Appendix

This brings me back to the meandering spiral-motif of women's communication, versus the dominant box-car motif. The first is linked a lot to what we have traditionally understood as "the culture of education." The other is linked to the business of education.

I'd like you to bear with me for a few minutes while I link these motifs to communication theory. Because I sense that this theoretical grounding will help us in defining what we want in terms of appropriate technologies for women's learning, and why we are for them. Equally, it could help us define what we are against, and why find it inappropriate for meaningful learning. Essentially, the spiral, interconnected motif corresponds to what has been called the social-bonding, communitarian model of communication. It can also be called an ecological model. By contrast, the box-car motif is linked to the transmission model, seeing communication as information transmission and related service transactions.

I'll start with the ecological model. It's something I've partly developed myself, drawing on the comm. theorizing of Robert Babe, James Carey and Harold Innis, and combining this with what I've learned from eco-feminists and also women scientists like Barbara McClintock, Lynn Marguilis, Ursula Franklin and Rosalind Franklin.

First, this model is grounded in nature and nature's ways of communicating. It's grounded in people and other living organisms, and the connections between them. It tends to assume therefore that all living things matter, and that they matter equally. The interconnections are key here: nature's ways of communicating involve an infinite and infinitely alive web work of communication.

It's suggested in the dancing spirals of the double helix, which Rosalind Franklin discerned through her crystallography work which was so vital to "discovering" DNA. Similarly, the kind of two-way communication between organism and environment which Barbara McClintock identified in her revolutionary theory of jumping genes, and which Lynn Marguilis has enunciated in her revolutionary theories of evolution being grounded in cooperative communication rather than individualized competition. Extrapolating this into a more social model of communication, this model has the following features:

• communication as extension of the living body, the grounded social relationship and community.
• communication as conversation and culture;
• communication sustaining life, and living institutions, over time;
• it's a growth model of comm. (after Ursula Franklin)
• it foregrounds the social/natural process of communication (over any mechanical means that might augment and enhance it.)
• it lends itself to holistic management, user control & related reciprocity and autonomy;

While the ecological model is an organic model of communication, the transmission model is a mechanical one. It's not that there isn't information transmission in nature, or even in the ecological model of comm. But it's not separated from everything else and scaled up as it is here.

In fact this separation and scale-up are two of the key characteristics of the transmission model:

• It transcends the natural limits of time and space (i.e. scale up plus speed up);
• it disembodies communication from face-to-face communication, and the rhythms associated with the time it takes to tell a story, to make your particular point, etc.
• it foregrounds the mechanical means of communication over the social process;
• it's a prescriptive production model of communication (after Ursula): communication as commodity transportation or transmission.