femilicious.com

Ruth Oldenziel (2001) argues that producers and consumers are linked and that the mythology that distinguishes men as exclusively “makers” and women as solely “consumers” is false. Consumers shape what is produced, just as producers create what will be consumed (p. 143).

Telephones were originally intended only for short, efficient business calls (Martin, 1998). When women began to use them to connect socially, telephone companies realized women were a potential market. Marketing changed and the telephone was reconstructed as a useful social tool in order to increase sales and profit. Women participated in the production of telephone technologies, but they are credited only with consumption.

Often women are producers in areas not regarded as “technology.” Women’s inventions for the domestic sphere like those related to needlework (Oldenziel, 2001, p. 131) often did not received patents. Without this formal recognition, women’s production goes unrecorded, unacknowledged, and therefore unvalued. Because of this, women who produce are not recognized as such. This strengthens the mythology of women as consumers rather than makers. Without formal examples, it is easier to disregard women’s contributions. It is important to recognize that the ways that this formal recognition is given is through systems developed by men.

Women’s modification of ‘male’ technologies has also been invisible. Women who converted car engines into refrigerator generators have not been credited as producers of technology (Oldenziel, p. 134). Instead, women are constructed as not interested in new technologies (Oldenziel, p. 133). This simplification does not recognize that women lacked funds of their own (Oldenziel, p. 133) and that their dependence on reliable, simple, durable, and easy to repair machines (Oldenziel, p. 134) drove their decisions, not irrationality, obstinacy (Oldenziel 132-133) or rejection of technology. As women became involved in production so that products matched needs, women embraced labour saving devices and other technologies.

Gender is a fluid construct. It is not determined by our biology, but is a product of our environment, our performance, our choices, and our society.

Our society sets up gender as a dichotomy: masculine and feminine. Masculinity includes traits like brave, noisy, and strong. Femininity includes being timid, quiet, fragile, and nurturing. Nothing is genetically inherent in men to make them masculine, or in women to make them feminine. Global variations in behaviour and expectations show that gender is a cultural construct.

From early childhood, we condition members of our society to believe that sex determines gender. Dressing girls in lace and pink clothing that restricts movement is standard. Boys are dressed in camouflage and dark colours, and when they get dirty, we forgive quickly with statements that actually encourage this behaviour.

Physiological girls who display ‘masculine’ characteristics and physiological boys who act ‘feminine’ are censured for crossing gender lines. Intersexed individuals often struggle with gender identity issues. The cisgendered do not often realize how challenging and unclear gender identity can be.

Socially constructing gender is problematic. When gender defines acceptable behaviours and interests, it limits an individual. If a girl is ‘supposed to be’ interested in nurturing, not machines, she may not receive a full range of choices and opportunities to develop her interests.

On a larger scale, society also suffers. Fields like computing, which have historically excluded women, neglect half of a potential pool of knowledge and skills. When entire groups of individuals are discouraged from exploring and developing interests in an area, these fields develop internal biases and are skewed to the interests of a non-representative group of the population.

When society is constructed such that only women are nurturers, men are also unfairly limited. The public sphere, which has been historically male dominated, has little accommodation for the needs of the family and men are unsupported in their role as caregivers. As women have entered the paid workforce in greater numbers, working for change in terms of parental leave or leave for caring for sick children or parents has illustrated the bias against men as nurturers.

Society benefits from encouraging individuality, rather than relying on stereotypes to determine each person’s potential contribution to the community. Gender dichotomies create a hierarchy, preferencing one element over the other. This preference is then used to esteem one group at the expense of the other when with cooperation, both group’s contribution could be valuable, if the society were open to it.

I got this in my email this morning from 43things and it gave me such a good feeling. One week ago today I handed in my last exam and met with my advisor to discuss my major paper. Here’s what the email said:

Dear future self,

I’m reminding you about your stated goal on 43 things, to
“finish school”.

How’s it going?

