Wow, this has been a crazy term. This class was extremely informational and I learned so much! I knew about the gender pay gap and things like that but I never realized how bad it was. I learned so much about STEM careers and it makes me really sad that I switched out of a STEM field, but it was just too hard for me. When I have kids I am definitely going to open their eyes to STEM careers at a young age.

My favorite week was the LEGO week, I grew up with LEGOs so it was awesome to learn more about them and get class credit for it!

I also learned a lot about how my computer is here to help me not confuse me. I never knew you can get your computer to talk to you, I use it all the time. It’s awesome! And I learned a lot about how to set up blogs, which is really important in my field. I could use it on my resume.

I probably won’t continue this blog after this term. I already have another blog that I barely write in, so I don’t think I need two.

After researching all about Kevlar I found it interesting that a woman discovered it. You don’t see a lot of women chemist so that was awesome. But I don’t think I would change anything about Kevlar. Its a really great product and best of all it saves peoples’ lives.

Some of my greatest dreams are: getting a high paying job, a nice house, and a nice car. Those are my ultimate dreams. My realistic dreams include a MacBook Pro and a really nice Bluetooth speaker.

I thought adding photos to my Cultural Research project was pretty self explanatory and really easy. The hardest part was finding the copyright of the photo.

The Gender Lens project looks really cool, I can’t wait to start on it. My experience with LEGOS starts when I was a child. My older brother was really into them and had buckets and buckets full. He would always give me the less cool pieces and take the awesome ones to make cooler things than me. One time he wanted to organize them by color and decided to outsource and make me do all of it. He had about 3 and 1/2 tubs full of them. I didn’t get too far.

The most difficult part of this process was actually writing the paper. I think I should have chosen a different subject, there wasn’t a whole lot of information of her early like or even the process of her invention. Once I finished writing the paper, I feel the process of putting it one line wasn’t bad at all. I followed the directions that were outlined for us and had no problems.

I decided to live chat with a librarian. This was an interesting experience. I found it a little difficult to phrase my question without any background information so I asked a basic question. Once I finally got in contact with the librarian she was so caught up on my original question she wouldn’t listen to my other questions. She also gave me a link to a Wikipedia article.

I was the second person in line and was told my wait time was about 1 minute. I sat there waiting for about 15 minutes. While I have no problem with this because I hoped the librarian would spend that much time with me, that was not the case. After about five minutes of the librarian looking for more information she told me her library was closing soon and to resubmit my question. I resubmitted my question, was told I was 3^rd in line and to wait 15 minutes so I stated to write about my experience so far in a different window. I was away from the screen for maybe 3 minutes I was checking back every now and again to make sure I didn’t miss my turn. Apparently I did. And they kicked me off. So I went to submit my question again and now chat was no longer available. This confused me because I thought they advertised 24 hours a day 7 days a week. The next best thing was to email my question. So I did that. I should get a response within two days.

While I think this idea of being able to talk to librarians without having to be there in person is really awesome, I am a little confused by it. At first I was shocked that I was actually talking to a real person from Oregon. In my experience when talking to someone on live chat it is either a robot or someone in another country. I was also a little disappointed because the librarian gave me a Wikipedia article. I also understand that the librarian I was talking to has a job to do and regular business hours I wish she didn’t take my question if she knew she didn’t have time for it.

I found that Google Scholar was the most helpful; I have also found that there isn’t as much information as I thought there would be on my woman inventor. Most of the databases didn’t have any information on her.

Mary Dixon Kies was the first American woman to apply and receive a patent from the United States Patent and Trademark Office for her technique on weaving straw with silk to make hats. Kies was born on March 21, 1752 in Killingly, Connecticut. Her culture is different than mine because she was born in the mid 1700’s. Things were a lot different back then. At this time the Naploeon wars were going on. Napoleon was at war with many European counties and the United States wanted to stay out of it. Therefore the US stopped importing European goods. The US government told the citizens to start manufacturing goods themselves. This is when the hat industry boomed because women needed to wear them while working in the fields.

Mary Dixon Kies’ technology was her technique on weaving straw with silk to make beautiful hats when a need for hats was important.

I didn’t really find any of the links given in step 3.3 helpful. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for and what interested me. I finally Googled “women inventors” and was given a large list of women. I chose Mary Dixon Kies because she was the first woman to receive a patent. This was a big deal because women were not allowed to own property and this stopped them from applying for patents and such. Kies opened a door for women and it is extremely inspiring.

For extra credit we had to set up an RSS feed. I have read and heard about RSS feeds in other classes but I never realized how easy it was to get. First I logged into my Google account. I found the News tab (which I never knew existed) and searched for “Gender and Technology”. I scrolled to the bottom of the page and in the footer was the RSS link. It took me to another page that just looked like a bunch of jumbled characters. I copied the URL and went to my blog. From there I went to the Widgets tab and added the RSS widget. In that widget I pasted the URL and titled the feed “Gender and Technology” and clicked save. I think these headlines will be a great starting point for finding news on Gender and Technology. Sometimes the headlines wont be relevant to my topic but it is interesting to see what is going on in the world. I did see an article that we used in this weeks reading about the California governor signing a bill to allow equal pay. And there was another article, Computer science is now the most popular major for women at Stanford University, about how Standford is closing the gender gap in computer science. This would have been a great article for this weeks readings because of the video we watched about STEM careers.

This week it was fun to customize my blog. I went with an OSU theme just because I feel it is appropriate. I’m not sure I did the Categories section correctly. I had to add a post in order for them to show up on the side bar, but now you can see these post. Other than that I had no other problems setting up my blog.

This is where Gender Lens goes.

This is where Financial Analysis goes.