-Spreadsheet-making skills

-Learning more about using Delicious (bookmarking tool)

I think a lot of what I learned in this course that turned out to be unexpected came from the interaction with my peers. I gained more insight into the way that other people interact with technology like blogs, computers, and so forth. I didn’t really have a solid idea before of what others’ experiences were with these–I just kind of assumed that everyone else was as familiar with using tools like WordPress as I was.

I feel like I met the course objectives–I’ve certainly developed more awareness about science and technology and how it interacts with women and women’s issues. I hadn’t really thought about many of the things that we discussed in a gender-lensed way before, but I definitely learned a lot, especially doing the Culture Project, where we had to consider the way that women in other cultures lived their lives.

I hope to keep this all in mind as I continue my chosen career path, Graphic Design, which involves a fair amount of technology use. I’m interested to see what it’s like for women in this particular career, which sort of toes the line between a technological career and a career in the arts, which are two areas that are traditionally identified more with men and women, respectively.

tiny house via tinyhousedesign.com

I would like to someday build my own non-traditional home. I’ve considered both earthships and tiny houses, and it seems like a tiny house is a small initial investment with the benefit of mobility. However, even though an earthship costs more initially, you have the benefit of more space (in case you someday want to live with more people than just yourself, or raise a family, or get a dog even) and also the built-in self-sustaining greenhouse, water filtering system, and room for wind- and solar-power generators.

Other dreams include but are not limited to:

-Owning and operating my own alpaca ranch

-Running my own graphic design studio

-Living in a tree house

Sanghvi came up with the News Feed feature of Facebook, as well as several other features that allow users different methods for connecting with people and businesses all over the internet. Recently she has founded her own web startup, Cove, a tool that lets people collaborate on projects through the site Dropbox.

I think that Indian culture differs pretty widely from American culture especially concerning women–though technology, entrepeneurship, and IT are some of India’s largest-growing industries now, few women have access to technology, the internet, or a technological education: India’s literacy rate is at 39 percent for women versus 64 percent for men (Women’s Education in India, October 1998). However, as Sanghvi is an example of, more women are getting into tech fields–the number of “women engineers graduating from ITT Bombay has grown from 1.8% in 1972 to 8% in 2005.” (Caroline Simard, Anita Borg Institute).

There may be some slim chance of interviewing Ms. Sanghvi, but it’s very slim, as she lives in San Francisco and seems to be very busy. It might be worth-while to make an attempt at contacting her via email, though, because there aren’t so many resources about her viewpoint on the internet, and I think it would be interesting to find out more.

The set-up itself was relatively easy. The WordPress user interface is very easy to use–dragging and dropping, checking boxes, etc. There is nothing really mystifying or difficult about it–again, great for making blogging accessible to people who maybe aren’t already entrenched in the world of computer programming or html and other languages.