Gender and Distance Learning

Abstract

This article examines distance learning from a gender perspective. In any new area of enterprise, expectations have an important effect on planning, implementation, and evaluation. When it comes to distance learning, a variety of images of what this exciting new technology will look like and what it can empower us to achieve will determine how we develop it. In a study about technological experts' expectations and desires for their own technologies, the fantasies articulated by women and men are different in important and predictable ways. Women wish for small, appealing objects that allow them to collaborate, to create, to share their work, and to integrate their work and home lives. Men wish for magic wands that give them enormous power, fabulous speed, and infinite wisdom. This culturally sanctioned difference in technological expectations has real implications for the future of distance learning. Both perspectives are needed if distance-learning technology is to be successfully integrated into our school system.

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