In fall of 2013, FemTechNet will initiate an international run of a Distributed Open Collaborative Course (DOOC) on feminist technologies. As a global network of scholars working at the intersection of technology and feminism, FemTechNet designed the DOOC as a revisioning of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) using feminist principles and methods. As described by member Alex Juhasz, “Feminist Dialogues on Technology, uses technology to enable interdisciplinary and international conversation while privileging situated diversity and networked agency.” The course themes were collaboratively decided upon by network members and include archive, body, difference, discipline, ethics, labor, machine, place, race, sexualities, systems, and transformation.

The beta run, titled Feminist Dialogues in Technology, was completed this past spring in a collaborative endeavor between Bowling Green State University, Pitzer College, University of California at San Diego (UDSD), and the University of Southern California (USC). As students taking IML 555: Digital Pedagogies with Virginia Kuhn at the Institute for Multimedia Literacy in the USC School of Cinematic Arts, I joined Priscilla Leiva and Vanessa Monterosa to build a Boundary Objects that Learn (BOTL)—teaching resources that are transformed through use and have been evaluated by the network for inclusion in the FemBotCollective database—for use in the beta run. We viewed participation in the DOCC as an opportunity to think through our own questions of pedagogy and digital media. In line with FemTechNet’s support of networked learning, our goal was to design a BOTL that could foster a sense of collaborative education through technology. 

We were invited to contribute a BOTL in a segment of the course that focused on questions of race. Our task was to create a digital resource that could enrich undergraduate students at Bowling Green and Pitzer College in their reading of Maria Fernandez's article “Cyberfemisim, Race, Embodiment” (2003) and Lisa Nakamura's “It’s a Nigger in Here! Kill the Nigger!: User-Generated Media Campaigns Against Racist, Sexism, and Homophobia in Digital Games.” Early in the process, we decided upon using CommentPress to build a site titled Feminist Dialogues in Technology: Distributed Online Open Learning Experiment. An open source plugin for the blogging platform WordPress, CommentPress allows users to comment paragraph-by-paragraph in the margins of assigned readings. By transforming the PDF articles into CommentPress pages, we sought to turn the documents into a conversation with which students could engage. 

As students read their assignments, they encountered annotations, hyperlinks, general reflections, and questions left by the graduate student authors. The course professor at Pitzer College later added guiding questions that intersected with previous course readings. Students were then instructed to read and comment on the articles. Approximately one week after the site went live, 132 comments had been posted on the CommentPress site. Of these comments, 110 were independent and 22 were left as replies to previous posters.  

A week and a half after the assignment was due, student participants from Pitzer College visited IML555. Although I was unable to attend the session, a graduate student account of the interaction suggests that undergraduates enjoyed the online conversation. In the class session, students noted that they noticed a difference between this format and the more traditional written reflection. The collaborative aspects of CommentPress, at times came at the cost of the more personal long-form response. At the same time, the conversation we had originally envisioned as emerging from this platform was undermined by the scarcity of secondary comments. However, future iterations of this class could remedy this barrier to conversation by instructing students to contribute their comments twice within a week. The beta run of CommentPress within Feminist Dialogues in Technology suggests that collaborative projects can unite geographically disparate classrooms wherever a commitment to feminist technologies and undergraduate technology exists.  Turning these projects into conversations, however, will require innovative uses of digital platforms as well as supplemental instruction by educators themselves.

Works Cited 

Carpio, Genevieve, Leiva, Priscilla, and Monterosa, Vanessa. "Dashboard." Feminist Dialogues in Technology. http://docc.usc.edu

Fernandez, Maria, “Cyberfeminism, Racism, Embodiment.” In Domain Errors! eds. Maria Fernandez, Faith Wilding, and Michelle M. Wright. Brooklyn, N.Y., 2003. Autonomedia."http://refugia.net/domainerrors/DE1b_cyber.pdf" 

Juhasz, Alex. FAQ for FemTechNet. October 4, 2012. 

Leiva, Priscilla. “4/23 with Pitzer Visitors.” March 23, 2013. 

Nakamura, Lisa. “It’s a Nigger in Here! Kill the Nigger!”: User-Generated Media Campaigns Against Racism, Sexism, and Homophobia in Digital Games.” The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies, edited by Angharad Valdivia, Blackwell: forthcoming. 

Wernimont, Jacqueline. "Feminist Dialogues in Technology: Pitzer MS 134," Feminism, Femtechnet, Gender, Pedagogy, April 22, 2013. Blogpost. http://jwernimont.wordpress.com/2013/04/22/ms134/