Sincerely,
Your past self

I’m done! And getting this email reminded me that I’ve accomplished a major goal. It hasn’t been easy juggling school, work, and parenting, but somehow I managed even if it is all a bit of a blur now. I’m soaking up time with Rob and my kids now and catching up on projects that have been sitting a bit too long. I’m spending a lot of time gardening and it feels so good to see the sunflowers, anemones, nasturtiums, and morning glories coming up. My eczema has all cleared up and I’m exercising again. It isn’t ballet four times a week like it was in first year, but it’s something. Life is good.

photo by RaeA

I went to the Teaching and Learning Conference at the University of Windsor on Tuesday. It turns out that this conference is worth at least a couple of blog posts. First one up is about laptops in the classroom.

The session was called “Excellence in Teaching: Ten Useful Strategies for New and Experienced Faculty” and presented by Dr. Mary Stein, Associate Professor in Teacher Development & Education Studies at Oakland University. I had high expectations because I figure there is so much I need to learn and all of these people will know so much. It turns out that panning for gold as far as teaching strategies goes isn’t easy.

Some of the strategies were clearly true. The one that came up under a few headings was planning. Plan out the syllabus, plan assignments, plan assessment, plan your classes. Determine your expectations before the course begins and have it all in the syllabus. This makes good sense — except that a lot of the other sessions talked about interaction between faculty and students and the importance of active learning. There has to be balance between planning in infinite detail and student participation in learning. I think this gets easier with practice.

Another of Dr. Stein’s strategies was to give students sticky labels with their names from a pre-printed class list. In a conversation after the session, two of us were questioning whether or not this would violate the privacy policy at our university. While there’s something to be said for getting to know your students (and it’s important to note that this is much more likely to happen in a class of 20 or even 40 than it will in a class of 700 students) requiring name tags may be a privacy violation. Should students be required to share their names in the classroom or should they get to choose how and when they identify themselves in class?

Dr. Stein also ‘encourages’ her students to upload a photo to the learning management system and joked that during the first week of classes students will generally do what she asks (hinting to her power as “controller-of-the-grade”). Yikes.

One paper-marking strategy I never considered was only marking grammar and spelling errors only so far and then drawing a line where you’ve stopped. The point is to get students who need writing help connected with the resources that will help them learn to write better, instead of spending all of your own time correcting pages and pages of these types of errors. I like this.

The importance of routines was also mentioned and it reminds me a lot of parenting. Lots of parenting books talk about the importance of establishing routines. Clear routines have clear expectations. Clear expectations lead to better cooperation or at least a starting point for discussion when things aren’t working. It’s interesting to see overlap between parenting strategies and teaching strategies but I shouldn’t be surprised. I read Rahima Baldwin’s book, You are Your Child’s First Teacher when my daughter was a baby. Do educators see the parallels and take advantage of the resources written on parenting strategies?

The shocking bits of the session came in the “Learn from your colleagues” section. Someone asked about strategies for student questions and the presenter said she has specific time set aside for questions so that her teaching isn’t interrupted. Another said he has a “parking lot” on the chalkboard where students can write their questions, again so that teaching is not interrupted. I realize that sometimes students will find that their questions are answered if they just wait a minute in the lecture, but it was repeated several times during the conference that lectures are an inefficient way to teach and learn. Why discuss strategies for something that shouldn’t be happening? If the goal is student engagement, active learning, and learning-based pedagogy then students have to have more opportunity and encouragement to engage. If they have a question or comment, doesn’t that show they’re engaged? Isn’t that what everyone is after? If you tell students to park their question, it shows students that their questions don’t count and they’re going to disengage with the class. Moving to other teaching styles is the answer for dealing with this issue.

