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This paper extends feminist critiques of information technology (IT) by examining the development of children's processing of information; for example, the development of the representation, manipulation, and use of information. My goal is to construct a theoretical framework to guide feminist research in computer science and cognitive science. This framework reflects a feminist focus on connections rather than an androcentric focus on separation and distance. I apply this framework to the interface of children's thinking and their experiences on the Internet. Thus, this paper will go beyond feminist critiques of current IT by outlining a fruitful direction that a feminist theory of IT informed by developmental perspectives might take. Research on children has not been integrated well into feminist scholarship. Women's studies scholars address intersections of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation across a range of topics, including information technology. However, age typically is ignored, even though these intersections have a different effect on, and different issues for, babies, children, adolescents, young adults, and aging adults.' This is true also in the case of gender and IT. Most of the work in this area focuses on and privileges the perspectives and issues of young and middle-aged adults. Any work including children tends to focus on topics such as the effectiveness of educational software in schools and gender differences in computer practices. However, as I will attempt to demonstrate, the implications of IT for development during childhood are much broader and more revolutionary than this narrow set of topics would suggest. The outline of this paper is as follows. I first critique the traditional use of the computer as a metaphor of human thinking, including cognitive development. This metaphor has emphasized objectivity, separation, and decontextualized knowledge and thus has tended to ignore connections, a concept central to feminist thought. I then consider possibilities for a feminist transformation of this metaphor and suggest applications to the Internet, Web site design, and

One of the most abundant and significant sources of knowledge about women is biography. We turn repeatedly to the individual life, both to formulate and to illustrate our more general observations about the nature of female experience. It is imperative, then, when we look to individual lives for such knowledge that, first, we draw from a broad range of lives before defining "female experience" and that, second, we conduct a thorough, honest, and sensitive examination of those lives we choose as somehow representative of the female condition. Specifically, we must include lesbian women among women and lesbian experience as part of women's lives. Moreover, because biography is such an important resource for women's studies, and because the art of biography, like other scholarly endeavors, has been limited by the often deliberate blindness of patriarchal vision, women must examine biography as a genre before snatching it up as a feminist educational tool. The essential difficulty which a biographer faces is this: how do I discover the truth about my subject's life? Two major barriers intervene. The first barrier grows out of the fact that the biographer has to deal with the sort of conflicting evidence about a person's life which reflects the nature of personality itself. That is, each human being is composed of what Virginia Woolf calls a "multiplicity of selves." In Orlando, her fantasy biography of her friend and sometime lover, Vita Sackville-West, Woolf's narrator asks, "how many different people are there not-Heaven help us-all having lodgement at one time in the human spirit? Some say two thousand and fifty-two . ... A biography," however, the narrator continues, "is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves."[1] Biographies of women have often failed because biographers have not acknowledged the complexity of women's lives. The second barrier is distance. The biographer works at a geographical, temporal, cultural, sexual, racial, experiential, and temperamental remove of varying degrees from her/his subject. The result is unavoidable inaccuracy or distortion. This distance between biographer and subject is increased markedly if that subject is female, and even more so if the subject is lesbian, primarily because most biographers maintain the sexist and heterosexist assumptions about women typical of scholars and of a patriarchal culture at large. As a result, women's lives have been recounted and judged in masculinist, heterosexist, racist (and all other "-ists") terms which preclude the possibility of women's possessing full humanity. In other words, while the lives of women have been limited by patriarchal restrictions, the history and interpretation of those lives have been likewise straightjacketed; consequently, it is hard to determine even what women's lives have been like, let alone what they mean. What follows is a lesbian feminist reading of biography as a genre, presented in the form of several syndromes which affect life writing about women in general and lesbians in particular.

MILLER, PATRICIA H., and ALOISE, PATRICIA A. Young Children's Understanding of the Psychological Causes of Behavior: A Review. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1989, 60, 257-285. This review of the preschool social cognition literature examines the common conclusion that young children understand external causes of behavior better than, and prefer them to, internal ones. 4 areas of research are considered: (1) knowledge of psychological states, (2) understanding that psychological states can cause behavior, (3) preference for internal versus external causes, and (4) discounting. Preschoolers have a rudimentary knowledge of psychological states, often tend to assume that behaviors have a psychological cause (usually an intention), and do not evidence a general preference for external causes. The particular domain and types of causes involved affect young children's social reasoning, including their use of the discounting principle. It is argued that evidence for the "external-to-internal" developmental trend is weak and is limited to certain domains and assessment methods. Furthermore, the internal-external dichotomy, as utilized thus far by developmental researchers, is too simplistic to be useful. More differentiation among types of external and internal causes clarifies the nature of developmental changes in social causal reasoning.

Prehistoric jasper quarrying and tool production at the Vera Cruz site, located near Allentown, Pennsylvania, are investigated through studies of quarry design, lithic heat treatment, intrasite spacing of tool production, and through functional and temporal analyses of artifacts. A methodology combining neutron-activation analysis and discriminant analysis is outlined, and the chemical profiles of seven regional jasper quarries are offered as a first step toward resolving speculation concerning the long-distance trade of this material.