Universities are no place for libraries – especially it seems the Women’s Library

Posted on July 10, 2012 by Gill Kirkup

Libraries with physical books and archives where people go to research and study are becoming for, many universities, expensive non-core functions that are in the first line for financial cuts. The library in my own university – state of the art and built about 10 years ago – is now an echoing, people-free, book depositary.  But my university has some kind of excuse – we are an online and distance teaching university. However, any library that contains precious artefacts and irreplaceable documents but relies on a university to look after and provide access to these is in a very precarious position.  On Friday I attended a meeting  about saving one of the most unique university ‘owned’ libraries in Europe The Women’s Library in London.

The Women’s Library is the oldest and most extensive collection of women’s history in Europe. It was developed from the collections of suffrage organisations and became known as the Fawcett Library, looked after by the Fawcett Society until 1977, when it was taken over by a polytechnic that became the present London Metropolitan University. In 2002 it moved into (lottery funded) purpose-built premises with a reading room, exhibition hall, lecture theatre, office and activity spaces. London Met. Uni. in the present shake up of UK higher education funding does not feel that it can afford to support this internationally unique institution.

There is a good campaign website and the Guardian has been running stories about importance of the library and supporting the campaign to keep it. The way ahead for the Library remains in doubt. It will be struggle to maintain its identity, which includes both the collection and the dedicated building and specialist librarians. Some other universities have expressed an interest in taking the collection.  But given the present precarious state of most university funding might such a move be simply a temporary, and limited, breathing space on a route that ends with the dissipation of the library as an entity.

I have been an irregular user of the library myself, but valued the exhibitions I have seen there and the meeting place it provides for scholars of women’s lives. To lose the library would be a disaster. Who save’s libraries today?

A library someone once thought worth saving

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Its a girl thing- but is it a science thing?

Posted on June 27, 2012 by Gill Kirkup

I have been suprised at the almost universal condemnation of the short video produced by the European Commission as part of a campaign to attract more young women to ‘do science’.

You can see it on YouTube if you missed it first time round.

It has been called offensive, insulting ( Telegraph), and has produced a wave of  challenge and criticism  from women scientists in particular.  ( eg Meghan Gray) because  it ‘stereotypes’ young women.

Personally I liked the ad. but I think the furore about it highlights a lot of contradictions in our thinking about gender and science. 

 I’m not sure what the ad. will achieve – I am not sure what ads do achieve – but aren’t they about provoking desire?

 Will this ad provoke desire among young women to be scientists? Not directly -  but I don’t think that is what it is trying to do. I think it is trying to make the paraphernalia we associate with science: lab equipment, models of molecules etc look like the kind of environment girls can be feminine in – and I also think that in using the Charlie’s Angels imagery it is being ironic and playful.

Will it turn young women off doing science? I don’t think so.

Does it trivialise science and scientists? Probably yes- but then we have been arguing for years that girls don’t want to do science because they think it is difficult, hard, not sexy, not feminine and not fun. So if we think ads work then wouldn’t we want ads to present science as easy and fun (which could be construed as ‘trivialising’ it) sexy and feminine? Isn’t that a good thing?

 But when an ad does this we criticise it as stereotyping young women.  I think stereotyping theory is not serving us well . It has become self referential and a kind of black box theory which explains everything and nothing. Show pictures of conventionally attractive young women in flattering ways and such images are criticised as being stereotypes. Show unconventional attractive/unattractive women doing science in unflattering ['realistic' ways]and they are criticised as stereotyping women scientists as not being attractive/sexy and that girls won’t relate to them – desire to be like them. Show men doing science and ….well you know where I am going with this one.

 In the past we have tried the worthy ad. campaigns: Do science and make the world a better place; Do science because it is inherently exciting; Do science and get a Nobel prize like these female scientists from the past. We haven’t tried: ‘Do science and make more money than doing hairdressing’, maybe because the stereotype of scientists that scientists like is the one about love and passion for the work, and making original contributions to the field, and a lack of concern for mundane things like makeup and disposable income.  But haven’t we challenged this one? Most people working in science and science related occupations are NOT fulfilling this traditional ‘stereotype’ of a scientist. They are technical team workers contributing to commercial [including health care] industries for regular wages and pensions – just like the rest of us. But their lifetime earnings are much better than women in traditional female jobs.

