Is There a Gender Divide Around OER and Educational Technology? |

"The month of March has been a memorable one for our project – it was all about celebration! Like the rest of the OER community we joined in the fun of Open Education Week to help raise awareness of the global Open Education movement and its impact on teaching and learning. The OER Research Hub has worked with various projects worldwide and we have been lucky to gain deep insight into issues in the OER field, and were only too happy to share this insight with the rest of the OER community. For each day of Open Education Week, we featured a key project resource, including our OER Impact Map and various survey results, and hosted two webinars: one on Accessibility and OER and another on the Battle for Open. A review of the Open Education Week’s Twitter analytics, using Brandwatch , to assist us in assessing the reach and  impact of our Open Ed Week campaign helped us gain some insight into who we have been communicating with. Hopefully, we’ll one day be able to identify, among other things, which types of Twitter users are most likely to mention or engage with different strands of our project. The month of March kicked off with International Women’s Day, which got me thinking about gender. For Open Education Week (March 10-15), the gender split for our Twitter activity showed slightly more women, than men engaging with us (53% Vs 48%) – no biggie. However, for some reason there was a significant spike in interest among our male tweeters on 13th March (the day our campaign shone the spotlight on the OER Impact Map). Okay, okay this may be totally trivial but I am tempted to think that this radical spike in the male category perhaps reveals their fascination with technology. It could even be tempting to go as far as concluding that the reverse of that is true: that women are slightly more hesitant to engage with technology rich tools. I don’t think there is enough information here to support that sort of claim, but it does make me wonder ..."