“She’s Geeky” conference in Bay Area – and call for volunteers

From the “She’s Geeky” organizers:

Dear She’s Geeky Women,

We are really pleased to announce that Early Bird Registration is open for:

DC – November 13-14, 2009  Friday – Saturday
Announcement:
http://www.facebook.com/l/41b3a;shesgeeky.org/sg/2009/09/annoucing-shes-geeky-dc-nov-13-14/
Registration: http://www.facebook.com/l/41b3a;shesgeekydc.eventbrite.com/

Bay Area – January 29-31, 2010  Friday – Sunday
Announcement:
http://www.facebook.com/l/41b3a;shesgeeky.org/sg/2009/09/shes-geeky-bay-area-3/
Registration: http://www.facebook.com/l/41b3a;shesgeekybayarea3.eventbrite.com/

We are looking for Bay Area “Host/Organizing Team Members” – if you live in the Bay Area and would like to/are able to volunteer some time (up to several hours a week over the 12 weeks leading up to the event) to help us with outreach, marketing/PR, or event production please contact us at info@http://www.facebook.com/l/41b3a;shesgeeky.org and we’ll get back to you.

To make our vision of making it to at least 10 cities next year our goal is to raise $200,000 by the end of the year.  We have plans to meet with several dozen successful women in tech to ask them to contribute to this vision. If you know of any successful women you think might be interested in supporting the growth of She’s Geeky please let us know. We will also be launching a Grassroots Campaign and we are designing a special edition She’s Geeky T-Shirt that will be for this event.

Some things are new this year for our events:

• You can bring your daughters / young women you know. We have a special low price for young women so please take advantage of it and bring your daughters, nieces and young friends.   We currently don’t have the capacity to offer child care but are considering our options for providing this.

• We are now offering a Personal Brand Sponsorship Level at $50.  This rate is on top of the ticket you choose to purchase  and for this contribution your personal brand/blog name will be listed and linked to on our Event Announcement Pages for the event & your logo will be printed out and on display at the conference.

• Community Sponsorships of $250 and $500 are also available through registration.  The $250 level includes one full event ticket (all the days of the unConference) and the $500 level includes two full event tickets. These are for small companies and firms who want to support the event or for an individual if they choose.

Corporate Sponsorship is available for both events contact us to learn more – info@http://www.facebook.com/l/41b3a;shesgeeky.org

Thank you for your continued support and interest in She’s Geeky!

She’s Geeky convenes to inspire women technologists for the future and advance systemic change in tech culture, providing a space to create enduring communities that foster collaboration and innovation among women professional women working in Science Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.
——————–

To reply to this message, follow the link below:
http://www.facebook.com/n/?inbox/readmessage.php&t=1045856682682&mid=12cc97eG12e6f0G606069aG0

Kindle Review

Update 10/1/09: Amazon has quietly raised the price of most new books to $15.  They are, more or less, a monopoly provider, so they can and no doubt will raise the price of books as they gain market share.

There has recently been  discussion about using Kindle for student textbooks. I got a Kindle 2 this summer and have been using it.  Here’s my review of the Kindle, with special attention to its potential for textbooks.  (The Kindle DX has a larger screen, but not so much larger that my points below don’t apply.)

IN SUMMARY:

What I like about the Kindle:

• portability, the ability to carry a lot of text with me and read whenever, wherever;
• syncing with iPhone, so that I have my Kindle books with me on the phone — e.g., waiting at the vet today I read some of the novel I’m reading, on the iPhone;
• string searching within the text (but with problems — see below);
• the ability to change text size: e.g., I use it on cardio machines at the gym and make the text large enough to see whatever the distance;
• built-in dictionary: highlight a word and the definition pops up. For specialized vocabularly such as used in a scholarly book or textbook, however, it’s not very useful;
• And price: $10 for most books from Amazon.  But this varies: Routledge has started putting out scholarly books on Kindle an the prices range from $15 to $30 and more.

There are limits on what’s available.  For my upcoming trip to Burma, of the fiction and non-fiction books about Burma that I’m trying read. only one, a novel, is available in Kindle edition.  I’d really like a couple of the more important non-fiction books on the Kindle: easier to carry; easier to search for place names; and less likely to incite the interest of authorities who might confiscate those books as I enter the country.

