Okay, so it’s not quite “dinner with Larry Lessig,” but today I spent some time with the US Public Printer, Bruce James. In addition to overseeing the US Government Printing Office (GPO), he’s the president of RIT’s Board of Trustees. He brought about a dozen members of his management team along, as well. Our department was their last stop on the tour, so I didn’t expect they’d be paying a lot of attention after a long day of touring.
I was in for a surprise. I talked about our new XML course sequence, which got approved today by our grad curriculum committee. (Well, the first three courses; I still have to write the fourth.) It includes an Intro to XML course that focuses on DTDs, schemas, metadatas, and general XML concepts, an XML Transformation & Presentation course that covers XSLT, XSL-FO, XPath, XPointer, and XLink, and an XML Programming course including tools for parsing XML, and web services approaches. The last course will be a “Semantic Web Seminar” where students will tackle a real-world information problem and develop an XML-based solution.
They really got it. They were scheduled for a half hour with us, but stayed at least an hour, asking questions, making suggestions, and appearing genuinely supportive and enthusiastic about the curriculum. I think we’ll be talking more about partnerships—which is really exciting. I think there will be some great co-op opportunities for our students, as well.
On a side note, I was the only woman in the room. Me, three male colleagues, and (at least) a dozen male GPO executives. Hmmm.
Well, not really just with Microsoft. But I liked the alliterative title.
This morning, I attended a breakfast sponsored by the Upstate New York Chapter of the Association of Women in Computing. They hold this breakfast annually to announce the selection of the IT Woman of the Year. Given that we have Xerox and Kodak in town, as well as the University of Rochester, and a plethora of tech-related businesses, there are a lot of amazing women in this town, and a long roster of impressive candidates for this year’s award.
The winner? Our department chair, Eydie Lawson. Woohoo! It was a well-deserved honor—she’s built this department from the ground up to the amazing, vibrant place it is today.
After the award ceremony, there was a keynote address by Bonnie Robertson, whose title is “Director, Partner Organizational Development, Microsoft Business Solutions.” I was prepared for a morning of software evangelism, but ended up very pleasantly surprised.
Bonnie, who has a background in sociology, talked about societal trends driving innovation, and her talk set the stage perfectly for the kinds of social software curriculum development that I want our department involved in. Nothing she said was hugely groundbreaking—but she was saying it in front of the people whom I most wanted to hear it. She talked about the growing number of “faceless interactions and transactions” that we all have to deal with, and the resulting increased desire for community and connections. Swinging from high-tech to high-touch…but, eventually, to high-tech-touch. She ended by saying “How do we adapt? Foster relationships and trust using technology.”
All in all, it was a lovely morning. It’s not often I get to spend time around hundreds of other women in technology. And when that pleasure is combined with watching someone you admire win an award, and hearing a good speaker…well, it was an awfully nice way to start the day.
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