Politics of University Metrics

This piece in the Chronicle needs very little editorializing, but it does need to be read. What we measure, how we measure it, and who gets measured increasingly influences funding. Metrics have teeth, but they are also very political.

Diversity Conflicts: Religion vs Gender

Lately, as you can tell I’ve been thinking about diversity. Today I want to write about diversity conflicts. I’ve worked in corporate America and Britain. All of the organizations I worked for had written statements of their commitment to diversity. But sometimes diversity becomes a set of tradeoffs, and I don’t think we talk about diversity tradeoffs as much as we talk about our commitment to diversity.

The tradeoff’s I’ve experienced most are the differences between religion and gender. I’ve been told not to touch a visitor (e.g., shake a hand in welcome or departure) to respect someone’s religious values. I’ve also been told what length skirt I should wear (over the knees), had requests for tights, and received a memo advising me to wear shirts that are to the cuff even in the middle of summer in order not to bear our arms all explained to me as being about respecting visitors preference for modesty in women’s dress.

I have to admit I found these requests very difficult. Its really awkward not shaking someone’s hand in the business context. Especially when everyone else (i.e. all your male colleagues) do shake this person’s hand. It’s a great way to amplify the isolation of being the woman in a male dominated field. My normal clothing often resembles that of my male colleagues, t-shirts and jeans/shorts. I’ve wondered whether I use my clothes as a type of camouflage, to blend into the environments in which I work. Dress like all those around you to dampen the differences. Skirts and blouses really scream yes, I’m different, especially in these male dominated environments. (Also have you ever tried to re-cable a machine under a desk wearing tights and a skirt, probably not, so here’s the word, its very easy to ruin the tights, its awkward to manage the skirt on top of everything else you’ve got going on.)

If there’s an upside to all of this, its that I’ve managed to respect all of these orders, even when they have collided with my own value system. And even, when I think they take a position within that diversity system. We mostly talk about diversity as being something that we do. It is also a set of value systems that sometimes collide and then must be chosen among. How we make those choices is not something we discuss as much (IMO).

MOOC Participation: Diversity and Assumptions of Development

Continuing my series of posts about MOOCs. Today’s is about a type of open/development rhetoric I keep hearing associated with MOOCs. It’s well meant I am quite sure, but I’ve heard the following sentiment: MOOCs will allow anyone from any continent to access content. And that in turn leads to increased education, skills for all.

I have a number of problems with this argument.

Starting with the obvious, this sentiment makes important assumptions about access. That access to the Internet and its content is uniform across the world. But it’s not. The Internet is a very different experience if you have a smartphone as your only means of access, versus if you have a laptop. Behind the hardware, there are questions of corporate policies and pricing mechanisms that influence access. Bandwidth caps, bandwidth pricing can influence how people use their phones, and in many parts of the world also how they use the wired network.

Behind these crucial practical questions of access lurk other assumptions, which warrant questioning. Is the content we create relevant or useful for everyone? What assumptions do the producers of content make about, say, what has been previously taught? What assumptions are made about the types of hardware and software the students have access too? And most critically, what assumptions get made about why the person is taking the course and whether that content will ultimately be most useful?

Although its not used too much, I have heard the word “Africa” used to describe diversity. I do think its well meant but it has the danger to collapse all of these questions into a stereotype of a person. Africa is not a person, nor is it a country, it’s a continent of great diversity in all senses. A person from Africa may well contribute to diversity in a MOOC setting, but so might a person from America.

Like others, I see this as being part of understanding the participation divide that shapes the Internet today. Some of that divide is the question of access, its costs, modalities, and so forth. But that’s not all that shapes the participation divide. When we overly simplify an entire continent we close down the question of what shapes participation in very problematic ways. If we are really committed to understanding how online education might help more people learn, the participation divide is precisely the question we ought to open up, to really take account of the highly diverse population of people that have some reach to the Internet. Because it’s only when we actually take diversity seriously that we have any shot at getting to something better than more education for the already well educated.