What I find most difficult for textbook-like or scholarly reading:

• the decontextualization of the content, and
• the near-impossibility of highlighting and annotating in a meaningful way.

For my own purposes, I like the Kindle for reading fiction.    I would not use it for professional reading that I want to understand, annotate, and go back to. I would not use it for books I want to keep; only those I will read and delete.

——-

For those who want to read more:

The Kindle is, like a computer screen, a small window on the text, considerably less than a page, even of a small book; and suffers from the computer screen’s lack of context.  It’s hard to see how a topic is related to others; to flip through a lot of pages quickly; to know where you are in the text; or see how long a section is.  The Kindle has a progress bar on the bottom of the screen and the text locations are numbered, but it doesn’t give the intuitive sense of location that a book does.  If I’m 70% of the way through my book – that doesn’t tell me whether it’s a big book or a small one, and how many pages that represents.  It’s even harder to know how many pages until a chapter break or the end of a section.

It does offer the option of looking at a table of contents, and searching for text strings, and you can page through the text, but, again, it’s more like moving through an online document, although a little slower than on a computer.  It doesn’t scroll, it pages.  It’s quite fast enough for reading, but not for skimming or thumbing.

Although text can be highlighted or annotated, it’s slow and tedious. The Kindle control for highlighting text is a tiny button.  The highlight itself is merely a light gray underline. I use a variety of kinds of highlights to mark my own texts, to distinguish major and minor points, outline the author’s argument, or number the topics or points made; not possible on Kindle.

Adding a note requires several steps: (1) hit menu key (2) use small button to scroll down to “add a note or highlight” (3) click (4) move cursor on page of text to where note should be (5) type on the tiny keyboard (I’m a fast, touch typist and this is slow) (6)  scroll to “save note” on screen and (7) click. Once you’ve added a note, it looks like a linked endnote, a superscript number.  You have to click on the superscript to see the note. Nowhere near as easy or as visible as, say, adding a virtual sticky to a PDF document, let alone writing in the margin.

String searching is useful, but is like using a book indexed by an obsessive-compulsive indexer. You have to (1) hit menu key; (2) scroll to search; (3) click; (4) type the term on small keyboard; (5) click “find.”  The result is a series of 2-line quotes for every use of that term.  if you can’t tell by that snippet whether a section is the one you want versus, say, a passing mention, and the term or phrase is used often, this could be a very long, tedious process.

Finally, a minor point but one that is getting more important as I have more books.  Books on the Kindle are listed by auathor and title.  Again, the lack of physical cues can be a problem: which is the skinny red book you used for X? The big textbook from Prof. B’s course?  This may seem minor, but I find some of my Kindle books sinking into an undifferentiated list — especially the ones I haven’t read yet.  The thumbnails of covers that Amazon uses on its site would be very helpful.  For example, one of my unread books  is “The Glass Palace”:  is this a current novel I just read a good review of?   No,  it’s an older novel set in the Burma of the British occupation. (That phrase has significance in Burma.)

For my own purposes, I like the Kindle for reading fiction.   I would NOT use it for professional reading that I want to understand, go back to, and re-use. I would not use it for books I want to keep; only books I want to read and delete.

Kindle Report

I’ve had a Kindle 2 for a couple of weeks now, and have some reflections.

It is incredibly convenient.  I take it to the gym, enlarge the text, prop it on the reading stand on the cardio machines, and off I go.  It turns pages quite fast enough.

The $10 or so per book is great.  I’ve bought books out only in hardcover that I wouldn’t have.  And can more easily buy a book when I read a review, rather than make a note of it and try to remember to find it later.

I do like the ability to search text, though I’ve used it mostly for novels so that’s not a big need.  Also like the built-in dictionary, though I’ve used it only to demo, not for real.

I’m glad I didn’t get the DX — this one is large and heavy enough, and easy to slip into a purse or backpack, or just carry in its own case, such as into a restaurant.  (Also, the DX is half again as much — way too expensive.)

The downsides? I would NOT use it for professional reading.  There’s talk of having students buy textbooks this way — TERRIBLE idea.  It’s a small window onto the text, gives little sense of context, and doesn’t allow easy rifling through the pages which would show more info, in context, with a sense of where in the text something resides, where it fits with other topics.  Just too little a window and untethered from the rest of the text.

