In August 1999, Lara Croft donned the cover of Playboy. One month later, she held the cover page of PSM (Play Station Magazine, the most frequent figure appearing on the cover in PSM's history--four times in two years). The two images were strikingly different, as one can imagine. But, the implications of the two representations are indeed significant and call into question the ideas of reality, identity, gender, and representation. Which Lara Croft is "real?" Which one, if either, is a figure with whom girls and women in the world of games and beyond can identify in any meaningful way? Or, is

The Internet is imagined as an all-inclusive technology that will allow everyone, regardless of social status, gender, or ability, to communicate equally. The full title of a recent book is The Control Revolution: How the Internet is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World We Know. But has the offline world really changed? Or is what is happening online merely a reflection of real-world power structures and communications? One possible answer is: the world has changed because online communities allow geographically diverse people to form relationships, whereas previously the mere

Brillo is an electronic journal devoted to the inclusion of marginalized voices in the movement towards a global information infrastructure. It's also cranky and witty and feminist and funny, and you can find it at [http://www.virago-net.com/brillo/ ]. We here reprint the editorial rant from the introductory issue and look back on our experiences with Brillo. This article is part of a special issue of the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility (CPSR) Newsletter.

Starting with the early popularization of the Internet, and as recently as the mid-1990's, gender has been claimed to be invisible in text-based computer-mediated communication (CMC)-the absence of physical cues as to a message sender's identity was thought to remove all trace of information as to gender, race, social class, etc. from the message, making the medium inherently democratic and egalitarian. However, claims of widespread gender anonymity have not been supported by research on online interaction. In the present essay, I report on what has been found in a number of empirical studies

This paper aims to share EDC’s learnings from developing and implementing this method including addressing issues of trust between youth and adult team members, appropriately acknowledging youth contributions, balancing the roles of mentors and adult design partners, and making dynamic curriculum adjustments based on participants learning styles and skill levels.

This article features schools and school districts with successful induction programs, all easily replicable. Increasingly, research confirms that teacher and teaching quality are the most powerful predictors of student success. In short, principals ensure higher student achievement by assuring better teaching. To do this, effective administrators have a new teacher induction program available for all newly hired teachers, which then seamlessly becomes part of the lifelong, sustained professional development program for the district or school. What keeps a good teacher are structured

What do research on women in science and research on science and gender have to do with each other? This volume brings together prominent historians and philosophers of science to examine women's participation in science, gender and science, and the potential for interaction between these two pieces of a larger puzzle. The eleven chapters included here explore a number of interrelated topics: the experiences of individual women working in science; the demographic patterns of and support for women in specific fields; the gendered construction of scientific education and terminology; the impact

Understanding the dynamics of individual or group adaptation can provide valuable information for constructing professional development strategies to increase chances of instructional success. This paper reports on an exploratory study that identifies indicators of convergent vs. non-convergent adaptation in two cases of teachers working together on a technology-based curriculum construction activity and explores the relationship between group characteristics and adaptation processes. We have used the core complex systems concept of adaptation as a lens for understanding how and why some

The goal of this article is to present a description of a professional development program designed to immerse middle and high school teachers in an inquiry-based learning environment using a forensic science context and the consequent impact participating in this program had on teachers’ pedagogy. Teachers participated in a year-long program consisting of two summer institutes and one programming during the academic year. Teachers spent the first week of each summer institute exploring various science domains using a forensic science context. Week 2 was spent with approximately 100 seventh –

Two new instruments created to assess perceptions of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) disciplines and careers are analyzed and found to have respectable to excellent internal consistency reliability, as well as good content, construct, and criterion-related validity for the areas assessed. Cronbach's Alpha for the individual scales on the STEM Semantics Survey and the STEM Career Interest Questionnaire ranged from .78 to .94 across the eight constructs represented. These were judged to be acceptable to assess anticipated changes resulting from MSOSW ITEST project activities