Those working in the field of multicultural education recognize that there are diverse ways in which human beings are diverse ... culture, socioeconomic class, gender, sexual orientation, ability, and so on. And when these multiple diversities interact, they produce patterns of breathtaking complexity reminiscent of fractal geometry.

My very first experience teaching college in the United States was roughly seven years ago at a large Midwestern university, where I was assigned an introductory educational computing course aimed at pre-service teachers. I will never forget what happened when I first divided up the group into small teams at random for an in-class exercise. Very quickly I had two separate teams come up to me and complain that they were both disadvantaged because their teams were comprised entirely of females and that they each needed "at least one guy" in their team. The rationale they gave was "Guys are better at computer stuff." To be honest, I nearly fell off my chair in surprise and shock. In my naive, virtually fresh-off-the-boat mind, America was supposed to be the bastion of gender equality. Boy, was I in for an education!

Interestingly, a few years later, when I was conducting fieldwork in Barrow, Alaska, for my dissertation study of the sociocultural impact of educational technology on native Inupiat learners, I encountered the exact opposite situation. In my classroom observations I noticed the female students exhibit remarkably higher levels of interest and expertise in educational computing than their male classmates. Interviews with native community members revealed that, from an Inupiat standpoint, computing was widely perceived as "women's work" since it was something one did indoors, like skin-sewing, food preparation, and so on. The menfolk's traditional domain was outdoors, hunting and whaling...

Educational technologists are - finally - starting to become increasingly cognizant of gender and cultural issues in educational computing. What is particularly interesting to me is how different elements of human diversity interact - as do gender and culture in the above two examples - to produce infinitely varied manifestations.