Stories from SXSWi 2008 – Attracting girls to IT

15% of people are from the northeast
15% of people left handed
15% of people in the world have no cell phone, or no Internet
And… less than 15% of computer science majors are female. [1]

This was the lead-in for the panelists and I liked the tie-ins of 15.

Since this session, I have talked to girls around the 12-15 year old range, and I completely agree with all the panelist’s observations about how girls don’t think they’re good at something, especially computers.

In this session I met Ashe Dryden and we talked about BarCamp Austin – she’s an organizer for BarCamp Milwaukee. I asked her to watch my laptop while I got a “pop” and offered to get her one too. I laughed when she asked upon my return, “Where are you from, if you say ‘pop!’” I have lived in Austin seven years, but haven’t let go of my Midwestern roots (Indiana and Ohio), where we say pop for all kinds of soda, pop, soda pop, Coke, and fizzy drink.

After the session I spoke to Clare Richardson of GirlStart about how the Austin XO user group would like to help out with their projects. One that’s upcoming is the Take IT Global showcase, where they’re working on games for the OLPC project. It sounds like they have enough XOs for their upcoming event, April 26th, which I plan to attend. They’re going to show off the educational game projects that the girls in the GirlStart program have been programming. They’re using a wiki to keep notes, collaborate, do project planning, all for the work they’re doing on their games. It’s great fun to read the game ideas.

Here are my notes from the session.

Clare Richardson – GirlStart in Austin, TX
What class in middle school did you feel smart and confident in?
art, phys ed, math, computer lab?

TechBridge
Free afterschool programs and summer programs.
Role models are key, role model training. Great training document available on their website. I plan to read through it for ideas on taking the XO to classrooms.

Jay Moore MentorNet
Email connection with mentors, 10-15 minutes a week.

Abby Tittizer IBM Extreme Blue
Internship program, not specific to women, for college students.

Q: What are the common misconceptions about girls and technology and getting them interested?
A: Perception is boring and nerdy and you have to already be good at it. Girls have altruistic missions.
Girls don’t think they’re qualified to do something, but boys “just go for it.” girls think that an internship means they already need to know how to do it.

Suggestions:

• Have girls sign up in pairs for a computer class.
• Spend time with your kids teachers and guidance counselors to find out more about their science education, etc.
• Boys tend to have an inflated sense of their own competence.
• UT has a club that has a roadshow that goes out to TX high schools to help recruit.
• They use pair programming in introductory classes.

Updated to add: There’s a great article in the NYTimes that I found through Anne Zelenka’s del.icio.us links called “Sorry, Boys, This is our Domain.” While girls might not be computer science majors, they are excellent bloggers and customizers of all sorts of web and social sites. Quote: “…a study published in December by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that among Web users ages 12 to 17, significantly more girls than boys blog (35 percent of girls compared with 20 percent of boys) and create or work on their own Web pages (32 percent of girls compared with 22 percent of boys).” Girls may have more patience and perseverance to stick to a site that requires content updates.

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Stories from SXSWi 2008 – Creating Findable Rich Media Content

Here are my notes for the Creating findable rich media content session at SXSW Interactive. Listen to the podcast for yourself if my haphazard notes are difficult to follow.

• Navigation typically not followable for Flash, etc. Text is embedded, not retrievable by spiders, key text is not prominent or differentiated (even XML).
• Lack of a unique URL hurts your linkage and Google ranking subsequently.
• If content is not coded or tagged correctly you’re not as findable.
• Disney example – their entire site is Flash. You can make Flash search-friendly, navigation is key – just make sure spiders can get through.
• Javascript function detects non-Flash capable browsers, so viewers get primary content (text, anything you can add to an HTML page).

Samsung example – Flex and AJAX for 20,000 SKUs of different tv models, used XML site maps to get all the deep links (which were previously unfindable).
Economist has a video site – 1 page for each video linked from master.
Tubemogul lets you upload videos in bulk with good tags, good titles.Not always rich media that’s the problem, but the execution, making sure you think about search and findability early on in the project, and tag early.

Sometimes content goes up only for a month and then comes back down, so search is irrelevant. Plus, if you want a rich experience, then you don’t worry about search – you actually want fewer people to have that rich experience.

Creating a findable strategy – or make your content find your users. (Now that is an interesting concept to ponder for technical writing.)

