WS 445 Final Reflection

As some of you may or may not know, I started this blog because I was taking a women's studies course called women and computers.

My first 3 posts were actually reflections of assignments for the class. We watched a video with a woman named Nadine who talked about internet accessibility in the middle east, read an article about how youth uses the internet, and a study done about Facebook. You can find my reflections here, here and here.

In between writing about the digital divide (here and here) and researching for my other classes, I realized I enjoyed writing about the women's issues. So I kept writing.

When our professor told us that we should find online resources to help our life after college, I enjoyed searching the web for photography related sources. Read more here.

I loved finding out more about the women who have shaped the web and I was frustrated at the lack of publicity on those women. Because they seemed to be doing so much more good for society then men who shaped the internet. At this time in my blog posts I was updating about every other day. It seemed fitting that I would post a few findings on my blog, here.

I used my blog to help research for my final project. You will see many of my blog posts documented in my final project presentation. It helped me organize my thoughts and see what I could do with the sources I found. See more here.

I enjoyed the class. It helped me learn that the issues of women are not strictly in the real world but also on the world wide web as well. The course was set up like a workshop and the student feedback of our projects was really helpful to me. I got stronger as a writer and as a student because of what the class taught me. It also taught me a few new resources I could use like delicious.com which is a bookmarking site.

WS 445 Final Project

I had the chance to do a great project for my women's studies class called 'Women and Computers.'

Part one was about visual aids and activism. Click on the link to check out my prezi. I published the videos in my blog before, here and here. I found that there was no research to see how much just how visual aids effect activist causes, but I did a good job trying to see what the effect would be.

Part two was about visuals about -isms. I wanted to see what google images turned up for the words I choose. Were they accurate representations? Sometimes. But sometimes it wasn't. Check it out. I was orginally inspired to do this part of the presentation, by "What does feminism look like?"

Happy Exploring.

Women's Contribution to the Internet World

Today in class, I learned about Women's contribution to the web.

I presented on Corvida Raven, and you can find my presentation (prezi format!) here.

I learned a lot about a few people here and there. Do you know a woman co-founded flickr? I didn't. Her name is Caterina Fake.

Another woman we learned about was Beth Kanter, and she is doing so much social justice work it is amazing. More about her here.

There was a few thoughts going through my head while my classmates were presenting. WHY DO WE NOT KNOW ABOUT THESE WOMEN!?!? Why do we only learn about Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill from Myspace?

Well, hello. Those are SOCIAL sites. But the sites that woman normally work on, those sites are trying to change the world. Much like Ory Okolloh who is an exective director of the activist group that developed software to report human rights violations on your cell phones called Ushahidi. That made me feel a little better.

Women may not be getting the media time, but they are making better contributions than say the time eater of facebook!

Life Resources: Photography

So I searched "photography for dummies" thinking I'd get a bunch of advertisings for the "for dummies" books. Instead I find this website which actually gives me good advice on learning my new DSLR camera, whom I named Cameron.

Now Cameron is a BRAND new CANON Rebel T1i. I have been wishing to get a camera as cool as Cameron since, well, I was 1o years old. According to my mother I have been asking for cameras since I was 8 years old. I got my first film one in third grade, my first (really lame) digital in fifth for christmas, respectively.

I bought the next camera I owned in 9th grade. I was super duper excited! I don't even remember the brand. All I know is that I babysat two little "angels" (you can guess by the quotations that I am being very nice in that description) for hours and hours to save up enough money for that camera. I think it was almost 200 dollars with the memory card.

My next camera was a gift from my boyfriend (now ex). It was the camera I really wanted and it gave me 3 and a half years of good photos. During this time, my boyfriend (the same one and still my ex) got a Canon Rebel XS and I fell in love. I knew that by the time I was out of college I wanted to own one of those.

Tada! I finally got a DSLR. With the support of my Aunt Suzanne, she talked my financial brain in to allowing me to spend my savings (not all of it thank goodness!) on an investment.

So, now it is just learning how it works. Which this site would be really helpful to start. I was actually thinking about buying the book, but since I know it is online, I will use that!! :)

So this project actually saved me a few dollars!!! Cool!

What Does Feminism Look Like?

http://www.badreputation.org.uk/2011/03/07/what-does-feminism-look-like/

This link has a lot to do about what we are working on in class right now. It involves image searching the word 'feminism'. It was an interesting read and it saved me some time for research. =]

Comparison of Two International Feminist Websites

I choose to compare, in class, two different feminist websites from around the world.

The first one I choose was from the UK. I choose it because it looked simple and not too busy. However, I scrolled down and discovered that, it was in fact, way too busy for me. I included a shot of it above, I mean, doesn't it look promising.

Well, the menu on the right side was quite helpful. And I could see that this website gave a lot of information. It just had too much text for me to concrentrate. I loved the idea of the F-Word Blog tab. You can get reliable factual information on the home page, but if you want articles with a more biased feminist perspective, you can have that choice.

The next one I looked at was something a little bit different. Just because I wanted to compare cultures as well. I clicked on it because I thought it would portray to my project I will do later in the semester. (On Visual Aids and Feminist Activism) And at first, I didn't like the layout, but I grew to like it as I explored it.

This website was not like I expected it would be, it was so much better. I am impressed with how 'high tech' the arab world is. It was so much better than the UK website!! And I got a lot more information, then I did at the UK site.

So overall, even if there is a lot of information, it is best if you keep it as simple as possible. I am definitely coming back here for my project!

Community

This is a picture I put up on Facebook to show I support Planned Parenthood.


It was a sign that read "I survived because of Planned Parenthood."


Within the first two hours, there was someone that wrote "what about the babies that didn't survive?"

Digital Divide && Connection to Gender Roles

This is part 2 for my 2/23 assignment. I found that Angie's assignment summary was about what women do online compared to what men do online.

She listed 2 facts that caught my eye at first. They were all related. And that is why I was so interested in them:

1. More men use the Internet to pursue hobbies; more women use the Internet to communicate with family and friends.

2. There are a greater number of women than men on social networking sites.

Digital Divide && Common Source

I found that this site was listed on many fellow classmates assignments. So I decided to start analyzing from this point of view.

This study was analyzing if gender was a role in influencing the internet. Women are found to be more 'online' so to speak than men. Does that make them influence the internet more? Although the articles says it does, I care to disagree.

The author defines influence

as the act or power of producing an effect without apparent exertion of force or direct exercise of command.

If women are more likely to be involved in the social network, what effect is that producing? What is it changing? And if the previous study we read is correct, and that men are sharing more political views over Facebook, they may be more influential than woman even on Twitter.

Overall, it doesn't matter which gender is on twitter or Facebook or the internet more. It matters what they do on it that cause influence. And if men are not on Facebook/twitter/internet as much as women, but when they are: they choose to make political statements, share current news articles and run more websites. Then they still have all of the influence.

[Picture source]

Gender and Facebook Reading

For class, we had to read "Got Facebook? Investigating What's Social About Social Media" which is a study by S. Craig Watkins and H. Erin Lee at the College of Communication (University of Texas-Austin).

Overall, the study was predictable as a regular Facebook user. The majority of people that use Facebook is college age adults (18 to 25) and the percentage users go down as the age goes up. Also, the majority of the study was done with Caucasians, which may bias the sample. The study also seemed to use college-educated people, this means the sample was most likely privileged, at least in class.

I was surprised at the average age of beginning Facebook, which was 22.69. Most of the people I knew started using Facebook during high school. So I thought it would be around 18. This was explained afterwards, saying that half of the people in the sample were introduced to Facebook at around high school age, but the other half were older. Another reasoning of this high age was the 'new' history of the website.