On a plane recently I had my brand new iPhone out (in plane mode) fiddling with it, learning how to use it; my MacBook Air out, editing photos; and my Kindle, reading a novel.  What we need now, obviously, is to be able to collapse all those into one.  The most dispensible would probably be the Kindle; keep the biggest and smallest of these and lose the mid-size device.

But not yet.  I can read Kindle books on the iPhone, but I wouldn’t choose to if I didn’t have to.  And my laptop battery doesn’t last as long as I would like.  But soon…

Automatically Backed-Up Hard Drive Catches Computer Thief

From Officer Casimiro Pierantoni’s Berkeley Area 1 crime update:

Someone left  left a laptop bag on the back seat of a car parked near Hearst Avenue and Euclid Avenue.  A thief smashed the car window and stole the laptop.   The victim had a back-up program installed on his computer that automatically uploaded new data from the computer’s hard drive to an online virtual storage location. The thief, not knowing of the back-up program, proceeded to take photographs of himself with the computer’s built-in camera; those photographs were eventually up-loaded to the internet based storage location.  The victim discovered the photographs of the suspect and passed them along to the police, who recognized the suspect as Gerardo Vegas,  with a long history of auto burglary and theft who had just been released from jail at the start of the year.

The Detectives closely examined the photographs and noticed that Vega appeared to be sitting in a motel room when he snapped the pictures with the computer’s camera.  Theorizing that the victim’s computer had accessed the internet thorough the motel’s wireless internet system, they began work to identify the I.P. address utilized by the victim’s computer.  They also checked Berkeley and  Oakland motels.  At one of the motels, they spotted Vega getting into a car in a motel parking lot. The Detectives stopped Vega and arrested him for possession of the stolen laptop.  They located additional stolen property (from other auto burglaries) inside Vega’s car and in his motel room.

Women Who Tech TeleSummit

Kaliya Hamlin sent the following message to the members of She’s Geeky.

Registration is now open for the 2009 Women Who Tech TeleSummit scheduled for May 12, 2009 from 11AM EST to 6PM EST. I’m so excited about this year’s line up and I know you will be too. Check it out! http://www.facebook.com/l/b2146; http://www.womenwhotech.com/2009-panels.html.

Women have really rocked the tech and social media world this past year and we are proud to be featuring Lisa Stone of BlogHer, Allison Fine of Personal Democracy Forum, Rashmi Sinha of SlideShare, Charelene Li, co-author of Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies, Shireen Mitchell of Digital Sistas, Holly Ross of NTEN, Rebecca Moore of Google Earth Outreach and so much more.

Our thought provoking panels (held by phone and web) will inspire you and give you the latest resources and tools that you can take back to the office and launch a successful and meaningful campaign or build your online personal brand, determine the ROI of your organizations social media outreach, get that big promotion or even launch your own startup. Check out these awesome panels: http://www.facebook.com/l/b2146; http://www.womenwhotech.com/2009-panels.html

* Launching Your Own Startup * Breaking Through the Digital Ceiling * Social Media ROI * Women and Open Source * Tools Galore in Online Communications * Democratizing Data and Watch-Dogging the Government * Video Activism * Tech Marketing in a Recession * Social Networks and Diversity Barriers * Innovation and Tech Career Reinvention * What Shirky Didn’t Tell Us * Feminine Mystique

Click the link below to view the full panel descriptions and register now! Like last year we expect the panels to fill up super fast. http://www.facebook.com/l/b2146; http://www.womenwhotech.com/2009-panels.html

Also we will be having fun after-parties after the TeleSummit on May 12th in Washington, DC, NYC, San Francisco, and London so save the date and come get your tech on with us. I will send a follow up email about the after-parties next week. I would also like to thank our amazing sponsors for their generous support of Women Who Tech. FreePress, Democracy In Action, Rad Campaign, Convio, Care2, NTEN, and Massey Media. Questions, comments? Email me anytime at Allyson@womenwhotech.com. You can also reach me on twitter @womenwhotech.

Smart Pen for Interviews and Other Uses?

