Friday, January 29, 2010
Female Voices in Virtual Reality - Drawing Young Girls into an Online World.
The 2nd article in the text is titled Female Voices in Virtual Reality - Drawing Young Girls into an Online World. This article featured a project that was conducted on technology that would be considered old by today’s standards. The article implied that girls avoided online communication and technical challenges. To me 10 years of evolvement has changed the overall picture. In today’s world females are well represented in virtual communities. The difference that I see is today’s virtual communities are application based and are so easy to use that I am not sure if females have gotten better at taking on technical challenges or if the user interfaces are now so easy that females are well represented in virtual communities but still lag behind in computer sciences.
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Jennifer, I am glad you mentioned the "dated" nature of this study. I think we might also consider that the technologies, tools, and virtual environments are more diverse than they once were. This may also account for girl's increased participation in online virtual communities. Perhaps it is not that the tools are easier overall, but rather that their are more options available that attract girls. Great blog!
ReplyDeleteMaybe it's because I'm in K-12 public education, but most of the technology users and experts I know are women! I do think that the advent of the Internet has made it more socially acceptable for girls to be geeks. Back in the day, a girl who was into Dungeons and Dragons was considered very odd. Now many girls are gamers and it's considered "hot."
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