Ada Lovelace Day: Great Women in Technology

I was struggling trying to think of a great women in Technology whom I admire and would want to blog about how they have inspired me. It has been in the last few years that I myself have moved in to the digital world of technology as far as cyberspace and on line communities. I found I was getting stuck that I need to talk about women like Sherry Turkle, Donna Haraway, Lisa Nakamura which are all women who have contributed and are still contributing to society in their work. They all have published work. However I kept coming back to one woman who has inspired me in technology and she has not published any papers,article or books but she has impacted 100's of students a year for the last 22 years. She is a teacher and her name is Deanna Lomax. She currently teaches math at Chief Joseph middle school in Richland, Washington. She is a nationally certified and is constantly updating her skills and finding new ways to reach her students through the use of the latest technology. I have listed her blog http://www.blogger.com/profile/18423524771855199608 if you want to check out some of the stuff she is learning about so she can then implement this in her classroom. She is constantly going after grants to get Computers, Smartboards, Elmos. Anything that will enhance her teaching environment. She won the Bill and Melinda Gates scholarship a few years back which equipped her classroom with computers. To me that is an inspirational women who shares her love of technology and Math through her job as a teacher.

Digital Divide

I cannot believe it is after 5:00 where did the day go? I am still working out my final paper proposal but I do know it is going to be on the Digital Divide and how it affects more than the older generation. I am also going to connect it into the younger k-12 generation and how making them study to the test is making the gap in the digital divide wider.

More to come this next week as I research this area.

Good luck to the rest of you and I am looking forward to reading your posts.
N

Is It Rape If It Occurs In Cyberspace?

A Rape in Cyberspace is an article about a real event that happened in a virtual community called LambdaMOO. It addresses how this virtual meeting place solidified itself as a community, how they responded to the aggressive and violent acts of one of their members “Mr. Bungle”. In class we discussed that this was one of the first publicized article addressing cyber rape and that cyber rape is a very real and continuing problem in cbyber life communities. I found that as I read the article I struggled with deciding if this was a real rape because of where it happened. As I re read the article and there was discussion in class and I found that yes this was a rape. Does something have to happen in a physical space to make it real? The emotions that the two victims experienced were very real to them. Yes they could have used the @gag command so that they no longer had to read what Mr. Bungle was writing. However others would still be able to read what Mr. Bungle was writing about them and the acts he was imposing on them. This goes back to the saying that you often hear if a girl dresses in short skirts and low tops she is asking to be raped. No the girl is not asking to be raped no one asks to be violated unwillingly. Can we educate or girls to dress differently to help them protect themselves? Yes we can, but it does not excuse a perpetrator from committing unwanted sexual acts upon a victim that does not want those acts done to their body (real life) or being (cyber life). It was interesting how the community struggled in making the final decision to toad Mr. Bungle and that they never had the opportunity to come to a consensus, instead Tom Traceback took it upon himself to removed Mr. Bungle. Which upon that act it made the LambdaMoo community create a more formal system of communal self-definition. They now had to have a formal petition process to have someone removed. Even though you could have someone toaded they can always come back as another person. Dr. Jest proved that he seemed to have some of the same characteristics of Mr. Bungle not as vile but enough that you figured it was the reincarnated Mr. Bungle.
I need to wrap this up with an experience of my own which I will reiterate the one I shared in class. The 12 year old boy Tate who had friended someone (Jeff) whom he thought was real and went to a different school. When in reality it was two girls posing as Jeff and would update and communicate with the people who had friended Jeff. They got tired of updating his account and to get rid of him they had him commit suicide. This caused Tate an extreme amount of emotional anguish he thought of Jeff as his friend and looked forward to chatting and positng on his wall everyday for the two months that Jeffs account was up. This is a growing problem and it does need to be addressed and anyone going into the virtual world needs to have the opportunity to become literate in this digital age.