This post on the blog Digital Ethnography sent me to the Livescribe site to look at their smartpen.  It records audio.  In conjunction with coded paper in a notebook, you turn the recording on and off.  It also transfers your notes to your computer as images and OCRs (?) them so you can search them.  I figured they would make their money from the paper,  but they say you can print your own.  (Of course, you have to give up your favorite pen and notebook.)

I haven’t investigated this in detail — am posting this in the hope that a reader either has or will investigate further and let us all know, in more detail, what it does and whether it lives up to its promises.

“She’s Geeky” conference coming up

The She’s Geeky conference will be in Mountain View January 30-31 with a no-host pre-conf dinner on the 29th.

Registration  lasts only until January 24th, so if you think you might want to go, time to do it.  Two days – $118 Saturday or Friday only $69.  

Their site says: “We are committed to making this event accessible — if you are unemployed or a student or have some other circumstance — e-mail us at info@shesgeeky.org to get a scholarship code.”

I’ve never gone and am  not  going this time, either, but I think it’s a terrific idea and want to be sure women who might be interested know about it.  

She’s Geeky events are neutral, face-to-face gathering spaces for women who like to geek out. Attendees include women involved in all aspects of technology, including those who like to use geeky tools, not just coders, programmers and engineers. You don’t even have to be from the computer industry. You just have to be a woman who identifies as a geek.

If you’re any of these things, you’re invited to come to She’s Geeky to:

1. Exchange skills and learn from women in different fields of technology.
2. Provide a forum for discussion of issues affecting women in technical fields.
3. Connect the generations of women working in or interested in technology, from those in middle school to the pioneers of the industry who may be elders in their 70’s.
4. Connect women in technology, computing, entrepreneurship, funding, hardware, open source, nonprofit and any other technical or “geeky” field.

New Course for Spring: Digital Narratives

DIGITAL NARRATIVES:
DO-IT-YOURSELF TEXTS AND OTHER KINDS OF DIGITAL STORYTELLING

I290-13
CCN: 42875.
Time: Wed. 2-4*
Location: 110 South Hall

*May change — contact vanhouse@ischool and I’ll explain.

Current developments in multimedia technology are leading to increased use of a variety of media for representation for communication. These include still images, video, animation and audio as well as text.  A number of existing applications make it increasingly easy for people to develop their own multimodal “texts” without special expertise.  The question is: How are people using these resources? How can they be effectively used?  And how can these resources be better designed to support these efforts?

We will look at two common applications areas to investigate these questions:
(1)    Do It Yourself: construction and use of multimodal resources for showing, teaching, and learning in the field of do-it-yourself  (crafts, building, repair, and related activities without professional help); and
(2)    Digital story-telling, for personal/collective history but for other purposes as well.

MORE about the content of the course below.

WHO THIS COURSE IS FOR:

Graduate students interested in exploring the confluence of emerging technologies and narratives of various kinds. Could include students from the School of Information, Computer Science, Education, Art Practice, Architecture, Archeology, Film Studies, New Media…a wide variety of areas.   Grad students only unless and undergrad manages to convince us otherwise.

FACULTY:

Prof. Nancy Van House, School of Information: has done considerable work on digital personal and collective memory, visual studies, new media.

Dr. Elizabeth Churchill, Yahoo Research: has a PhD in cognitive science. She works at Yahoo on various projects related to digital memory,  user-generated content, and digital resources for DIY (do-it-yourself.)

MORE ABOUT THE COURSE:

Our reasons for choosing these two areas:  there’s considerable interest, activity, and user-generated content in each.  This interest is likely to continue and grow (they aren’t current fads).

These areas share some similarities: they can benefit from both pre-existing and specially-constructed visual, audio, and textual resources.  Both are of considerable interest among non-professionals, as leisure activities.   Both have a narrative element to them, whether it’s the story of an event, or how to do something from beginning to end.  The audiences for both are more or less peers.

They differ in their goals, and the kinds of stories that they tell and information resources use and create.

Interestingly, these areas often overlap, as apprentices learn techniques and stories from their predecessors and mentors. In this way, traditions and practices continue and evolve.

Both can benefit from using technology to tell stories and track revisions. And both are likely to be intertextual, linking to and drawing on existing resources.

