEEE trans!

We are really proud of the progress we are making with the EdShare repository of educational resources, and its kid sib language learning repository called Faroes. This paper is looking at organisational learning rather than the nuts and bolts of repositories. It ties in nicely with previous work we have done on barriers and drivers for change. Apart from anything else, if we are going to continue to invest in technology enhanced learning, then we had better find a way from learning on the way about the processes and sharing lessons learnt - for good and for ill!

Big thanks are due to Hugh Davis who led the insights, corralled us into order, and got this paper off the stocks. Les Carr, aka repository man as ever injects shed loads of energy into our work, and Jessie Hey (now more of a lady of leisure) really had a whole load of experience to share. But (perhaps the secret of our success?) it really was a team effort.

I wrote a little bit about the context and the background of the paper in a previous post, you may want to take a look at that, and then probably best if I point you to the actual publication.

Bootstrapping a Culture of Sharing to Facilitate Open Educational Resources

Davis, H., Carr, L., Hey, J., Howard, Y., Millard, D., Morris, D. and White, S. (2009) Bootstrapping a Culture of Sharing to Facilitate Open Educational Resources. IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies . (In Press)

Bootstrapping the culture of sharing: refining our understanding of learning objects

or oooer as I like to think about it....

Bootstrapping a Culture of Sharing to Facilitate Open Educational Resources, Davis, H., Carr, L., Hey, J., Howard, Y., Millard, D., Morris, D. and White, S. (2009) Bootstrapping a Culture of Sharing to Facilitate Open Educational Resources. IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies . (In Press)

We have been working on a paper for the IEEE Trans on Learning Technologies on some of the cultural change aspects of our experiences of working with repositories. Its about our experience of developing EdShare, but also reflects a rather richer back catalogue of experiences of establishing and using repositories, plus a few insights into the heady world of technology enhanded learning.

We are really proud of the progress we are making with the EdShare repository of educational resources, and its kid sib language learning repository called Faroes.

Thanks to shed loads of hard work on scholarly repositories led by Stevan Harnad and Les Carr from right here in ECS at the University of Southampton, we have built ourselves a real track record in that very important area.



EPrints is an open source repository which has blossomed thanks to the the hard working EPrints team with support from JISC. Our paper is not concerned with the technical aspects of the software, but more importantly about the organisational learning which we have derived from our intense usage of EPrints respoitories - probably most importantly because, compared to other well know repositories, we observe that EPrints users not only install their repository, they actually populate it.

Here at Southampton we have EPrints repositories for academic publications in ECS, and across the whole institution (University of Southampton). We are also using EPrints to drive our eTheses repository, and our EdShare repository of resources used educationally for teaching and the support of learning.

We not only have ground level experience of installing and running the repositories, but we are also getting increasingly sophisticated in our understanding of the most effective organisational drivers which can not only get the repository established but also get it used.

Many different colleagues have identified advantages from using the repositories, each individual will have a personal priority list. Findability figures big on the list. People like to be able to find their own stuff irrespective of moving on to new machines, or new institutions. We also like the fact that items in the repository are findable - classic search engines index the repository, and even if the paper is not world visible, will provide a pointer to its existence, often resulting in individual approaches for further information - thereby enhancing and enriching the scholarly knowledge network.

well that's enough of me blowing our trumpet, take a look at the paper if you want a little more information, oh and why don't you take a look at EPrints....

Potential users can find out more about the system and set in train further contactvia the software site hosted at eprints.org