Advertising STEMLinks

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It was interesting to delve into the world of online advertising this week. Nearly all the options that will generate traffic for STEMLinks involve significant upfront expenses. While Google, Yahoo and Bing claim that I can spend as little as I want, I found that if I set my daily spending limit to $10, my ad loses out to other higher bids for the same keywords. The story is the same with social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Online directories like DEX, Yellowpages etc required me to purchase a membership before I could place my ad. The other option that will generate relevant website traffic would be websites and online magazine related to educational products/programs/information. These also required me to purchase adspace. Free advertising options were limited to webrings and reciprocal links. The challenge with both was that the webmasters prefer to link to websites that have well developed content, and the STEMLinks website is not fully developed as yet. However, it was good to learn the various options I have for promoting STEMLinks online.

Education and Information – Part II

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Since the core of my activism plan (STEMLinks) is a web-based, virtual mentoring program, I decided to create an online lesson on best practices in virtual/web-based mentoring. Virtual mentoring is becoming increasingly popular since it is more flexible both in terms of time and place, unlike traditional face-to-face mentoring. I found quite a few virtual mentoring programs – MentorCloud, MentorNet, WitSon, CanTEEN, EngineerGirl. A common thread in the successful virtual mentoring programs was a well designed web platform that addressed privacy and security concerns while providing an easy to use communication and management platform. This would be an important point to keep in mind as I develop STEMLinks.

Education and Information project – Part I

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In working on creating the online lesson/how-to for the STEMLinks project, I unearthed a wealth of information on mentoring. Search strings like “STEM mentoring” and “mentor training” returned a number of websites that had great information on the types of mentoring, what makes a great mentor etc, and also how to design, create, operate and evaluate a successful mentoring program.  I found http://www.mentoring.org/ to be a very useful resource that I can draw on even after I complete this course.

Gendered marketing

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This week’s reading about looking at LEGO through gendered lens provided positive reinforcement for the choices I have been making with my daughters. I’ve rejected the idea of gendered products, avoided pink and purple like the plague, and actively promoted gender-neutral toys and activities, and TV shows and movies that portray strong female characters. I was also happy to learn that research has shown that boys and girls are far more alike than different in their cognitive abilities, and the differences that do exist are trivial. To me, it says that nurture, rather than nature, plays a stronger role in developing my daughters’ visual-spatial abilities. As Caryl Rivers and Rosalind Barnett say in The Truth About Girls and Boys: Challenging Toxic Stereotypes About Our Children, I can provide the counterbalance to the overwhelming barrage of gender stereotype messages from media and marketing, by simple actions like choosing to play baseball with my daughters instead of playing with a cooking set.

Creating the Financial Analysis

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The past 2 weeks were focused on creating a budget for the Activism plan. I was not too surprised to see how drastically the financial requirements changed between the very rudimentary budget outlined as part of the Activism Plan write up and the detailed financial analysis. I was, however, pleasantly surprised to see the number of options for funding that were available. I certainly did not expect to see small grants that were in the order of a few thousands of dollars, but I found that there were plenty of those. Most of the small grants were intended to help schools purchase classroom supplies or enrichment material. Another piece of learning from Weeks 5 & 6 was how to write a grant application. There were plenty of examples online on what made a good grant application.

I also expanded the STEMLinks project a little to include monthly BlogTalkRadio shows – interviews with women in STEM careers focused on career advice, with live Q&A, so students can call in and get their questions answered by an expert.

Activism plan – brainstorm

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Mindmap - Activism plan Brainstorm

Ideas for Activism project

  • Write to advertisers questioning the gender stereotypes perpetuated by their product advertisements.
  • Create a social media campaign (facebook, twitter, linkedin etc) where people talk about their observed gender inequity of the day.
  • Create a website that consolidates the stories of women in STEM, current and past, their work and their lives. This can be a resource that schools and colleges use to inspire girls to pursue STEM careers.
  • Build an online portal that connects women in STEM careers with women who are taking STEM majors in college. The portal acts as an online community/forum of women in science where college students can get career advice, mentoring support, inspiration etc.
  • Organize women-only STEM contests and/or workshops at community colleges.
  • Organize networking events where college students get the opportunity to meet with and talk to women in STEM career paths.
  • Campaign to colleges and universities to a) create a hiring plan that will increase the percentage of female faculty in science and engineering tenure track positions, and b) put in place programs that will create an equitable workplace for their female staff.
  • Campaign to colleges and universities to create a program that encourages women in STEM industry career paths who want to switch to academia

Research and Developing the Resource Database

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This week’s goal was to have an outline of the Activism Project ready and start gathering data that will be used to flesh out the details of the project.

The following question will guide the development of the Activism project over the upcoming weeks: What role should higher education institutions play in promoting more women to choose careers in STEM fields?

I will try to keep a global perspective (as opposed to focusing on the American landscape alone) as I gather data. The sociocultural aspects of the gender bias in STEM are a necessary component in formulating strategies that will be most effective in closing the gender gap in a given cultural context.

I did not face any technological challenges in this week’s assignments. Zotero was a very intuitive tool to use, which made the process of data gathering and categorizing very easy. The bigger challenge is in whittling down the vast amount of research data that is available, and creating a coherent argument that will support the Activism Plan.

Getting Started

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This is my first time using WordPress (I use Blogger for my personal blogs), and I found the set up process to be reasonably straightforward. Compared to Blogger, WordPress gives the user more advanced features to control content editing and publishing. Blogger, however, has a much simpler interface, which I find more intuitive to use.

The Links/Blogroll feature has been disabled in the newer (3.5 and higher) versions of WordPress. According to WordPress documentation, the Links Manager needs to be installed as a plugin on the server for it to be available on the client side menu.

Setting up an email signature was also simple. Google has a simple user interface for creating email signatures. I have used it before, so I knew where to find it.

I had not used the Windows Narrator functionality before, but a quick search on the internet got me the Microsoft documentation on this. However, I found it frustrating to use the Narrator, mainly because it would switch to reading out the controls that the mouse pointer was hovering over. I often use Adobe’s “Read out Loud” functionality for PDF files, and like using it.