Fiat website – Flash-based
Layered approach – CMS backend with XML that transforms either to HTML or to have Flash consume the content. This approach could be mistaken for a form of cloaking, make sure intent is legit and alternative is a faithful representative of Flash content.

Other SEO suggestions – break up container, create deep links from blogs to specific content allowing inbound links.

Other findable strategies
Never ending friending report 2007
Asked people ages 14-29, if you had 15 minutes of spare time, what are your top two choices for using that time? Social networking or talking on cell phone were the top answers.

Target example (Adweek article) -Back to College campaign on Facebook
2-3 months lifespan, so this is an example of not worrying about findability, but rather ensuring that your content finds your users. How does Target create a dialogue with college students; one that would inspire and support their transition into college life?
Give freedom to kids to discuss produts, within their own community.
Personalized checklists sent to mobile.

Funny side note – I think this Target campaign was a nominee of one of the “Suxors” as one of the worst social media campaigns in 2007.

Consider everyone’s accessibility – mobile phones, text to speech, and so on.

Google webmaster tools – google.com/webmaster – these are relatively new.

Q: What is the biggest challenge coming up?
A: Something should be invented to work in the authoring stage to give info to the search engines.
Q: What about exclusionary methods? They don’t understand the ping pong effect something that’s cool will come around everywhere? His clients don’t want to pay for the bandwidth and so on.
A: I don’t think they actually answered this other than to say viral is always good.

Q: What about microformats?
A: The Google panelist said it needs to get more standard and have more attached to the content. He did point to http://www.google.com/experimental/.

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Stories from SXSWi 2008 – Textbooks of the Future: Free & Collaborative

I have been talking to SJ Klein regularly via email and phone for my work on the wiki pages and kid’s user manual for the XO laptop for One Laptop Per Child, so I was excited to hear him speak and meet him in person. Also, directly afterwards I planned to go to lunch with SJ and with Robert Nagle, the technical writer (and self-named idiot programmer) in Houston who originated the idea of XO user groups across the states after the Give 1 Get 1 program completed.

I had tried my best to promote an XO meetup as a lunch after the Textbooks talk, even getting it listed on the entirely awesome sched.org, but when the four of us arrived at Las Manitas at about 10 after 1, we were the only ones with the “little computers,” as my son calls them. So we just waited our turn for seating, and got to know SJ and Melissa Hagemann, a program manager with the Open Society Initiative who was moderator for the panel. As it turned out, she and Robert had been in some of the same cities in south eastern Europe in the 90s. While speaking of books, Robert described hand-carrying two fifty-pound bags of books along dirt roads as a Peace Corp volunteer and for me it really brought home the fact that books – they are heavy. Much heavier than the two 3-pound XO laptops I had been “lugging” around the Austin Convention Center all day. The 3-pound OLPC library on the XO laptop probably contains hundreds of pounds of books, and you could add several hundred more pounds of books by putting in a small USB stick or SD card. Quite a revelation for me.

Here are my rough notes from the Textbooks of the Future: Free & Collaborative talk at SXSW Interactive 2008. I’ll link to the podcast of it when it’s available. (Updated to add the link, since now it is.)

For open source textbooks, take a look at cnx.org.

Yes, wikibooks are now possible. Pedia press had been doing high quality book output for a while, now partnering with Wikimedia Foundation.

OLPC’s interest in open education materials is that it gives students and teachers ability to share and collaborate on materials. They’re in a unique position in some ways, though, because they’d like to target 15 languages for their materials.

Why are open textbooks possible now?

• Convergence of technology and community
• Also XML – lets you build lego blogs of reconfigurable, recombinable objects (sounds like DITA topics, doesn’t it?)
• Online lets you go past books
• Intellectual property now has new licensing – creative commons license
• Development of quality control mechanisms, repository of content
• Lens – gives you a filter, lets you see things through a lens, filtering which items which you think are valuable
• National Instruments, Texas Instruments, checking the books, offering lenses

Print on demand options – if you can’t produce shiny books, you aren’t taken seriously in many parts of the world, and in some age groups, print is important. With just-in-time printing, books are assembled automatically, index generated automatically, print on demand only costs students $20 instead of $120.

The same thing will happen everywhere that knowledge is valuable.

Is there a role for publishers in the new learning environment? There can be conflicts even in branches of publishing. All major publishers he’s talked to know that a change has to happen. They’re investing/investigating.

