Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Tech Savvy: Educating Girls in the New Computer Age

Sherry Turkle, Patricia Diaz Dennis, et al., from Living in the Information Age

As a young woman soon entering in the workplace, I had a particular interest in this article. Turkle and Dennis are concise and direct in their assessment that the technological education of girls needs to begin in the K-12 area and continue through high school and college. Their main concerns are that technology is not created with women in mind (as the creators are men), and that current cultural ideas and action circulating among women regarding technology point out the deficits and short comings of current technology education methods.


They point to the lack of "quality of educational software" as well as few, if any, "opportunities to design" programs and software that can be used to best suit needs across disciplines in a single classroom.

While all of this is true and extremely relevant to the students at Saint Mary's, what I would have liked to see fewer bullet points and more discussion. Perhaps I'm just a HUSTian at heart and have been trained to read rather than scan; I do know, however, that more things can be said in a essay than can be said in a set of bullet points. But I digress from the point of things.

My actual and non-superficial critique of the article is that Turkle and Dennis seem to have forgotten one key detail in the implementation of new technology methods in the lower divisions and new pedagogy in higher ed: support. I.e., Money. American greenbacks make the US school systems go 'round, and without financial support from tax payers, administrators in the individual school systems, parental involvement and support, the change will not occur. I can easily identify with the problems, as several, if not all, of their changes should be made within my high school. Seeing as I still have siblings in that school system and the high school itself, I've heard many a tale of what's changed and who's left and who's replaced them. What I haven't heard is that improvements have been made to the computer labs, the teachers' computers themselves, or that software upgrades have been purchased. Oh, I'm sure certain upgrades have happened - I'm betting that all the Dell's are running XP Pro by now, and that the single Mac lab has one of the last three OS upgrades.

Most school systems (based on what I know of the school systems in St. Joseph and Elkhart counties) don't have a large budget marked out for computers and technology. The ones that do are typically one of the magnet schools that specifically use technology for art or science. The liberal arts' relationship with technology is non-existent as far as high schools are concerned, suffering from some misconception that all liberal arts folks need is an OS and MS Office (Which is completely incorrect and crazy, I don't know what I'd do with a computer on which I could only write papers. Maybe use it as a paperweight?).

Other problems rear their head in the issue of funding. Thanks to the Bush Administration's infinite levels of unquestionable wisdom, most teachers don't have the time to worry about giving their students a comprehensive education that includes decent computer knowledge (and I don't mean programming or building from scratch; we're talking basic "this is Office and it's a set of programs that make your life easy;" the distinctions between web browsers and e-mail clients, etc.). Instead of learning new techniques, ideas, and software and then incorporating that into the curriculum, teachers are forced to spend time going over basics in reading, writing and math so that students can take pointless, ridiculous standardized tests which then determine a great many fates: the student, the teacher, the school and even the school system. No Child Left Behind places an emphasis on a sort of false holistic approach to education and leaves no room for individual learning and teaching styles, forgetting that the world is a dynamic place.

(I shall endeavor to leave that soapbox; I obviously have a deep and long-standing dislike of NCLB, having been the first graduating class that suffered under its delusions of success and grandeur. I make no apologies for it, however, and never will.)

However, it is my deepest hope that as more women join the technology field, it will be seen as more socially acceptable, feasible, and even promotable to increase the availability to computer classes to young women, as well as teaching styles from the beginning. I do have one thing that I would like to add to Turkle and Dennis' ideas: the expectation of computer competence. When parents and teachers begin to treat young women as a) competent computer users and b) give the proper guidance and tools (which is largely influenced by economic status, I am aware), then female students will not feel that this is a boys' realm. It will become simply a skill to possess, like spelling or addition. Non-gendered and demanded is my hope, I suppose. Let's see how long that actually takes.