 I don’t expect to see ads represent ‘real life’. Ads- so I understand – create lifestyle desires that influence our choices, they make us aspirational   They can also be nice to watch even when you aren’t sure what they are selling. I hope this ad gets young women to aspire to ‘strut their stuff’ in a lab.  I’d like it to work, we haven’t a great history of success in this area, it is time to try something new.

Heather Mendick also takes up this discussion in her blog on the Gender and Education Association Website

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Women deal better with being lost in Space

Posted on June 21, 2012 by Gill Kirkup

I was a science fiction reading young teenager in a small northern British town when the first Space programmes were launched. I remember pictures of a debonair Yuri Gagarin and a serious Valentina Tereshkova looking like innocent twins in their cosmonaut space helmets.

Tereshkova

And sitting up later into the night to watch the first US astronauts land on the moon.  But by the time the US sent its first woman: Sally Ride into Space – looking like a Charlie’s angel in her publicity shots- it was 1983. By then Gagarin was dead and Tereshkova was a Soviet bureaucrat. I was tired of watching space launches and had stopped believing that we were en route to the next  frontier of human endeavor.  Instead ‘Space’ was a place in my imagination peopled by Mr. Spock and Uhura: who rarely wore a helmet but had a great line in ear rings.

Lui Yang

Then, on Saturday, with as much publicity as it could muster China sent Lui Yang on a space mission. She is the first Chinese female astronaut, and she sets off to do something still quite remarkable – but some how also mundane – nearly 50 years later than Tereshkova’s first trip.  The Guardian quotes the Chinese Space programme spokeswoman as saying: “Generally speaking, female astronauts have better durability, psychological stability and ability to deal with loneliness.”

Is that why have only 40 of the 460+ people who have gone into Space been women?

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What I saw in China 2: low tech ‘non-jobs’

Posted on May 18, 2012 by Gill Kirkup

Despite the high end high tech products and industries in the major cities of China – and in the hands of many Chinese people –we saw lots of incidences of over-manning: of people working in ‘non-jobs’. China is the only place where I have seen someone sweeping the hard shoulder of the motorway using a dustpan and brush. In Europe sweeping motorway at all is rare except for moving debris after an accident, but doing it laboriously with such simple tools would be uneconomic. 

As well as the motorway sweeper, there seemed no logic to the two women washing the marble staircase of a Shanghai museum at two in the afternoon, as visitors went up and down. The Chinese like shiny marble surfaces for public places like railway and  metro stations; all  kept very clean and highly polished, and potentially deadly.

The ticket booth for the metro had four women working in it: one issuing tickets, one supervising the one issuing tickets, one dusting the desks and one sweeping the floor.

The most pointless job I saw was that of the uniformed man whose job it was to keep people off the grass under a statue of Mao, by blowing his whistle whenever someone appeared to be heading in that direction[1]. Economically I think it would be cheaper to let people walk on the grass and pay a gardener to ‘fix’ it every few weeks, or pave it over.

These kinds of jobs are really a way of distributing social security payments – but despite China’s economic boom they still go to very large numbers of the population for whom there are still not enough ‘real’ jobs.

from http://www.noaura.com/china01.html

[1] There was a sign asking people not to walk on the grass but Chinese people don’t pay much attention to regulations if they think no one is looking. For example drivers only obey traffic lights at road junctions if they can’t see any other cars, and pedestrian crossing lights seem to be optional as far as both pedestrians and drivers are concerned. The signs in the camellia beds in the palace gardens said ‘keep off’ – in all sorts of different ways. Men with whistles spent lots of the May afternoon chasing people who were trying to have their photos taken sitting among the best camellia bushes in the centre of the beds. The information at the Yanghsuo hotel told us that the bamboo boats beside the hotel were unlicenced, illegal and unsafe and could be stopped by the police at any time. It then gave information about how to book a ride on them.