The ultimate shocker for me was the negativity towards laptops in the classroom. It was incredible — not one positive comment got through although maybe in the hands that didn’t get to comment there were others besides my own. People complained that students who appear to be taking notes are actually doing other things. (omg? really??) Students have always done other things in class besides take notes. Sleeping comes to mind as an example, so does talking, passing notes, drawing, doing other homework, and making grocery and chore lists. As with all things, there are advantages and disadvantages to laptops in the classroom. My favourite example comes from a computer science professor I know. He was teaching a programming class and was showing how to conserve resources in a program. Unaware to the prof, while he continued teaching, a student with a laptop connected to the university’s server and ran the program. Then they raised their hand and said, “I don’t see the results you predict.” Because this student had initiative and resources to do this, the class then went on to explore why it didn’t work according to the theory. This is learning, this is active, this is an opportunity to engage with the students and explore a real problem. Why take this away?

So maybe it isn’t the laptop in class that is the problem, it’s the Internet. Could it be that bringing the Internet into the classroom challenges who is the authority? Does this make some professors uncomfortable? The Web contains multiple viewpoints on every subject imaginable, and I’ve seen it where students look things up to challenge what the prof is saying. I’ve also seen students bring up examples that support the prof. It works both ways. It a women’s history class we were discussing some of the major womens’ organizations in North America over time. Someone asked if one of the groups still existed, prof didn’t know. Again, unknown to the prof, someone else surfed around, found the group’s site, gave an update from their front page, and shared the address with the class. Again: bonus because a student had their laptop in the classroom.

And it’s not just for students, professors can play too! If instructors had a messaging client open during the lecture (sounds off) students could message their questions, effectively dealing with the earlier concern of how to handle questions. There are positive applications of the technology!

So what are the real laptop issues?

• Students surf.

Sometimes they surf because they’re bored. Answer here is engage them with your teaching. That was actually Dr. Stein’s strategy number one: Don’t be boring.
Sometimes they surf material that isn’t rated E for Everyone. Maybe some guidelines are in order or maybe we need to accept that we can’t protect students from the big/bad/ugly. Students can spend some time at the beginning of the semester establishing a class code of conduct – it at least brings the topic into the arena of discussion. Students who would be offended are forewarned. Same advice we give to people who are offended by breastfeeding: don’t look. Small screens minimize this, and so do bad LCDs that have a limited viewing angle. Only the person close-up and directly in front can see.

• Students don’t pay attention.

This isn’t a new phenomenon created by laptops. Laptops are just a scapegoat. The students who came at least thought there was something about your class that was worth getting out of bed. They could alternatively still be sleeping or hanging in the pub. They are in your class — it’s a start. They will get more out of being there and not giving it their full attention than they would if they weren’t there at all. And students today multitask with amazing proficiency. Even without Alt-Tab. I share that with as many people as I can cause it pains me to watch them click through tabs in the task bar.

The answer here is definitely not invoking the hokey pokey as one attendee at the session suggested (not in those words but bad enough). It was more along the lines of “require a full body response to a question.” Like raising your hand to different heights to indicate level of agreement with a statement. This is a fine strategy, especially to engage kinesthetic learners, but only to get people to take their fingers of the keys? Missing the point.

And requiring students to put away laptops/close lids during discussion? Only if you’re also taking away pens, pencils, and paper from all the students.

So what about having laptop section in the classroom? Near the outlets for those who need power. If you don’t want to see the multitasking going on, you don’t look. If the typing bothers you you sit on the other side of the room. It’s true that sometimes the keys are loud. This can be as annoying as screeching chalk. Solution? Quieter keypads and getting over it. Or maybe wearing an ipod is the answer. ;)

What happened to the design?

Today is the 2nd Annual Naked Day, when people everywhere disable the styles on their websites.

The idea is promoting Web Standards. It’s a good time to see how your site loads (i.e. how far down the page is your real content?)

I tested to see how it would look first in Firefox with the web developer toolbar by simply disabling the CSS ( CSS > Disable Styles > All styles). I was mostly happy with what I saw so in header.php I commented out the call to the stylesheet. There are a few things I see that I need to tidy up but for now, here you have it: my naked blog.

Enjoy.

For more info and a list of sites that have gone naked for the day check out the Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information.

