Agents of Change: Virtuality, Gender, and the Challenge to the Traditional University

214 Pages·2003·2.667 MB·English

by  Gabriele Kreutzner, Heidi Schelhowe (auth.), Gabriele Kreutzner, Heidi Schelhowe (eds.)

Agents of Change
Schriftenreihe der Internationalen Frauenuniversitat
»Technik und Kultur«
Band 9
Gabriele Kreutzner, Heidi Schelhowe
(eds.)
Agents of Change
Virtuality, Gender, and the Challenge to the
Traditional University
Leske + Budrich, Opladen 2003
Die Schriftenreihe der Internationalen Frauenuniversitat "Technik und Kultur" wird ge
fordert durch das Niedersachsische Vorab der VW-Stiftung
Gedruckt auf saurefreiem und alterungsbestandigem Papier.
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ISBN 978-3-8100-3492-2 ISBN 978-3-322-91354-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-322-91354-8
© 2003 Leske + Budrich, Opladen
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Contents
Gab~iele Kreutzner and Heidi Schelhowe
Introduction . ................. ............................................. .................... ................ 7
I. Research and Knowledge in the Information Age:
Selected Feminist Approaches
Eva Hartmann
Transnationalizing Tertiary Education in a Global Information Society...... 25
Gill Kirkup
Open and Virtual Universities ....................................................................... 43
Cynthia L. Selfe, Gail E. Hawisher
Compromising Women: Teaching Composition Online and at a Distance in
the United States ............................................................................................ 57
Rosi Braidotti
The Material Foundation of Virtual Subjectivity.......................................... 73
Cecile K. M. Crutzen
ICT -Representations as Transformative Critical Rooms ............................... 87
II. The vifu Project: Inside and Outside Assessments
Gabriele Kreutzner, Heidi Schelhowe, Barbara Schelkle
Driven by User-Orientation, Participation and Interaction: vifu -
Virtual Women's University (www.vifu.de) ................................................. 109
6 Inhalt
Seda Giirses
Computer Training at vifu: Digging Out Curiosity........................................ 125
Birgit Delker, Herbert Asselmeyer
Lessons to be Learned from the Project and Process of Supported
E-Learning at the Virtual Women's University ............................................. 133
Heidrun Allert, Hadhami Dhraief, Wolfgang Nejdl
Intelligent Online Knowledge Resources for Instructional Learning.
Computer-Supported and Computer-Aided Design for Online Knowledge
Resources ... ................ ............. ..................... ............ .................. ......... .......... 147
Melanie Dunn and Mara-Anahi Kuhl
The Users' vifu .............................................................................................. 155
Maika Biischenfeldt, Birte Plutat, Heidi Schelhowe, Isabel Zorn
Information Architecture and Networks at vifu - Continuation of the·
Project in 2002 .............................................................................................. 161
Barbara Maria Griiter
The Hype and the Morning After - What We Have Learned about
E-Learning ..................................................................................................... 179
III. From Traditional University to Networks of Shared Knowledge
and Learning
Wendy Harcourt
Women on the Net: the Internet as a Tool for Social Transformation .......... 191
FatmaAlloo
How ICT Plays a Role in Social Movement - The Case of Africa ............... 201
Tanja Paulitz
Productive Differences - Virtual Networks Call For Heterogeneity............. 205
Authors ........................................................................................................... 219
Introduction
The university as we have known it is undergoing massive transformations. This
observation is commonly made these days during discussions of the future of
our academic system(s). While it certainly holds true for the "Western" strong
holds of our globe, it likewise applies to a wide variety of marginalized contexts
and locations beyond. For historical reasons, universities and academic systems
differ considerably from place to place. However, the transformative process
under analysis here is driven by major economic and technological develop
ments generally subsumed under the label 'globalization'. And although, the
contemporary world deliberately puts the stress on change and 'the new', the
traditional academic systems are challenged by the great juggernaut of global
ized transformation on the level of the particular and the local.
