#FemEdTech Cartography: Shifting Academic Culture Through Collaborative Policy Creation

Abstract

Recognizing the need to equip and empower individuals and societies, intergovernmental organizations like the United Nations have created policy recommendations for member countries. Many of these recommendations include promoting open practices, such as creating and using open educational resources and publishing in open access platforms (UNESCO, 2012, 2019). Policy frameworks at the intergovernmental level are far removed from levels of implementation. This distance can hinder policy success (Ansell et al., 2017). Another barrier to open scholarship policy implementation lies in the traditional, dominant academic culture strongly influenced by the prestige economy (Blackmore & Kandiko, 2011; Fitzpatrick, 2019; Jhiangiani, 2017). Public engagement and collaboration through networked practices—known as networked participatory scholarship (NPS)—may influence academic culture to “support, amplify, and transform scholarship” (Veletsianos & Kimmons, 2012b, p. 768). This study examined the open online scholarly community #FemEdTech as it engages in NPS to create, collect, and curate value statements to generate iterative codes of conduct. Contents of tweets that include the Twitter hashtags #FemEdTech and #FemEdTechValues were thematized and categorized in alignment with the principles of a feminist Internet (Association for Progressive Communications, 2020a−2020q). The findings are represented as a visual metaphor of a map charting the fluid nature between policy design and implementation, described as the #FemEdTech Cartography. This collaborative policy creation can serve as a model to shift academic culture towards more socially just practices using open scholarship to address the pressing issues of our time.