Front page of the Windsor Star today:

Casey Froese (age 11) is a minor hockey player in Windsor, Ontario. Recently it was discovered that she’s been suiting up all season in the boys’ (ages 9-10) locker room. Since then, she’s been told to suit up somewhere separate from the boys. Glenn Froese, her father, says this is sex discrimination and that she has a right to suit up with the boys.

The Windsor Minor Hockey Association Bylaw says that girls aren’t allowed in dressing rooms until 10 mins before game time. After games, girls have to leave the room before players remove equipment.

Yikes.

Dad brings up issues of of team bonding and how important it is that the players stay together. All the kids wear shorts and tshirts underneath (though this is not mandatory), that no one is showering or getting naked (although they could). From this angle, it seems like the question to ask is “what’s the harm?”

Well Mr. Froese, I agree with you. I think it would be great if everyone could get changed together and that gender didn’t matter. I think it would be great if everyone could just be team players and if no one cared whether you were girl or boy, gay or straight, cisgender or transgender, or every other possibility. Wouldn’t it be great if we knew for certain that everyone would be safe no matter where they went or what they wanted to do, regardless of their gender, sex, religion, skin colour, ethnicity, class, ability, etc? Wouldn’t it be great if 50% of women in Canada weren’t victims of physical or sexual violence at some point in their life (StatsCan)?

But we know that’s not the case. We know that women are victims of violence on much too frequent a basis. We’re talking about your daughter. She has a one in four chance of being a victim of sexual violence (Stats Can). You are gambling with the chances of whether or not she’ll be safe here. You think yes. Others say no. Can you guarantee that your daughter and every other girl will be safe at all times? You hope so but can you guarantee it?

How about we take all the kids out of the boys locker room. Have them change in the lobby. Or create a gender-neutral change room. As long as girls are in the boys’ room, the boys have the power. And I don’t think we’ve made that much progress yet. Maybe someday, but not yet.

Wasn’t it just International Women’s Day? Couldn’t we celebrate instead of attacking women?

Update: Contact phone number for John Jay High School in NY: 914 763-7200 Leave a message with the principal in support of the Megan Reback, Elan Stahl and Hannah Levinson.

I got a link to the censorship taking place at John Jay High School in the mail today. Seems women’s bodies are still dirty and unsuitable for children (er well, it’s okay if we give birth to them — lots of them in fact). It doesn’t matter that these girls defied the order not to say the word “VAGINA” — that order was Wrong. There is nothing wrong with what these three girls did, nothing at all. I’m glad to see support from the community, and how it’s crossing borders into Canada and soon will go beyond. Hopefully it will come from far and wide and this school’s admins will realize that rules like this try to make women feel ashamed of their bodies. I’m especially glad to read this quote from Dana Stahl, Elan Stahl’s mother, “To me, they were reciting literature in an educational forum and they did it with grace and dignity.” Way to go Elan!

I wonder if there are other words associated with women’s sexuality that are not allowed at this school? Like rape? Could you imagine a school where girls are not allowed to talk about rape? Scary scary — what we do not hear does not exist, right?

I’d like to see the principal apologize to these girls and the community and tell us that he does not think women are shameful, sexless, dirty and offensive. I’d like these girls to organize some mandatory workshops for staff about the importance of a healthy attitude towards women’s bodies and how this is directly linked to women’s position in society (i.e. the end of misogyny). The staff could get a special certification at the end of the workshop (which includes writing an essay on the topic) — maybe “Gynophile”? or how about this classic: “Teacher”? These workshops would be adapted for the students at the school too because they’ve all been told now that “vaginas” are a problem. I’m not looking forward to seeing how that plays out in their futures. What do you think Megan, Elan, and Hannah? Actiongirls would be happy to help!

Here is the entirety of principal’s statement. He’s insisting that the girls are not suspended because they said vagina but because they said vagina when they were told not to say vagina. This is sooo not cool. Mr. Leprine, really, it gets easier the more you say it. And as for kids hearing it — it wasn’t that long ago that they were sliding through their mothers’. They’ll be okay. Maybe even better than okay.