This is not a technology design course; we do not expect students to build new technologies, although we will explore the space of potential designs to address emerging creative needs and directions.  We will, as far as possible, rely on existing technologies.   However, these will be treated as prototypes; we will ask how these (or similar) technologies could be better designed to suit the understandings that emerge from this course.

Students don’t necessarily need to be interested in either of these application areas.  We’ll treat these areas as examples.  Students may well bring to the course other areas of interest that share some of these key elements.

READING AREAS MAY INCLUDE (with varying degrees of depth and emphasis)

•    Visual studies: what it is; what it says about the role of visual media in general, and contemporary developments.  The relationships among still images, video, and audio.
•    Visual epistemology: the relationship between the visual and text
•    “Visual psychology” (for lack of a better term) – deciding when and how visual media are most effective for different communicative needs/desires
•    Multimodality
•    Narrative and storytelling
•    Objects as carriers of content and symbolic meaning
•    Issues of publicness and media – e.g., images are both more fraught and more evocative than text
•    Procedural teaching and learning

TECHNOLOGIES

As noted, this is not a technology design course.  We will, as far as possible, rely on existing technologies.  However, existing technologies will be treated as prototypes; one issue will be how these (or similar) technologies could be better designed to suit the understandings that emerge from this course.

These will likely include:
•    Flickr and other photo (and video) sharing sites
•    YouTube and other video sharing sites
•    MemoryMiner or similar – software for constructing personal/family histories

This list is not exhaustive, but indicative.

STUDENT REQUIREMENTS:

•    Committed participation: reading and engaging with the course materials and topics
•    Some sort of major product:  probably a paper applying the concepts of he course to some area of interest.  One product could be a technology design: a prototype, or at least design requirements.

I212 Syllabus Posted

I’ve posted a tentative syllabus for I212, Information in Society: Critical Technology Studies: Science and Technology Studies and Reflective HCI.

UPDATE 11/12: that link is now live.

We’ll read some key work in STS and related areas (including distributed cognition and activity theory), and pair those readings with others where authors at least claim to be applying these theoretical approaches to problems related to design, information and information systems, and other areas of interest to students in the class (e.g., probably ICTD).

We’re fiddling with scheduling to try to make this course accessible to the people who want take it (rather than my just picking a time and crossing my fingers that people can show up), so if you’re interested, email me and let me know (vanhouse @ ischool).

Spring I212 — Critical Technology Studies: Science and Technology Studies and Reflective HCI

Spring 09
M 1-4  (but see below)
Location: 202 South Hall
CCN: 42575 (3 units)

This spring’s I212 will combine an intro to science and technology studies (STS) with reflective Human-Computer Interaction(HCI).   The goal is to look at a variety of ways of understanding how people use, adapt, and domesticate information and communication technologies, and how these might affect HCI and ICT design.  We will look at a lot of both theoretical literature and practical studies.

This is *not* a technical class, but will instead focus on how to motivate and evaluate design from many perspectives. It’ll be useful for technology designers, but especially for students interested in expanding their understanding of the relevant literature and theoretical perspectives.

In this class, we’ll define both HCI and STS loosely.  HCI is concerned with the interaction between people and technology, and design that fits people’s practices and needs.  HCI has gradually expanded its scope to include more and more of the human sciences.  Reflective HCI seeks to surface the often-unstated assumptions and values embedded inn HCI.  Science and Technology Studies (STS) is a multi-disciplinary field rooted mostly in the social sciences, but also history and philosophy, that addresses the relationship between society and technology. Much of reflective HCI is rooted in STS.

We’ll look at alternative theories from STS and HCI but also from communications studies and related fields.  Exact topics will depend on who’s in the class and what our collective interests are.

Past offerings of this class have included students from computer science and other engineering departments, education, architecture, and other departments as well as the iSchool.

Because the topic and coverage of this course changes, people who have taken it before can get credit this year as independent or group study.

Syllabus from the last offering, 2006:  http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i212/s07/ — it was mostly PhD students (from the iSchool and elsewhere).  I expect this year it will have more master’s students and so more focus on what this means for design and professional practice.

Class will meet Mondays 1-4. However, we may be able to reschedule the course to fit the schedules of the students who actually enroll, so if you’re interested in the course, let me know.

Also let me know if you are interested in particular topics within this area  –  it’s useful to know if people have specific interests.