27 female edubloggers from ZaidLearn

October 9, 2008, [MD]

Zaid Ali Alsagoff, who has an intriguing Norwegian connection, has carved out a neat niche in the edublogger community, providing colorful and interesting slideshows on different topics, whether it be Web 2.0 educational tools, lists of edubloggers, or other resource collections. He has even published a book, called 69 learning adventures in 6 galaxies, available for free online.

A while back, he put out a slideshow with 25 27 edubloggers that he liked (and I was honored to be part of that list). In the comments, it was pointed out that all but two three were men, and some discussion ensued about why this was, whether this was important or not, etc. In a constructive spirit that I really admire, Zaid said: OK, fine, I will go find a bunch of great female bloggers, and post them here (paraphrased :)). And so he did:

27 Inspiring Women Edubloggers

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: education women)

Although I would certainly never choose not to read a good blog because it was written by a woman, when reflecting I realized that many of the blogs I read in the edublogger sphere were indeed written by men (while in the library blogosphere there seem to be a lot more women). This is also interesting since there are probably much more women who work in the education sector than men…. do they blog less, do they promote their blogs less, are their blogs qualitatively different from male blogs, do male bloggers link to them less frequently?

I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, but one tiny observation that I made when looking through the last slideshow, was the number of bloggers that had a URL under some blog hosting company (for example edublog.blogspot.com or miasteaching.wordpress.com - fictional examples), as opposed to their own hosted domain (miasteaching.org). I did a quick count, and from what I saw, in the first list (almost all male), 17 out of 25 had some kind of personal URL, whereas among the all-female list, only 4 (of which two were hosted at their company) had a personal URL.

No hard and fast conclusions to draw from that, this is obviously not a representative sample, but I wonder if it means anything… That the men are more focused on promoting themselves as a brand, whereas the women are more interested in communicating? Or the men are more interested in the technical challenges of hosting their own domain?

I am not trying to essentialize, but I wonder if there is some kind of a trend here. Just thinking.

anyway, kudos to Zaid, and my poor Google Reader who is now bursting in the seams

Stian

Stian Håklev October 9, 2008 Toronto, Canada
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