March 6, 2007

Dear John Jay Community Members:

I appreciate the concerns expressed by students and parents over the monologue issue that occurred last Friday night at the “Open Mic Night.”

John Jay High School recognizes and respects student freedom of expression in the context of the school setting. That right, however, is not unfettered, particularly when an activity or event is open to the general school community where it is expected that young children may be in attendance. The challenge is to balance the rights of student speakers and the sensitivities of the community. The School’s response to that challenge was to pre-audition the students before several faculty members for the “Open Mic Night” and to determine the suitability of the intended presentations for the audience. In many cases, younger siblings, often elementary age, attend these types of events. This event was also being videotaped for the local cable television channel.

When a student is told by faculty members not to present specified material because of the composition of the audience and they agree to do so, it is expected that the commitment will be honored and the directive will be followed. When a student chooses not to follow the directive, consequences follow. The students did not receive consequences because of the content of the presentation.

There is a clear difference between putting on a production of a play such as “The Vagina Monologues” and an open performance at the microphone of an excerpt from the play before unsuspecting parents and their children. In the first case, the community would have been aware of the nature of the production and could have made an educated decision to attend or not to attend based upon that knowledge. In the case of the “Open Mic Night,” the community was invited with the expectation that the pieces presented would be appropriate for the general community, including younger children. Parents and community members did not have the ability to make an educated decision about the appropriateness of the content of the presentations for younger children.

There is also a clear difference between what is read and discussed in the classroom and what is presented in an activity open to the entire community. Our judgment was guided by the forum, the audience and the students’ commitment. Our decision was made in a considered, careful and thoughtful manner.

Sincerely,
Rich Leprine,
Principal JJHS

A few things I’ve noticed about grocery stores, groceries, and grocery shopping:

• During the day on a weekday, the grocery store is filled with women with babies and old people. Even in this factory town where a large number of people are shiftworkers there are few men, fewer men with children, and very very few families. Not the most statistical of surveys but it’s been my observation. This is partly why I like to do my errands during the day when possible — the lines are short, the store mostly empty (compared to evenings and weekends), and people are mostly in a casual mood. Yes I’m lucky I can still negotiate my schedule this way.
• The plastic shopping bags they’re giving out at Zehrs these days have (what I’m certain is) a strategic hole in the bottom. It’s in the same place in every bag and (conspiracy theory) they’re intentionally making these bags defective so that people have to purchase bags for their garbage cans and cat litter. Mostly I use reusable bags and bins but I do need a handful of disposables each week for my son who cleans the cat litter. It’s taking twice as many bags now to do the work of one, just so we don’t stream litter across the house.
• The stores cannot decide where to stock the organic produce and other products. Some stores have a separate section so you can skip the huge store and just go for the gold. Other stores have the organics spread throughout so that you have to hunt each shelf — and so you can’t skip anything. I prefer keeping it all central because it speeds things up for me.
• Vegetable does not necessarily mean vegetarian. I’m always surprised at the fish sauce, anchovy extract, etc in vegetable meals. sigh I’m so tired of reading labels.
• It was only last year that the local Zehrs got self-serve checkouts. I first used these in 1993 in Nova Scotia in a grocery store. Go figure it took until 2006 to get them to Ontario.
• The grocery bins that the store sells as an alternative to bagging your groceries do not fit on the self serve checkout stands.
• The Zehrs in South Windsor does not offer paper bags, claiming that Zehrs did a study and found that the paper bags break down at the same rate as plastic. Seems awfully strange then that the stores on Dougall, in Lasalle and in St. Clair Beach all still offer paper bags.

Got any more observations?

When you decide that things aren’t quite right and that you have the power to make changes in the world, however large or small those changes might be, you leave the path. You can no longer follow the map of your youth, the instruction book your parents gave you, or mimic the decisions made by those around you. Breaking new ground is just that — you’re on your own.

