Roisin’s Third Quarter Feedback

1. What connections have you seen among all the imaginative representations of gender and technology that we’ve looked at?

I’ve noticed an emphasis on the relationship that both of these things have to imagined and real political situations. My paper dealt with this in a slightly roundabout way, but each of the three sources seemed preoccupied with the idea of a particular mandated relationship between the two being in some sense fascist, and thus dystopic. This emphasis on political realities (whether it be Reagan’s America, or the Porn Wars, or industrialization and militarization) makes it clear that the context in which gender and technology are considered together is primarily the context of power and politics.

 
2. How do these works contribute to your understandings of gender, technology or the relations between them?

I suppose they contribute in the sense that they make clear what I articulated in the previous question. More easily consumed than academic writing, they provide an imaginative window into the concepts which we have been studying all semester. In content as well as in form they streamline ideas which have been percolating all semester.

3. Any other feedback about how the class has been working the past three weeks, w/ all the small group work we’ve been doing? Are there other things you’d like to be doing in class that we haven’t done yet, or that you’d like to do more of?

I like working in small groups because it offers a chance to conference fairly informally about reactions and ideas concerning the material we’ve been studying. For me, as someone who finds it more difficult to speak up in a large group, it’s nice to be able to share my ideas with a smaller audience and then to come together with the whole class rather than being constantly put on the spot if you want to be heard. I really enjoyed considering “Metropolis” from different disciplinary standpoints, I thought it was a great way to get everyone excited about material they might otherwise have been stuck considering within a frame they did not totally identify with or understand.

 
4. What concrete suggestions do you have in particular about wordpress functionality? (Laura and Anne have started a log here….)

Posting papers has given me the most aggravation. I don’t generally have issues with posts, but with papers I constantly have to resize font and figure out line spacing and rearrange pictures. Sometimes when I add pictures they go in random places they aren’t supposed to or the captions I wanted don’t show up. Maybe if wordpress had it’s own font/line spacing stuff it wouldn’t be so weird when things get copied/pasted from a Word document. Other than that, I haven’t had too many problems with wordpress.

 
5. What has your experience been with posting and receiving on-line commentary on your papers?

I haven’t gotten much other than the comments made by Anne, but I admit I haven’t been great at commenting on other people’s papers either. I guess I’ve been trained to want to wash my hands of a paper once I’ve passed it in, and having it online doesn’t afford me that option. I’m not sad if people don’t comment on my paper, but I get that the point of having them online is to share more.