In our view, the ongonig changes are neither reason for celebration nor de
spair. What motivated us to put this volume together was our curiosity about
these processes of change, as well as our awareness of their significance, our
partisanship for particular directions that they mayor may not take and, last but
not least, our insight into their complexities and heterogeneous, even contradic
tory, outcomes. As our common engagement in the challenging intellectual ad
venture called the International Women's University (also known by its German
abbreviation ifu) drew to its official completion, we exchanged ideas about a
potential publication project that would help us to reflect upon our own in
volvement in vifu (the virtual international university as one of ifu's central proj
ects) as an experiment in academic reform, and help us to place both ifu and vifu
in a more comprehensive context of historical change. More specifically, we
were curious to learn more about the actual roles of two different dimensions of
the overall process: gender and virtuality. These, we suspected, would play their
own specific roles and, depending on the particularity of a given situation, un
fold their historically specific 'effects' within the overall transformation process.
8 Gabriele Kreutzner and Heidi Schelhowe
The transformative potentials of gender
This is not the place to summarize the past decades' discussions on the social
category of gender, nor is it the place to suggest that our thoughts and practice
are based on some rigidly fixed and stable definition. Suffice it to say, that in the
context of our overall activities, the term 'gender' implies two principally differ
ent and unique dimensions. First of all, in our theoretical work, we depart from a
position which conceives of gender as (still) a central relational category of so
cial and cultural structures. Secondly, in the more practical context of the vifu
project, we took great interest in the category of gender because of its potential
to constitute a social group. Against the background of the discussions about the
dangers of essentialism and of repressing differences, it seemed to us that in
constructive terms, (i.e. in terms of concretely shaping a communication tech
nology), it was crucial to risk thinking about such a collective figure as being
characterized by heterogeneity. Even though our reliance on the construct of
women as a (potential) collective is largely strategic, it is interfaced by a sub
stantial portion of empirical validity. After all, it was women's struggle for ac
cess to education that exerted some influence on universities as traditional
'male' organizations. 150 years ago, women put gender on the social and edu
cational agenda and, in the course of this development, started the long trek into
the venerable halls of (Western) science. Referring to our own particular geopo
litical background, it is worth noting that in what is now Germany, women were
admitted on a regular university career path only some 100 years ago.1
A second major advancement for women in education and science came
with the past century's ('second wave') women's movement which brought
about the beginning of feminist science. Like other disprivileged social groups,
women made significant progress in the period after 1968. The women's move
ment arguably brought significant numbers of women into the university and en
abled them to intervene in the processes of knowledge creation. 'Gender' was
now theorized as a social category and gender relations were conceived of as
providing society's structural foundations. To a certain extent, this did have
some transformative impact on science, the understanding of knowledge, and on
academic institutions. New disciplines were born, including Women's Studies
While in some of the German states women were allowed to receive a doctoral degree by
the 1890s, participation on an (legally) equal basis was reached only when, in the State
of Baden, they were granted access to the procedure of "Habilitation" and, thus, to the
career path of full professor in 1900. In Prussia, this right was granted to women in 1908.
We also attempted to investigate the situation outside of the traditional Western territory,
but only with limited success. In actual fact, this would have led to a full-fledged rese
arch project of its own. Valuable exemplary insights into the situation outside of Western
Europe and the Anglosaxon sphere of influence are delivered by Sang Chang for Korea
and by Sumaia Mohd EI Zein Badawi for the Sudan in Neusel and Poppenhusen (2002).
Introduction 9
and, somewhat later, Gender Studies. Questioning the gendered relations of
power and domination on which academic institutions and their structures are
based challenged more than simply these structures. Rather, gender and, subse
quently, the whole array of structural categories were 'discovered' as significant
shapers not only of the humanities, but also of the 'hard' sciences and of tech
nology development. In short, the academic world discovered both gender and
knowledge as social constructs (rather than natural 'givens') which are, thus,
principally open to transformation. In the wake of this 'discovery' and indeed,
just as important were the subsequent insights into the relevance of differences
(e.g. within a given social group) and the particularity of a given perspective
which social constructionism and feminist science turned into central epistemo
logical concepts.