If you’re lucky you’ll find like-minded people along the way and together you can chart this new territory, consult before making brave new choices of your own, or stumble along, helping each other pick up broken pieces from the mistakes that come from any learning experience.

Love and relationships are a site of potential change as gender roles and relationship power dynamics are being navigated and changed by more and more couples. Heteronormativity is no longer the only relationship model, but what’s an individual to do when they are conscious of historical imbalances and there is a desire to leave hegemonic power differentials behind, but yet there really isn’t a clear cut working model to follow?

Start with divorce. In North America right now anywhere from 1/3 to 1/2 of marriages end in divorce. So many people are divorced which means their fantasy picture of the happy nuclear family with white picket fence, etc. is not their lived reality. I’m divorced but most of the people I know who are divorced are close to my age. I don’t have a whole lot of elders to look to for help navigating the fallout of divorce (like co-parenting with someone when we’d rather never see or speak to each other again). It’s not possible to just walk away from that person forever, in a way that it once was. Where is my role model? Someone to tell me that “one day this will be ancient history and here’s what worked for me”?

And single parenting. Where are the supports for parents who are doing it on their own? Shouldn’t this be worked out by now? If so many families in Canada are managed by single parent head of household and most of the families headed by single mothers are living in poverty why hasn’t it been dealt with? We’re doing things differently than our parents’ generation and there is no one to drive the soccer team around, bring cupcakes to school, or even attend PTA meetings. Time for basic family maintenance and survival is precious. There are no extras.

Regarding fathers, many today are more than breadwinners. Divorced or not, how many of them are following their own father’s parenting style? The supports and guidance for these men are minimal and those that are around are underutilized. Whether for lack of time or anxiety/inexperience with the support structures that do exist, there are lots of dads who are winging it.

Next, more and more adult students are turning up in university classes. Many of the ones I’ve encountered are women post-divorce who hope post-secondary education will be a way out of poverty for themselves and their families. The supports for us, the roadmap for how to study and parent and juggle work (sometimes more than one job) has yet to be drawn.

People are redefining what a relationship entails. Sex in a culture of AIDS and STIs (on top of the fear of an unwanted pregnancy) has to be negotiated. Rape and sexual harrassment are real things that could happen to you and could come from the people around you. It really could (or really has) happened to you.

Dating can now include all kinds of technology: emails and text messages and messenger clients. Profiles on myspace, facebook, and other social sites can lead you to potentials as well as the older sites specifically for finding a match. Some people still think it’s wrong to look for a date through a matchmaker site, others wouldn’t dream of going out with someone until they’ve sussed out their language skills and interests via the distance and safety (perceived or real) of online communication. Each person has to navigate this themself; there is no consensus as of yet.

More re: dating: the question of who pays for what on a date is no longer such a big deal — for some people. There are still traditions in place about who drives, who opens doors, who sits first. For some couples, these things are reciprocated but for others old habits die hard. For those in the new water, it can feel good to know your relationship is on equal footing and that a gift of kindness is just that: a gift, given and accepted altruistically, not in order to create debt.

Couples use language to show they are part of this new movement: descriptors like “partner” and S.O.for a significant other show real effort to reflect how we feel about another person. Gender-neutral language is a big part of this. Calling someone your partner reflects that they are truly an equal: equally responsible, equally knowledgeable, equally capable for maintaining the relationship and all it entails. It shows that a couple is committed to working together and is helpful in preventing one part from blaming the other for any difficulties. You are partners.

It can also be a way to reject the traditional marriage model of husband who rules and wife who is chattel and obeys. Rewriting the language helps us to reflect the true nature of our relationships. The term partner is also useful for describing same sex relationships since there is no implied gender in the word. The term partner opens up minds as to what a relationship can be, in an attempt to breakdown heterosexist culture.