Cool like Me

"Cool like Me"
Page 112 chapter 3
In this section Nakamura talks about the silhouettes the Ipod uses to depict black people dancing as a form of coolness. This is similar to the Matrix Trilogy is signifies the desire that the white body cannot feel or express visually as a black body. She is comparing the Matrix to the Ipod in that black create a sense of cool. Apple is selling their products as cool objects to have by using silhouettes of dancers with dreadlocks, afros and Pheno/steroe/typically black profiles. The Matrix used a similar approach with the Rave scene black bodies moving to the music in a sexually driven state that added to the aspect that they are cool. The title of this blog came from Donnell Alexander where he stated, "Cool derived from having to survive as far as can be imagined from the ideal of white culture, with little more than a spiritual dowry for support. Its' about living on the cusp, on the periphery, diving for scraps... Cool, the basic reason blacks remain in the American cultural mix, is an industry of style that everyone in the world can use."
I agree with Nakamura on this Black actors are usually depicted as cool in their appearance and dance. The usually lead in the area toward fashion and flair. It makes me think of the TV show Welcome Back Kotter which was a late 1970's sitcom. You had a variety of people in this show but the cool guy was Freddie Boom Boom Washington and everything about him was cool. He talked cool, he walked cool he was cool. Whereas the other cast members were not as cool. They usually did something goofy during the show. I was racking my brain trying to think of other movies that showed this type of scenario which I am sure there are many and as soon as I post this they will all come flooding back to me.

A Costly Addiction

Laurence Lessing in his article "A Costly Addiction" talked about the framers of our republic were obsessed with dependency. He went on to define what he thought this meant to the framers, he thought that what we as Americans think of dependency is different. Dependency can be thought of in terms to addiction to alcohol, drugs, or anything that we are dependent upon. Laurence stated that framers claimed dependency to be when a citizen was considered dependent when he was not free to act in the public good because his own well-being depended on a particular result. What started this whole article was a n email he received from a colleague who wanted to discuss Network neutrality. However at the end of this colleagues email there was a lengthy disclaimer. "Let me say," he wrote, "that I am not representing … any company in this debate. I … have declined to represent [anyone] on anything to do with net neutrality ... I have also broken with a coalition with whom I was working on these issues [in part] because of … the corporate money I found to be behind the sponsors. I say this so you can be sure that I have no agenda other than a scholarly one."
Lessing likened the way our politicians run for government to rats in an experiment learning which lever delivers food. Politicians are spending the majority of their time trying to raise money for their election. By the time they are elected they are dependent to the contributors who have their own agendas and wishes for policy they want to see in place. In regards to the internet and the history of policymaking the winners have been the industry's most skilled in playing politics and the losers have been the ones focused on innovation instead of sucking up to Congress. He ended that this practice will not change until private interests are not the ones funding public elections.
I am in agreement with Lessing on this topic the more politicians spend on their elections the more other parties are able to influence their choices in congress. Our politicians were originally supposed to represent the people now it seems to be the ones who have the money get to be heard and we are not focusing on innovation. The internet is a free space however if certain groups get their way they will be able to control the laws in regards to the internet.

Publication Date: 2006-11-02
Format: Magazine Article
Bibliography: Lawrence Lessig, A Costly Addiction, Wired, November 2006

http://www.lessig.org/content/#

Lessig - A costly addiction

The Lengthy and Often Heated Debate

THE LENGTHY AND OFTEN HEATED DEBATE
David Ben Webs as Pegs page 254-255
This article started off by asking some questions around the meaning and status of community in today’s world. There are two arguments the first is communities and what they are if they are in decline and why. The second argument is about technology and what is the good or bad impact on social relations and communities. Ben talked about the demise of old-style communities and if there really was demise or did we have a preconceived notion of what a physical community was in the past. There is a belief that communities are in a decline is this because of technology or because they have changed over time due to the “bowling alone” position. It is mentioned that real life communities were created because of accidents of geography as virtual communities are created as an elective and selective choice.
According to Rheingold virtual communities enhance and sometimes replace real life communities. Other commentators believe that virtual communities are shallow and lack durability and longevity because they are too easy to join and upkeep. Ben is in disagreement with this one because he believes there is extensive work in building and sustaining a virtual community. He believes that the real life communities we used to refer to no longer exist if they ever did, our communities are now enhanced and sustained by phone calls, travel, and mail.

I have lived in a time when we did not have the internet. Computers were only owned by government agencies or schools, Phones were attached to the walls of your kitchen and so community was a place you physically lived. There were no virtual communities. With that said I have noticed over time that as technology has increased lives have increased in the amount of activities families participate. Communities have expanded and stretched. It used to be your community was your neighborhood and the school you attended. That too has changed as lives got busier communities changed. Now we add a mobile and virtual technology to our lives and we are more able to keep in touch and create new communities. I do not think that there is demise to our communities instead we are more able to keep in touch with people we care about because of technology. We are also able to enter into a virtual community that might better suit us if we choose.