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What I saw in China: 1. Noisy technologies

Posted on May 11, 2012 by Gill Kirkup

I have just come back from a three week holiday exploring parts of China. While I was there I was too overwhelmed to blog, but since I have been back I have been reflecting on some of what I experienced.

 An overwhelming experience of any Chinese city is the noise. Everything and everybody seems to want to make their presence felt by making noise. Every vehicle honks its horn to warn other traffic and pedestrians that it is about to manoeuvre. This is particularly disconcerting when the manoeuvring is behind you on the pavement, or you are in the taxi squeezing itself between a bus and contesting taxi. In Beijing we needed earplugs in our hotel because the building site beside the hotel was busiest over night. That was when the concrete lorries made their deliveries and the concrete was pumped and laid. The lorries get stuck in the Beijing traffic in daytime.

 You escape the street noise by travelling on very fast and clean trains and metros. There you are assailed by people noise. On short journeys everyone uses their mobile phones to shout at their friends and family, often with the speaker turned on so you listen to the other party shouting back. Or they play games on their phones and iPads.  A five hour journey 5 on the Shanghai – Beijing express with the people in the seats in front of playing arcade games with the sound turned on felt like a long slow ride despite the carriage indicator screen showing a constant speed of over 300 kph.

from phot by Wang Fuchun – ministryoftofu.com

 In three weeks I spotted only one Chinese person reading a book while travelling on public transport and two reading newspapers. The only Kindle users were clearly western visitors: on planes.   I understand the Chinese government don’t – yet – allow Kindles to be sold in China- although iPad and iPad clones are sold.

Maybe people get home, draw their blinds, switch on their illegal Kindles and read in blissful silence each evening- but I doubt it.

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Gender equity gets closer but not for everyone

Posted on March 31, 2012 by Gill Kirkup

This last week I have been participating in an online forum run by UNESCO and IIEP (the International Institute for Educational Planning) on gender equality in education. It is very easy to sign up for online conferences and then never be able to prioritise the time the engage- it embarrasses me to say that I have done that more than once. But I have managed to make to time to engage with this forum.  It is to easy to forget the state of education for most of the world’s population when you spend your time working with the relatively privileged in a highly developed region of the world. 

One of the targets of the  Millennium Development goals of 2000 was: Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and in all levels of education no later than 2015. The UNESCO World Atlas of Equality in Education  using data for 2009, concludes that 56% of the world’s population of primary school children live in countries that have gender parity at primary level, only 29% at lower secondary level and only 15% at upper secondary level. These equity measures are in a global context where only about three quarters of the world’s population of primary school children live on countries with universal primary education. Once in education many children don’t stay of long. Only 87% of girls and 90% of boys completed their primary education. At secondary level girls’ enrolment has been catching up with boys; 67% and 69%, which is good news, but not news equally spread across all countries.

I woke in the middle of the night last night wondering if it was time to change my job and spend my money differently. But his morning I am afraid I turned back into in an academic and went back online.

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Can face-to- face universities offer consistent high quality online and distance learning?

Posted on March 20, 2012 by Gill Kirkup

For some years those of us working in distance learning institutions have been encouraged to see ourselves as simply part of a continuum of ‘blended learning’. Our older siblings: traditional or face-to- face institutions, declared that they could use e-learning technologies to offer distance education at least as good as dedicated distance learning institutions; perhaps even better since they could draw on a bigger reservoir of expert teachers and researchers.  The most recent issue of Open Learning: The Journal of Open and Distance Learning, is dedicated to examining distance learning in dual mode institutions. It questions whether many institutions whose primary student body is geographically present have been able to offer distance learning in a sustainable way. Such institutions often do not have the policies and processes – including appropriate quality assurance – the IT back office systems, the skilled support staff for students and academics, the work practices and culture, the values, or indeed the business skills to understand the cost structures of distance learning. Thus distance learning provision is the domain of a few departmental individuals (academic and administrative). Once these early adopters and enthusiasts move on – or burn out- the systems are not there to support others to continue the work as a normal part of their activities, and a normal part of the institution’s teaching.