Language isn’t the only changing thing in relationships today. Choosing cohabitation or longterm dating with each partner maintaining their own residence are practical alternatives to marriage for a lot of couples. Having children or not are greater options as methods to control fertility and prevent pregnancy are further developed. If a couple does decide to marry for legal or religious reasons there are a greater number of choices for language used in a ceremony to reflect equality between the individuals and the diversity of couples marrying. It’s no longer assumed that a woman will change her name when marrying a man — many couples choose a hyphenated name for all or a hybrid name.

We are an individualistic society. We have a lot of choices to make and there aren’t a whole lot of examples to follow. We do the best we can, with the information we have at the time, but are we really making informed choices? Do we just rationalize when we make a choice that follows a tradition?

If we were truly lazy we wouldn’t do anything differently. Because we do endeavour to make changes, to reconstruct our families, our language, our ideologies we mustn’t t be lazy. Doing things differently takes effort, but it’s worth it: for us, our families, other people breaking ground along side us, and those who will follow.

I turned in my application to the MA history program with an exciting proposal to collect oral histories from the last women to give birth on Pelee Island,Ontario, back in the 1950s. By then most women were relocating to either mainland Ontario (Leamington or Windsor) or to Ohio to give birth. I’m excited because there’s a personal connection – my grandmother was one of the last women to give birth at home on the island (to my father). Even though she died over 10 years ago from breast cancer, I feel connected to her through this project. It also means I’ll get to go to Pelee to talk to people and talking to the older generation of islanders is always a hoot. (photo credit Jonath, flickr.com. Click the image to go to the photo’s flickr page.)

I’m working on a directed study this semester, cross-listed between the Women’s Studies and History departments about how the emerging technologies of blogs and user-generated media have changed the form and content of communications between mothers and information about mothering. I’m not a mommyblogger but I’ve followed the flurry with interest since BlogHer 2005 where it was identified as a radical act by Finslippy. I’ve watched La Leche League change from a personal mother-to-mother organization for breastfeeding help to an organization with a strong emphasis on online helping and information sharing – including providing mothers and health care professionals with links to Dr. Jack Newman’s video clips for help with latch and positioning and the online Community Network for leaders, and forums for mothers. It’s still mother-to-mother, but it’s changed. Online communities help with the sense of isolation mothers can feel after having a baby, but the technology changes the style and who has access to helping. The project is still too large and it’s hard to cut out pieces of the research in order to make the project more manageable, but it’s getting there.

I’ve begun writing a summer project grant that will (hopefully) allow me to make podcasts of historical Canadian texts in the public domain. I’m excited about it and hope to work with Toronto’s Mitchell Girio for production quality and also hoping for some original music from Mitch and some local Windsor artists. I’ve had some skeptical response to the idea from traditional historians who wonder if people would actually be interested in downloading and listening to Canadian history on an mp3 player — but I see it as a great way to encourage interest in our past — and to give attention to works that maybe haven’t been included in the traditional canon of what is Canadian History. I think it’s incredibly exciting and of course, you never know until you try. I know I would do it, and I know my kids would be into it too. That’s enough for now, for me.

Actiongirls is getting busy too. We’ve planned a pile of Stitch n Bitch sessions with more to come. This project is slowly attracting community interest. There was a reporter from the Windsor Star at our meeting yesterday who asked plenty of baited/leading questions. No doubt there will be an article filled with misquotes in the paper on Monday. /sigh/

So… I’ve discovered that there are places where people with ideas like mine gather and brainstorm and plan and develop and change the world. One of the conferences I’m trying to get to is later this month: Norther Voice 2007. They’re offering a travel subsidy (deadline today, Feb 2 at 12 PST). I never considered that I might be able to go to this since travel across Canada is crazy expensive but when I found out about the funding assistance I decided I should try. With the bursary I could get there and learn and contribute my experience as a women’s-studies-history-IT-student-mom-activist-artist-geek. Without it, there will be nothing but homework and dishes and laundry for me until I save more pennies. Maybe it will help me sort out where I’m headed, trying to combine computer science, history, feminism, activism, and art. Either way I’d get to see the Rockies.