Feminists launch model for online learning

Photo: Hajer Naili

Hajer Naili, a New York-based reporter for Women's eNews reports, "This multi-university online course emphasizes feminist contributions to technological innovation and a collaborative approach that contrasts with the MOOC. "Expertise is distributed throughout the network," says a facilitator."

Photo: FemTechNet

A year after The New York Times ran an article about Silicon Valley, which opened with "Men invented the Internet," FemTechNet is about to launch an online curricula highlighting the significant contributions of feminists to technology.

FemTechNet, which describes itself as "a global network of feminist, students and artists who work on, with and at the borders of technology, science and feminism in a variety of fields," is calling the curriculum a DOCC, or Distributed Open Collaborative Course.

"Dialogues in Feminism and Technology," its first DOCC course--running from Sept.16 through December in 15 universities across the United States and Canada--is something of a pilot, which starts in North America and aims to expand across the globe in the coming year.
Two goals are preserving the history of feminist contributions to technological innovation and advancing feminist principles of social justice in future educational models and pedagogies, FemTechNet said in a press statement.
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About FemTechNet  

Who?
FemTechNet is an activated network of scholars, artists, and students who work on, with, and at the borders of technology, science and feminism in a variety of fields including STS, Media and Visual Studies, Art, Women’s, Queer, and Ethnic Studies.
Members in the network collaborative on the design and creation of a work of feminist technological innovation for the purposes of engaging the interests of students on advanced topics in feminist science-technology studies.  This project seeks to engender a set of digital practices among women and girls, to teach and encourage their participation in writing the technocultural histories of the future by becoming active participants in the creation of global digital archives.


What?
In 2013, FemTechNet initiated a networked learning experiment involving instructors and students from several institutions in the creation of a collaborative open course structure called a DOCC:  Distributed Open Collaborative Course on the topic of Dialogues on Feminism and Technology.
The first iteration of the DOCC 2013 will take place from September-December, 2013.
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Source: FemTechNet