The notion of 'virtuality'
When speaking of 'virtuality', we refer to an understanding of the term that is
situated within the discourses about 'new' information and communication
technologies (ICTs) or - to use the generally established and perhaps more ade
quate term - the 'digital media'. More specifically, our use of the term is related
to discussions (at least in Western Europe and particularlY'in Germany) on the
introduction of this youngest generation of media technology into the academic
system and institutions of higher learning. Their infancy facilitated the formation
of an otherwise non-existent sphere, a nexus of both symbolic representation
and communicative exchange which eventually materialized as the Internet.
Thus, when alluding to the 'virtual university', we are referring to the emer
gence of a set of formerly unavailable tools for learning and teaching in and
through what some call 'cyberspace'. The spectrum ranges from using computer
programs or the Internet in university classroom to our own experiences in the
viju project, the emergence and development of a lively and truly global commu
nity of learning. Thus, when speaking of 'virtuality', we refer to emerging ICT
based spaces in the Internet.
Teaching and learning in and through 'cyberspace' have been cast into cen
tral roles in the current debates about the transformation of higher education and
of the university. In contrast, gender does not figure as a player, let alone a pro
tagonist in these debates. Nevertheless, it was our awareness of gender as a cen
tral category encoded into the script of those transformation processes which
motivated our decision to embark on a development project, called viju, in the
area of new learning technologies.
10 Gabriele Kreutzner and Heidi Schelhowe
Virtual learning processes and the computer as medium
With the emergence of new leTs, came an Internet hype and an enthusiasm for
the expected entry into the 'Information' or even 'Knowledge Society'. The im
plementation of new media technologies into the institutions (not only) of higher
education was massively supported by R&D funds and a variety of research
programs and funding initiatives. At the same time, the computer, invented in
the 1940s as a gigantic calculating machine and turned into a powerful tool for
the rationalization and mechanization of intellectual labor, began to unveil yet
another, quite different side. During its infancy, its decisive shapers directed its
potential towards a rationalization and economization of human cognitive per
formance. Meanwhile, it has emerged as a medium comprising all other tradi
tional technological media which provides access to all kinds of 'information',
sets up new networks of social relations (or modifies existing ones), mediates
established and potentially new kinds of communication and, ultimately, recon
figures systems of power and power relations. Up until the 1990s, the com
puter's potential for supporting the transfer of information and for mediating
communication had been considered to have a much lower priority.
In our specific context, we do not conceive of the impact of the digital me
dia on the universities' ongoing metamorphosis as an technology-intrinsic en
telechy. Rather, we are on the look-out for those actors, forces and agents, and
their vested interests, which determine the nature of the developments that tech
nology is subjected to while other possible developmental paths are disregarded
and left aside.
There is the possibility - one favored by many theorists and practitioners in
the field of 'virtuality' who are engaged in the implementation of digital media
into academic teaching practices - to use digital media to shape a centralized
point-to-multipoint delivery system of unquestionable 'knowledge' positioned in
the metropolitan centers of Western industrial societies. Thus, knowledge con
tinues to be constructed as a product, a commodity passing through the (new)
channels of communication in a one-directional way, from predefined, centered
and fixed (Western, hegemonic) 'senders' to equally fixed, decentralized' 're
ceivers'. According to this model, learning becomes increasingly organized as
an act for the individual to engage in in isolation; as an operation aimed at im
planting the centrally produced, hegemonic 'knowledge' bits and bytes into
one's own 'brainware'. Knowledge produced in the strongholds of Western in
dustrial societies would acquire - or continue to maintain - the status of a Mas
ter version, which represents the canon or the legitimate version. All other
forms, including those of local knowledge, are then subjected to 'overwriting'
procedures and, ultimately, to deletion.
Ours is quite a different vision. Together with most (if not all) authors col
lected in this volume, we argue for a social use (and shaping) of digital media,