Rickly’s interrogation in “The Gender Gap in Computers and Composition Research: Must Boys Be Boys?” of the intersection of gender and technology in the classroom, her asking the questions, “Do students really participate more consistently and interactively in the synchronous electronic forum than in traditional oral class discussions? And, how is gender a factor in these participation levels?” (124), and the manner in which she engages with these questions—by, as she says, looking “beyond standard measures of biological sex, then, to measures of socially constructed gender” in her study (138)—has got me thinking about the social constructedness of all these things and what implications this might have for the ways we model our classrooms.

How do we deal with hierarchies? How do we deal with the fact that “[i]f only a few voices are present, then the classroom becomes hierarchical in nature, with a few creating knowledge for the many” (125)? How can we ensure that our classrooms are spaces in which students feel “free to participate, to contribute to the making of meaning” (124), and, based on Rickly’s results, can interactions with and through computers and conversations mediated by them help to foster more widespread participation and contribution if, as Wolfe posits, “women feel ignored online, not because their contributions go unacknowledged, but because they do not receive the type of conversational feedback that they value” (155)?

And if we shape our classrooms into, as Wolfe puts it, “relatively friendly” settings that allow “women to speak with relative freedom and [help] them to contribute nearly as much to the conversation as their male peers” (162), might this “friendliness” do them a disservice upon their entrance into the much more hostile terrain of online spaces? Or, in other words, how do we create a generative, productive atmosphere in the classroom, one that promotes communal discussion, while, at the same time, preparing students for the hostilities they might face elsewhere?