Technological futures: gendered visions of learning?

This article draws on public policy documents and on-going research in further education in the United Kingdom to examine the discourses and practices surrounding the introduction of new communications and information technologies in education. One notable omission from the dominant discourses in this area is any explicit reference to issues of gender, despite the volume of research and feminist theory which highlights the gendered construction and use of new technologies. Yet these discourses encompass not only a degendered view of technology but also, it will be suggested, draw upon masculinist visions of learning and the individual student to construct newly configured, yet still gendered, visions of learning. As such, there is a danger of narrowing, rather than opening up, the opportunities offered by new technological developments, and of constructing new formations of gendered power relations.