Better without the Stand-Up Comedy
Having recently completed my state-mandated Sexual Harassment Prevention Training, which was offered to U.C. Irvine employees online by Workplace Answers, I have a few observations, as someone who studies distance learning.
1) The two-hour program was limited in both vividness and interactivity: the scenarios were made more engaging only by illustrations with static cartoon characters and periodic online multiple choice quizzes. (See Steuer, "Defining Virtual Reality: Dimensions Determining Telepresence," 1996 for more on the "vividness"/"interactivity" matrix.) However, one could argue that this approach fosters the necessary Platonic rationalism that such courses promulgate, so that it follows that supervisors should be disembodied rather than embodied learners.
2) The viewpoint of the learner was always assumed to be heterosexual and often implicitly male, despite the obvious countering of gender stereotypes in some of the hypothetical cases and the presence of gay characters in others. What do I mean by that? Well, the role-playing never presented a supervisor (dean, department chair, lab supervisor, or office manager) who was homosexual; such people only appeared as actors in the conflict, never as decision-makers in the resolution. Also, in the vignettes about "inappropriate workplace attire," only women were depicted as offenders. The one-sided regulation of clothing as a way to control female sexuality from the position of a gawking male gaze appeared surprisingly uncontested to me, especially since men can wear inappropriately sexual or revealing clothing as well. As Barbara Ehrenreich points out in her recent book Bait and Switch, rules for attire are exclusionary measures in corporate America, since it is more difficult for women to comply with norms of dress.
3) The curriculum was considerably less challenging than the other form of large-scale state-mandated coursework aimed at remediation of behavior, which can now also be satisfied online, by which I obviously mean traffic school. You see, one can actually fail traffic school, if test performance is poor enough. But my attentiveness or success at achieving particular learning benchmarks did not appear to be monitored. Completion of two hours of clicking buttons, practically regardless of which ones I chose, seemed to be enough.
As with traffic school, mandated sexual harassment prevention instruction is generally provided by one of several niche businesses from the private sector. However, traffic school perhaps more obviously should use available vivid and interactive technology, particularly since 3D driving simulations can accurately represent guesswork about speed, distance, and legality.
(And now, a digression. One summer, when I was home from college, I actually worked at a traffic school, in a minimum-wage job manning the phones. This was in the nineteen-eighties, and "comedy" traffic schools had just become popular as acceptable forms of "live" instruction. By the time I actually had to attend traffic school myself, in the nineties, various gourmet traffic schools had appeared on the scene, which offered ice-cream or goodies for "choco-holics." Why is it that "live" traffic school must satisfy bodily appetites or physical sensations? I understand why there are no "stripper" traffic schools, but why are there no terror traffic schools or tearful traffic schools, because pity and fear might more effectively deter accidents?)
1) The two-hour program was limited in both vividness and interactivity: the scenarios were made more engaging only by illustrations with static cartoon characters and periodic online multiple choice quizzes. (See Steuer, "Defining Virtual Reality: Dimensions Determining Telepresence," 1996 for more on the "vividness"/"interactivity" matrix.) However, one could argue that this approach fosters the necessary Platonic rationalism that such courses promulgate, so that it follows that supervisors should be disembodied rather than embodied learners.
2) The viewpoint of the learner was always assumed to be heterosexual and often implicitly male, despite the obvious countering of gender stereotypes in some of the hypothetical cases and the presence of gay characters in others. What do I mean by that? Well, the role-playing never presented a supervisor (dean, department chair, lab supervisor, or office manager) who was homosexual; such people only appeared as actors in the conflict, never as decision-makers in the resolution. Also, in the vignettes about "inappropriate workplace attire," only women were depicted as offenders. The one-sided regulation of clothing as a way to control female sexuality from the position of a gawking male gaze appeared surprisingly uncontested to me, especially since men can wear inappropriately sexual or revealing clothing as well. As Barbara Ehrenreich points out in her recent book Bait and Switch, rules for attire are exclusionary measures in corporate America, since it is more difficult for women to comply with norms of dress.
3) The curriculum was considerably less challenging than the other form of large-scale state-mandated coursework aimed at remediation of behavior, which can now also be satisfied online, by which I obviously mean traffic school. You see, one can actually fail traffic school, if test performance is poor enough. But my attentiveness or success at achieving particular learning benchmarks did not appear to be monitored. Completion of two hours of clicking buttons, practically regardless of which ones I chose, seemed to be enough.
As with traffic school, mandated sexual harassment prevention instruction is generally provided by one of several niche businesses from the private sector. However, traffic school perhaps more obviously should use available vivid and interactive technology, particularly since 3D driving simulations can accurately represent guesswork about speed, distance, and legality.
(And now, a digression. One summer, when I was home from college, I actually worked at a traffic school, in a minimum-wage job manning the phones. This was in the nineteen-eighties, and "comedy" traffic schools had just become popular as acceptable forms of "live" instruction. By the time I actually had to attend traffic school myself, in the nineties, various gourmet traffic schools had appeared on the scene, which offered ice-cream or goodies for "choco-holics." Why is it that "live" traffic school must satisfy bodily appetites or physical sensations? I understand why there are no "stripper" traffic schools, but why are there no terror traffic schools or tearful traffic schools, because pity and fear might more effectively deter accidents?)
posted by Liz Losh at 7:42 AM
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