It has been a busy couple of weeks but I think I finally have all of my schoolwork done. Over the course of this class I have learned how to set up this blog, how to set up a news feed, how to communicate with the school librarians, and how to effectively conduct research from OSU’s library and Google Scholar.

I learned several theories on why there aren’t more women in STEM fields and read about ways to encourage women to join these fields starting at a young age. It was interesting doing research on a specific product, the Easy Bake Oven, and finding out some of the gender expectations of that toy. Each week presented insight into different tech fields and it was great that we incorporated gender into those discussions. Most recently I read about how venture capitalists invest much more money into men’s start-ups even though research indicates that diverse teams fail less often.

Finally the financial analysis was very helpful to me because my project involved my future education plans. I actually greatly enjoyed all aspects of this class and am very glad that I enrolled. I am not sure that I will continue using this blog but I will use concepts learned from this class, such as spreadsheets and research skills, in the future.

I have been having a difficult time finding information about culture, statistics, and gender in Austria in late 19th-early 20th centuries. Lise Meitner was born in 1878. I first tried Answerland chat and asked about online information regarding the culture of the time period. The librarian named Iris directed me to the OSU History resources page and suggested I search JStor. I browsed through both for awhile, but was not really finding anything helpful. OSU also has a chat feature so I asked about statistics. Laurie has a contact in Germany that may be able to help, so she passed my email address on to her. I was very pleasantly surprised to be passed on to a librarian in a different country. Hopefully I get a response before Sunday. I will update when I hear from her.

The databases that I have found most helpful so far is OSU’s 1search, I have also used Encyclopedia Britannica, JStor and EBSCO. I plan on checking out some of the other resources like OSU’s newspaper database and Statista.

Creating a news feed is an excellent idea and I will definitely utilize mine. It is convenient to have relevant news articles listed in the sidebar. I tried to select the RSS button, but that took me to a page with a bunch of words and symbols that I am not savvy enough to understand. It was much easier to select the news topic that I want and copy the address at the top of the page. Ultimately I liked the choices that “women and technology” provided.

This week’s experience was more challenging than last week. I am a complete beginner at blogs and while following the directions, I sometimes did not know what I was doing until looking at the finished product. I like the layout I chose and I am able to customize it to my liking. Currently, my pages are horizontal and in the vertical sidebar. Hopefully, once I figure out if the horizontal bar lists subpages, I will eliminate the redundancy. Overall I am enjoying learning the features of this blog.

My social media usage can easily be described as passive. I have a Facebook account, but rarely make any posts, so setting up a blog has been a new experience. It is actually very similar to posting in the discussion forums for class or writing an email, although it does contain many more features and options. As we delve into the depths of our blogs, I am sure I will discover something interesting or challenging.

Email communication is something I have slightly more experience with, but with the advent of social media and new developments in cell phones, my email use has waned tremendously. I do not believe I have ever set up a signature before, and if I did, I was probably in junior high. It would have consisted of something pretty juvenile and unprofessional. Thinking about it now, I do see how it is a helpful tool in the professional world and will continue to use it after this class minus the link to this blog.

Finally, the text to speech tool is probably not a resource I will be taking advantage of again. One reason is that it will pique the interest of my two year old, and he will inevitably want to “help” me with my school work. Second, I get too distracted by the unnatural pauses and pronunciations to properly focus on the material.