Where Are the Women? An Action Research Project

The presentation Where Are The Women? An Action Research Project was created in Powerpoint and uploaded to VoiceThread as an experiment. In 2007 I made a post that listed a series of personal goals connected to this blog. Number 5 had three parts, connect blogging to at least 3 professional development activities over the course of the next 12 months to include:

a. Conference presentation

b. Submit a paper to a journal

c. Host a webinar

This conference presentation took place at the eLearning Summit on May 22, 2008. I am working on the journal article, and am wondering if this VoiceThread will count as the webinar? "A VoiceThread is an online media album that can hold essentially any type of media (images, documents and videos) and allows people to make comments in 5 different ways - using voice (with a microphone or telephone), text, audio file, or video (with a webcam) - and share them with anyone they wish. They can even be exported to an Archival Movie for offline use on a DVD or video-enabled MP3 player. A VoiceThread allows group conversations to be collected and shared in one place, from anywhere in the world".

VoiceThread has free and pro options and can be used commercially, in higher education, and in K-12. I am trying out the free option, but am considering the pro option. I am not quite sure how to use all of the options this tool provides. According to the print information, one can doodle or video doodle, comment in text, or record a comment to a VoiceThread.

According to VoiceThread, here are some of the limitations on my Free account:

* Archival Movie exports, $2.99
* the presence of advertising
* single file size limit of 25 MB
* no downloads
* send 50 invitations per day

* create 3 VoiceThreads
* 75 MB of storage
* 3 phone commenting minutes
* no uploading MP3 comments
* 30 min webcam commenting

Women: Overlooked and Not Missing

Started looking and reading late this evening, but I found a good blog post written by a woman on technology and that led me to another, which leads me to another, and so on and so on. So found several new websites and blogs today devoted to women in technology worth writing about.

Willow Cook of the TechSoup Blog wrote, that women aren't missing from the ranks "technology sector" they are just overlooked. Willow's blog post led me to Tara Hunt's ,Women Who Risk: Making Women in Technology Visible.

Hunt believes "that part of the answer to the question "Why aren't women in technology?" lies in our mistaking the answer to the former question, "Where are the women?" She then goes on to provide an impressive list of women in technology, their blogs names, and the companies they work at or founded.

Women exist in good numbers, so why Hunt asks, can't we be found? Some of her reasons include the following:

-Women choose family first
- Women are cloaked in invisibility ( she provides a personal example of this)
-Masculine measures of success don't fit most women's career paths

So here I am in 10+ months into my action research project, making the invisible, visible by starting a project connected to seeking and finding women in technology. Will continue to work on this as I wrap up between now and the end of the year, but more about that later.

eLearning Games and Simulations

Attended the eLearning Games and Simulations Conference at Normandale Community College and was pleased to see a mixed audience of higher education, and postsecondary faculty and others in attendance. The conference had some 200+ registrants for this one day event and a well received mix of sessions on gaming and simulations on virtual worlds and opportunities to learn how to connect students with interactive technologies. Am pleased to report that I was one of many women in attendance at this conference.

While current research reports that women game less than men, some groups are doing what they can to grow female gamers. Found some information on the web about sholarships that WomenGamers.Com (valued at $945) were offering two female students ages 8-18 for one week at the National Computer Camp (Nccamp.com) . The camp experience has already been snapped up by two essayists who submitted an application and and essay by the May 18th deadling deadline. Applicants were asked to respond to the following question:

"What will video games of the future be like and if you were in charge of designing a game, what would it be like?"

The essays from the young women who responded to the scholarship challenge are fun to read and provide some real insight into what they think about games and the kinds of games they would create and play.

Research on blogging and women bloggers

Still wandering all around the web looking for research on women bloggers, women bloggers who blog about education technology, leadership and higher education. I found a directory resource for women bloggers and an article (Taylor Eisenman) citing research on how infrequently popular male bloggers include female bloggers on their blogroll. This article was based on Clancy Ratcliff's dissertation research. Ratcliff's (2005) research focused on a "case study of gender differentials in discourse on weblogs (often called the “blogosphere”). To that end, I am analyzing the “Where are the women?” debates to ascertain the ways both men and women account for the gender gap in blogging"(Ratcliff, 2005).

Some of the reasons outlined for the gap in this study included:

women aren't self-promoters

women "can't handle agnostic nature of political discourse" of blogs

women use pseudonyms more than males

women don't blog about politics

While Clancy's(2005)dissertation research has a focus on rhetoric and politics it does ask the question, "Where are the women" and will provide me with more research based information to answer my questions about women blogging about this blog's areas of focus. I am looking forward to learning more about blogging and the discourse about women who blog over the course of this year and will link this site to Blogs by Women soon.

English posts that contain Women Bloggers per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!