Appendix

Fifteen years ago, Pat Webb and I participated in what was perhaps the first national women's conference focusing on computerization and its effects on women's work. It was jointly organized by CCLOW, CRIAW, NAC and the Cdn. Federation of University Women. We came together to get our bearings on what we needed to do and think about in the face of what seemed to be a major social transformation.

Similarly today, we've gathered to get our bearings on what we need to do and think about. On the one hand we have a lot of desperate people looking for new skills for the new economy, wanting to upgrade educational credentials, and needing technology-assessment tools to avoid being ripped off.

On the other, we have the increasingly digital and multi-media context in which training and learning is being developed and offered -- often by package-deal information-systems and service providers.

The question is, how do we respond as critical insiders? What do we want to guard against? And, what do we as women sticking up for other women want for ourselves? What technologies, and more importantly, what relations between people and technology do we want?

One way we can move toward appropriate choices and uses of new learning technologies is by having a clear sense of the kind of communication that underpins effective women's learning. I'd suggest that it's the kind of comm. that went into this conference: a lot of personal chatting by phone, fax and email, knitting together ideas, looping back and forth.

I picture it as something of a spiral - plus the lazy meanderings of a long-established river, with its oxbows representing the moments where the past doubles back to the present, to renew it. But equally, we need to realize that a very different model of communication is reasserting its dominance in the transformation of our society into the globally networked digital universe. Picture it as the box-car approach to communication and education. It's communication as production and transmission: a series of multiple- choice boxes, with an engineer up front going as fast as possible.

This doesn't bode well for the culture of education, or for women. McLuhan's description of the new media as the "extensions of man" could prove to be prophetic. They could serve primarily as the extensions of men, and of only some men at that. If we're not careful the new digital networks could become not the "extensions of women" but the "retractions" of women instead.

Okay. First, I want to spend a minute sketching in the larger context of restructuring, digitization and the new digital economy, out of which both the skill requirements and the new learning technologies are emerging these days.

In a nutshell, what's happening is that national machine-based economies are being restructured into a global systems economy.

Two elements here: 1) digitization: Much of the information underpinning work and the management of work in the industrial economy is being digitized. Transformed into the dynamic state of electronic bits. The second thing to understand is that this digitization/computerization is now in its third phase: the networking phase where all kinds of automated production modules, information sub- systems plus related electronic files can be linked together both within institutions and between them, creating the network of inter-connecting networks called the information highway.

Networks and digitization are the key to the transformation going on with restructuring: making it possible to de-institutionalize all kinds of work, to contract it out through a new global and local div. of labour constituted through at-home teleworkers and call centres, through remote agile factories and workshops, through the networked organizational structures of virtual corporations and virtual colleges and universities and other institutions of training and learning.