The case studies and discussion papers included in this special issue are well worth reading, especially by distance learning enthusiasts in traditional universities, where there is still a policy enthusiasm for distance learners who seem to offer new markets and potential economies in teaching. The lesson seems to be that this enthusiasm needs a comparative level of financial investment and systems development.

Maybe these nice pictures we are so used to of the distance learner in splendid isolation in some national park are more real that we thought. Maybe there is just the poor student and his laptop, and a bit on Blackboard when his tutor remembers to update the readings.

[Image from http://www.crossculture.com/services/distance-learning/]

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The boys’ night out

Posted on March 16, 2012 by Gill Kirkup

In all the media coverage about the visit of Prime Minister Cameron to President Obama, nobody seemed to think the 800 mile round trip on Airforce One to see a basketball game was anything worth mentioning. I am not a plane spotter so the following facts are the results of 5 mins of Googling: AirforceOne is basically a Boeing 747; which is a jumbo jet. It burns 5 gallons of fuel per mile – so the trip to the basketball game burned at least 4,000 gallons of fuel. Every gallon of jet fuel produce 21.1 lbs of CO2 – so a minimum of 85,000 lbs of CO2 was produced that evening.

I am not a sporting fan, so I don’t understand why two of the world’s leaders who should be showing leadership in a global economic and pollution crisis burn 4,000 gallons of aircraft fuel to see a ‘game’. That is both a lot of dollars and a lot of pollution. Is this a gender thing? It seems to me to be the equivalent of the Ab Fab ‘Door Handle’ episode when Patsy and Eddy take a day trip to New York by Concorde to go shopping. We laughed at them.

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Don’t dig there, dig it elsewhere – preferably outside my house

Posted on February 20, 2012 by Gill Kirkup

 My neighbours are quiet guys, they work from offices at home. For years they have been complaining that their internet broadband access is not good enough for what they need to do, and that  letters and phone calls to the appropriate provider achieved nothing except the statement that we weren’t an area of the city due to have the new fibre optic broadband for some time. They bonded over their shared grievance at the summer street barbeque and Christmas mulled wine. But a hole has now appeared in the road and the spirit of shared grievance has evaporated.

Hole in the road

(No matter how high tech our lives there will always be men digging holes in the road)

The hole is there because our neighbour [the architect] has been offered a trial ‘fibre to curb’ package, and the new cables are being run to his house. To make matter worse he has been offered payment by the provider to be a tester of the technology- while everyone else watches green with envy – unable even to pay for the same privilege.  To say that his erstwhile friendly neighbours  [the IT consultant and the accountant] are not happy is an understatement. Our architect neighbour is taking great care, he remembers the fate of the protagonist of Bernard Cribbins song about the hole:

Well there we were, discussing this hole
Hole in the groud so big and sort of round it was
It’s not there now, the ground’s all flat
And beneath it is the bloke in the bowler hat

Posted in the pleasures of technology, the trouble with technology | 1 Comment

Why Read?

Posted on February 12, 2012 by Gill Kirkup

Lost Horizon - the first 'pocket book'

I was listening to someone on the radio talking about why she read little when she was a child. Because, she explained, she was a black working class West Indian child and when she was young books for children contained no characters that she could relate to because they were mainly white and middle class. A working class child myself I agree that the stories I read were not about people like me leading the life I led – Thank goodness- As a child I sought out books that were about people and places not in the least like me, my family, my home town. Reading was my chance to go somewhere; else feel like someone else; if possible someone having adventures; whether they were the Famous Five, Superman, Alan Quatermain, Odysseus, even Moomintroll.

ShangriLa

It seems to me a terribly limiting ambition for reading: that it should be about people like me the reader. Reading takes us somewhere else, and when we come back to ourselves we see ourselves and our world differently. It offers places to escape to, away from our boring selves for a while. And sometimes we bring back the imaginative tools to change our lives.

[image from http://www.losthorizon.org/ ]

Posted in education policy, the pleasures of technology | 2 Comments