DOCC 2013: Feminist Dialogues on Technology BETA Courses
FemTechNet’s first Distributed Open Collaborative Course (DOCC), “Dialogues on Feminism and Technology,” will launch in fall 2013 as a result of experimentation and BETA course implementation in spring 2013 at University of California, San Diego, Bowling Green State University, and Pitzer College. From January to June, 2013, several feminist scholars ran BETA courses, “Dialogues on Feminism and Technology.” Each course helped work through key elements of the DOCC 2013.
Lisa Cartwright and Elizabeth Losh offered a course at the University of California, San Diego: COGR 275: Feminist Dialogues on Technology.
Alex Juhasz offered a course at Pitzer College which was taught in tandem with Radhika Gajjala’s course at Bowling Green State University (BGSU). “Feminist Dialogues in Technology” was a Women’s and American Culture Studies course offered by Radhika Gajjala of BGSU in Ohio and Alex Juhasz of Pitzer College in California during spring 2013.
The BETA course offered students and faculty the opportunity to participate in collaborative university learning by taking advantage of various digital platforms, including the Sakai student portal at Pitzer, Facebook, Vimeo, and Google+ Hangouts. This course emphasized key issues in Feminism and Technology within the context of American culture, Globalization, and Media Studies. Students explored gender and technology through 11 themes including: TechnoFeminism, machine, body, archive, labor, difference, systems, place, race, sexualities, and transformation. As part of each theme, students collaborated by writing responses, producing keyword videos, contributing to Wikipedia, and creating crafts representative of the 11 themes for further connection and conversation. Christina Gayheart, a BGSU undergraduate student, said “the course was exciting because, though each school had a separate classroom, we worked collaboratively to further our understanding of Feminism and Technology; furthermore, the course explored a wide array of teaching mechanisms to offer variety. In many ways, I think the professors learned as much as the students did in this course.”