Section Six

Tools and strategies: Responding to the issues

Overview

As we have seen throughout this discussion paper, many factors affecting the issues around women's use of learning technologies are connected to structures and decision making at a range of levels, in public and private sectors, in capital cities, in educational institutions and in our own communities and homes. As well, the rapid changes in computer and communications technologies make it challenging to keep a current picture and to understand the implications of new developments.

In the midst of this sometimes overwhelming complexity, it is important to recognize that all these developments result from people making decisions, even though they are sometimes portrayed as the inevitable outcome of "technological forces". In many cases, these decisions take place in a context shaped by various levels of government policy. This means that it, is usually possible, as citizens, to follow the thread of decisions until we reach the level of public accountability. It also helps if we have a road map, a sense of the various components of the picture and how they interrelate. This section explores how we can develop our own road maps to the issues that affect women's use of learning technologies and how we can use those road maps to reach decision makers.

This section suggests some tools and strategies to:

• find and share relevant information that affect women's use of learning technologies;
  
  
• observe and keep track of developments that may affect the use of learning technologies;
  
  
• identify decision points about the use of technologies, at national, institutional and community levels;
  
  
• explore the values underlying decisions and consider their compatibility with feminist values and with principles and practices of adult learning;
  
  
• examine how and whether the use of new learning technologies meets standards of equality, such as those established in laws and Charter rights, as well as standards of fairness;
  
  
• identify appropriate action steps to convey concerns about potential negative impacts and to support initiatives with good potential for women's learning.

These suggested strategies can be undertaken by individuals, by formal and informal groups that share and coordinate tasks, and by networks of groups, using both conventional forms of communication and some of the new technologies that have been under discussion in this paper. There are already many examples of networks of women expanding the ways they use technologies for communication beyond phone trees to fax trees to e-mail, list serves, and computer conferencing.