Carissa Bunnell

I have learned many new things this term with this being my first Women’s Studies course. I have learned:

• how to better use Blackboard, such as embedding links and using the discussion forum better (saving writings as a draft and resuming them later)
• many concepts about the inequality that still exists in today’s society
• how products are designed are completely influenced by who creates the product not necessarily who the product is for
• what feminist pedagogy is
• the great contributions that women are making in technology (Culture Site project!)
• struggles that many women are still facing today with sexism or dealing with the “glass ceiling”

Those are not all of the things that I have learned but certainly highlights main points that I am taking away from this course.When I began this course I never expected to learn so much about how to use a blog and add so many features to my blog. Overall I met the course objectives, however I wish I had put more effort into and completed the Financial Analysis. That project seemed like it could have been very useful to me as the topic I chose was something I am going to do in real life this coming Fall.

I will continue to use my newly acquired knowledge of Blackboard as I finish my time up being a student at Oregon State, it may even come in handy in the future if my graduate program happens to use Blackboard as well.

For the Teach Project I brainstormed a few ideas around working with cell phones, content management sites, as well as working with digital cameras. I decided to do my project on how to create a PDF file out of a webpage and insert a live link into the PDF. Last summer I learned how to do this in my job and it has been very useful for me. PDF’s are easier than sending files via email and are more convenient. Another factor as to why I chose this is because even though I will teach how to do this for a website its a very similar process for other files such as Microsoft Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, etc.

The culture site project is complete! Finalizing the project wasn’t too difficult with adding images. The uploading was probably the simplest part of putting the entire culture site on my blog. Also, the peer reviews were very helpful as to what needed to be added in and things I simply overlooked. Many of my reviews stated to add in images which i did and think it added a lot to the pages.

For the financial analysis project coming up I have started to brainstorm the idea of using my trip to Europe next fall. It would be beneficial for me to look into exact figures and start to plan better. I look forward to the project.

Continuing my research on Pattie Maes has been quite difficult. There is plenty of information on her work that she has done more recently, but I mainly struggled with finding the culture parts and how that has played a role. I’m still working on the paper and struggling to get it to the word requirement. This project has required much more time than I thought it would. I had originally planned to be able to easily access the information needed, but it’s turning out otherwise.

Although I am having difficulties finding the necessary information I am enjoying learning about Mrs. Maes and Belgium. I think Belgium is a country that I have always overlooked when thinking about Europe however it seems to have a rich history and provides greatly for its citizens. Learning how rare Mrs. Maes work was in her field for the time astonishes me and is rather inspiring.

As I continue to do research for my culture site project I find more questions to ask about resources to use to find information so I was very willing to contact a librarian to ask for help. I went to the Valley Library to see if I could meet with Jane Nichols to ask her to help me find various resources in looking up Pattie Maes. I wasn’t able to meet with her so I followed the provided link to chat with a librarian. A lady from Tigard Public Library was available to assist me. I asked her to help me find a specific Time Digital article from 2009 that had a cover story on Ms. Maes. The librarian searched ArticleFirst and GeneralOneFile but was unable to find the article. She continued searching for me but still wasn’t successful. Although she couldn’t find the article she provided alternative places for me to search as she was continuing to search as well. Neither of us found the article, but she was offered to have the librarians here at OSU to follow up with me if they had any other ideas of places to search. I was disappointed that we couldn’t find the article I was looking for, but very pleased with the interaction with her. She was helpful and polite while working with me and I really appreciate her contacting other people to help search for the magazine article.

Pattie Maes is an Associate Professor at MIT and the head of the Media Arts and Sciences program. She is originally from Belgium where she obtained her Bachelor’s and PhD in Computer Science. Her areas of expertise are human-computer interaction, artificial life, artificial intelligence, collective intelligence, and intelligence augmentation. Ms. Maes is the founder and director of the Fluid Interfaces Research group at MIT. The group “designs new interfaces that integrate digital content in people’s lives in more fluid and seamless ways.” In order to gain more information and further research Pattie Maes I will look into the Fluid Interfaces Research groups website and her own personal site, which has an email provided that I could send her questions in the hopes of getting a response.

Finances on spreadsheet

Starting culture site project this week. Since I am traveling to Norway I am thinking of looking into a Norwegian female inventor or a female involved with technology.

The process to setting up a blog was more complicated this time. Adding the personalized appearance was easy and was something I had wanted to change since I first set the blog up. I’m unsure if I correctly set the categories up correctly, but I did my best to follow the instructions.

Now that we are really getting into the course I need to look into the 3 big projects for this course and start to gather more ideas and information on them. Especially the culture site project which is the first project. By the end of this week I plan to have that mostly done.

Teach project- I need to look into more to get an idea.