Liddy Nevile <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I like your sentiment about gender but there are times when things are
> gender focussed without being gender biassed - this does not mean they
> should only be available to people of a specific gender or that there is
> any other sort of descrimination.
Hi Liddy and all in dc-education,
I realise that there are some occasions when courses are gender-
focussed, eg. for reasons of positive discrimination or for cultural
reasons (though I wouldn't condone these). But I don't think that
DC should endorse gender discrimination by specifically including
this category in a type list. If courses are gender-focussed then I
think this should be included in the resource description. I cynically
suspect that gender-focus quickly becomes gender-bias in peoples'
perception of what the tags mean. I would deplore the idea that
people could search for women-only resurces. This has shades of
the 'women will use the web if we give them shopping portals'
attitude.
> I think that your compalint is another instance of what I was worried about
> with audience - why classify the audience - can't we classify the resource
> and see who wants to access it?
>
I would agree with this. DC metadata is concerned with describing
the resource. [Classifying audience could be getting into the same
realm as dc.agent which has moved from describing the resource
to descibing the agent. However, they may decide this is justified.]
If you start to think about 'lifelong learning' then specific audience
has less meaning. Resources for primary school children could be
just as interesting to 80-year old great grandparents who didn't
have educational opportunities when young. The resources we have
at MIMAS are for 'higher education', but this is an authentication
issue (ie. who has paid to view them and who funds us) not an
interest issue, and future initiatives may expand their use.
I should have thought that educational resources could be
described using Description and Subject. It seems to me that the
only significant 'audience' type category for an educational
resource is what qualification it leads towards, if any - could this go
in Subject? For instance, in the UK a course may lead to a GCSE,
but this doesn't mean I have to be 15-16 years old and at school to
be interested in following the course - all I need to know is the
qualification it leads to.
Best wishes,
Ann
>
> ps - amazing thsat we were together in Frankfurt and are now on opposite
> sides of the world - what a great world!
Yes, what a great world! Even more amazing to me that email now
allows us to communicate so quickly and easily!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mrs. Ann Apps. MIMAS: Electronic Publishing. Manchester Computing,
University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL
Tel: +44 (0) 161 275 6039 Fax: +44 (0) 0161 275 6040
Email: [log in to unmask] WWW: http://irwell.mimas.ac.uk/~zzsupjaa/ann.html
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|