What strategies are useful? “The Budapest Open Access Initiative: an international effort to make research articles in all academic fields freely available on the internet.” from http://www.soros.org/openaccess/index.shtml

Three dimensions -
people (blurring the lines of roles, in today’s society we have rigid lines of roles of teacher, or author)
networking, transmitters, guides

Q: Robert’s question as a representative from Teleread.org – people searching for tutorials or text books want “the best” – what’s the finished state?
A: People looking for most efficient and effective way to learn things. Those sites will rise to the top.

Q: Can you use a lens that is another company’s lens?
A: Next version, yes you can.

Q: What about “controversial” areas or areas that evolve year over year?
A: For CXN.org, they decided not to develop with a wiki model, allowing for a multiple entry model, such as causes for the civil war has multiple articles with author attribution. Lenses can then point towards most used, or most heavily peer reviewed, your choice.

Q: From instructional designer in corp. environment – she sees missing things such as visual representations or animations, what’s happening or needs to happen to bring in those valuable designers.
A: Inkscape – open source vector drawing application, access to others’ illustrations (svg, vector graphics standards) Also mentioned the payment for illustration contribution based on Phillip Greenspun’s donation to Wikimedia Foundation.

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It’s the network, not the media, plus, the Content Wrangler Community on Ning

Another one of my takeaways from last week’s South By South West Interactive conference is that it makes sense to use the term “social networking” rather than “social media” to describe sites and tools that help you stay connected with others. We’re not all journalists, and the “media” part of the term seems to signify that you want to share media, but in reality, you want to share interests, ideas, and connect with others.

Join the Content Wrangler Community on Ning

There seemed to be an amazing convergence for me last week, when not only did I witness some neat interactions at the conference in person, online I was also having neat interactions with other members of the Content Wranger Community on Ning. I’ve started a Blogging group there as well, and I posed two questions to the group – one is, How do you find time to write blog entries? and the other is, Blog engine as a CMS? Or CMS as blog engine?

Please feel free to add me as your friend, add a comment, join a group, connect with me on The Content Wrangler Community. I’d like to get to know my readers!

Austin’s own STC president Leah Eaton invited the most people to join the community in the 3-day timeframe for a contest, so she gets to choose from a list of conferences to attend. Naturally, I encouraged her to attend DocTrain West where I’ll be moderating the Meet the Bloggers session featuring Scott Abel, Darren Barefoot, Aaron Davis, Tom Johnson, and Scott Nesbitt.

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Stories from SXSWi 2008 – BarCamp Austin III (BarCampAustin3)

Steve Carl already wrote up his notes from BarCamp Austin and I enjoyed his viewpoint very much. This was only my second BarCamp experience, and this year, I decided to take the plunge and actually volunteer to present. Whurley was very encouraging despite my inexperienced questions. “What’s a badge that you wear vs. a badge for your blog?” for example. There are graphics for each, as it turns out. The graphics are completely awesome, and the t-shirts were great, arriving despite an actual train derailment preventing the first shipment from arriving on time.

For those not familiar with the BarCamp format, it’s an unconference where you show up in the morning and put your session into one of the time slots on a white board or on a post-it note. The wiki also had sign-up schedules but the hand-written timeslots at the event win over the wiki page.

The week before BarCamp, I went to the wiki’s Sessions page, clicked the Edit button, and wrote up a short description of a session called Hug the XO. I basically wanted to see if others could bring their XO laptops and I could show them the tricks I’ve learned recently, plus run the Sugar emulation on my Dell laptop.

Getting to Idea City

(photo by Chad Hanna from theotherpaper on flickr)

The morning of BarCamp, getting to BarCamp turned out to be more difficult than I had planned. I got downtown by 9:00, but couldn’t find the Silver Dillo to ride over to 6th and Lamar to GSD&M’s Idea City. So, I took a few touristy photos of Ester’s Follies and the row of SegCity’s Segways, turned around and went back to the Austin Convention Center. I attended a 10:00 SXSW Interactive session, Creating Findable Rich Media Content, and then went back to Sixth street seeking the ‘Dillo. I walked about five blocks until I was past Congress Avenue when I saw a Silver Dillo sign and a person waiting at the sign, then turned and looked up the street to see the trolley coming our way. I double-checked with the woman waiting to make sure there wasn’t a charge since I was silly enough to have not gotten cash out, and sure enough, it’s a free ride. I boarded the Dillo and was on my way.

