Gender Awareness in ICT

At last I am able to make an addition to our blogg after some blogg reorganisation.
 

The trip to the OECD Expert meeting was both exciting and informative. There were so many interesting presentations and at the end of it all it was easy to feel that there were more questions than answers. The Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research hosted this OECD Expert meeting. To begin with we were all welcomed by Francesc Pedrò (CERI/OECD), and Lisbeth Rugtvedt and Oystein Johannessen of the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Reseach. Then the presentations and discussions began.

The presentation by Claire Shrewbridge on the findings of PISA 2006 was especially interesting for us as it mirrored very similar results to that of our Pilot study as far as how young people relate to computers, gaming and socialising in ICT, and showed that even a small study in Kalmar displayed similar trends to all of the OECD countries in the PISA study. However, our focus is more towards education and we think that our main study will produce some useful data.

Ioanna Vekiri from Greece gave a psychological perspective and showed how despite girls achieving equal or better results than boys in some subjects, they still have less confidence in their own ability. Studies on attitudes in ICT show similar tendencies so it seems that one of the main problems for us as educators is to find ways of improving the self-confidence of girls in relation to ICT. This is, of course, linked to the gender issue and how there is a need to change cultural attitudes towards male dominance within ICT.

Moreover, related to this, Tone Bratteteig emphasised that there is still a huge lack of women choosing computer science as a career and stressed the need to rectify the situation. As she said, females use computers in the work place equally as much as males, therefore, women are also needed to design programmes and systems. I think that one example of this could be in caring professions such as nursing as there is empirical evidence that systems used for documentation of nursing records do not meet the demands of everyday nursing practice. Could more women in computer science help this situation?

http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~tone/Publications/Bratt-ifu-bok-02.htm

Vivian, A. Lagesen pointed out the problem of attitudes towards gender and computing. Her doctoral thesis compares attitudes between women and computing in Norway and Malaysia where women are well represented in computer science where there are different cultural attitudes and computing is considered a suitable career for women. She emphasised the major influence that parents and other family members have on what girls do. In Malaysia, computing is not symbolised by the masculine gender to the same extent.

http://kilden.forskningsradet.no/c17224/artikkel/vis.html?tid=39199

This is just a sample of the proceedings but it will be possible to read more about these, and all the other presentations which were equally interesting,  when the conference proceedings are published on the New Millenium Learners website.

It is widely accepted that the use of ICT will have a major influence on how learners approach learning, now and in the future. Curricula and teaching method are expected to change accordingly in order to meet the needs of the new ICT competent generation. Observations and studies report on the new activities and habits of young people, elaborating on the overwhelming amount of ICT included in their everyday lives.

Currently educators in secondary schools and higher education are collecting information and bracing themselves with knowledge on how to approach the communication patterns of the younger generation. However, one essential aspect seems to be absent from the discourse; the possibility that these young people do not all behave, think and learn in the same way. It would appear that currently our youth are considered as one homogenous group and fails to mention that there may be gender aspects which need to be taken into account. Possibly, since ICT is a male dominated sphere, this area of study, although it is said to represent all young people, actually focuses on how teenage boys and young male adults behave regarding ICT.

Therefore, before we decide that young people do behave in a certain manner, it is crucial to study the behaviour of young people regarding gender and ICT. We believe that, although some aspects of behaviour in both gender groups are similar, we will find that other aspects are drastically different. For example, we have observed that some groups tend to favour programmes such as "The Sims" while others favour war games such as "Destroy all Humans". Furthermore, it appears that populations playing on-line games, such as World of War Craft and Final Fantasy show gender tendencies.

For the reasons mentioned above, we believe that there is some urgency in examining ICT  from a gender perspective as this may have major implications for education and ICT in the future. In order to ensure good communication between teachers and pupils, it is vital to have an understanding of how different groups may approach the use of ICT.