Getting into BarCamp

Idea City itself is an incredible workplace, full of creative vibes and a wonderful open design with full windows in front. Steve Carl greeted me, I registered with a cool registration application that Twittered my arrival to @barcampaustin (very cool), I had my picture taken for the flickr photo stream, and Steve and I proceeded to the schedule board to see where I could fit in my pres. I really felt more like doing a demo than a full-fledged presentation, so I was happy to see that the demo room had a free half-hour slot at noon. I drew little XO icons on a post-it, titled it “Hug the XO” and headed upstairs to figure out the room layout. On the way up, I saw my old BMC buddy Cote, and ran into Decibel, a good friend of my husband’s, and also met Snax finally, having friends of friends of hers.

Hugging the XO

In the demo room, I hooked up my laptop and ran the Sugar emulation image downloaded from the RedHat Site by using QEMU. In emulation the Activities run pretty quickly, and it’s very easy to display on a large screen. There’s discussions surrounding a projection display for the XO itself, but it’s easiest to emulate for me.

I showed Turtle Art which is really exciting to programmers. People expressed an interest in showing the XOs at Codemash because there’s a grassroots Kidsmash that happens in parallel, so I’ll definitely be following up with Josh on that idea.

I also learned some neat tricks to get deeper into the XO. One way to view the files on the flash memory without using a command line is to launch the Browse Activity and type file:///home/olpc/ as the URL. Now that is a handy shortcut.

I also learned that you can transfer files to and from the XO by using scp from the Terminal Activity by reading the XO setup user guide at OLPC Austria. First, get the IP address by typing iwconfig at the prompt. Then, you can use these instructions:

To upload the file test.py from a pc to the xo (into /home/olpc), use: scp FILE_NAME USER@IP:TO_DIRECTORY

scp test.py olpc@192.168.0.2:/home/olpc

To download the file /home/olpc/xo_test.py from the xo to a local pc, simply reverse the arguments:

scp olpc@192.168.0.2:/home/olpc/xo_test.py ./

We finally got the Acoustic Tape Measure Activity working correctly, and I’ve updated the instructions on Floss Manuals appropriately. Test your task instructions, I always say! Fortunately, this was a fun one to test. We had to have the laptops beep at each other at least 4-5 times before the measurements came into a reasonable range, starting out at nearly 200 meters, and eventually settling on just over 3 meters. Success! The noise they make to each other almost sounds like they’re spitting at each other. Kids will love this activity with a pair of laptops.

People really enjoyed the Speak Activity and we laughed to discover you could give it multiple eyes.

I think we had at least a dozen people stop by the demo room, and after the demo session was over, we set up two of them near the lunch pickup line. Steve was nice enough to “babysit” the XOs while I went back to some afternoon SXSWi sessions, and he said he thinks at least 100 people got to see and try out the XOs for themselves. We downloaded Flipsticks, played some Tam Tam Jam, showed off the Browse Activity, surfing to any URL we needed to, and generally had a great time. We met other XO owners and I told them about the XO-Austin users group, and told everyone they could meet us at Las Manitas on Sunday for an XO meetup. I’ll write another story about my lunch meeting with SJ Klein from OLPC, Robert Nagle, the XO-Houston user’s group organizer, and Melissa Hagemann from the Open Society Institute (OSI). We had a great time together.

Summing it up

This experience was such a great opportunity for me to talk to people about things I believe in (kids, technology, and education) while having fun being a technical writer. I was intimidated initially because I’m not a programmer, and so I wondered if I’d be questioned for even volunteering to present, but I realized that no matter how technical I was, I would be less technical than someone in the room and more technical than someone else in the room. So, the correct action to take is to share the knowledge you have and listen to others to learn more about the topics that interest you.

My only regret from BarCamp is not staying longer for Dawn Foster’s talk about Community Management. I had asked my husband to meet me at the Convention Center with my two sons so we could go to Screenburn together, but after seeing how intimidated my four-year-old would have been by the shoot-em-up video games there, I cancelled on them and wished I had stayed at BarCamp longer. I’ll just have to settle for reading Dawn’s notes about her BarCamp experience instead.

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SXSW Interactive starts today – pack your XO

So many sessions that I want to attend, but at least sched.org lets me select more than one session at a time. Such an awesomely simple interface and login is so quick, just an email address and a password and you’re scheduling in no time.

I’ve also put an invite out on upcoming.org to anyone who wants to meet with other XO users to come to Las Manitas for a late Sunday lunch. Thanks tantek for the photo.

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