There are disappointingly few people in this room, but the panel is a great lineup:
It’s wonderful to hear these accomplished, articulate women speak.
Ride and Swift both do an overview of the depressing statistics on the underrepresentation of women in STEM education and careers.
Swift points out that our educational offerings are failing to engage girls (and boys) in science. She says that dramatic reform typically doesn’t come (from government) unless there’s a cataclysmic failure, a train wreck. The problem they’re talking about here is a quiet disaster, and hasn’t galvanized a response. She criticizes the assumption that if we focus on the needs of girls, and create separate learning spaces for them, that we shortchange boys. The point is to create complementary environments that are designed for learning needs, not to create an either/or dichotomy.
Packard talks about key approaches. You need to make science interesting through hands-on activities. Very few primary education teachers have science or math degrees, so their comfort level is low for teaching this material. His company has been developing materials to support teachers and increase their confidence in teaching science and math. He points out the problem with the lack of visible role models for women and minorities. They’ve been working in Philadelphia to highlight real people in scientific jobs to help change the perceptions of kids.
Last speaker is a high school science teacher who’s quite engaging. She’s taught at an all-girls’ school, but now teaches at a co-ed school. She asks her students every year to draw a picture of a scientist. Even in the girls’ school, these 7-9 graders almost always draw men with stereotypical ‘mad scientist’ characteristics. She’s never had more than 22% of her students in a given year draw pictures of women. Cultural perceptions aren’t changing. Even her school, which is highly supportive of her work and speaking, has only now (after 11 years) thought to have her speak to her colleagues about these issues.
She makes an important point about the extent to which the girls she teaches perceive their math and science skills as being weak. They’ll say they’re not good at math, when their grades contradict that. But once they’ve convinced themselves that “math is hard,” they start opting out of science and math classes.
An audience member—Paula Stern—asks what opportunities are out there inciting girls to involve themselves in math. She also plugs NCWIT’s upcoming town hall meeting.
Rafanelli makes a great point about kits and toys for teaching science—to attract girls, they need to be social. Girls want to do things with their friends, and if the kit is designed for one person it won’t be as attractive. Ride points out that science itself is collaborative and communicative, and the teaching tools need to reflect that.
Packard talks about the importance of contextualizing science education so that girls see the relevance to things that they care about.
Packard also says his experience is that if you don’t test something, it doesn’t get taught. If you’re going to test, you have to test everything—not just literacy and math. Rafanelli says that very few primary teachers do “real science” in their classrooms, because they’re having to teach to the tests, and the tests don’t include science. (They’re not arguing for the value of testing—they’re saying that if you’re going to have testing, you can’t have it focused so narrowly and still have broad education.)
I’m not quite sure what the title of this panel has to do with the description they’ve provided, but the lineup of speakers was interesting enough that I wanted to check it out.
Westlake talks about the NAB conference—notes that HD was a huge focus, but the conference seemed light in terms of people.
(The moderator is extraordinarily annoying. I suspect he may have been a used car salesman before he became a radio announcer.)
Programming, search, playback, monetization—these are the important aspects of video that the AOL guy identifies. He leaves out things like “creation,” of course, because this panel is clearly about the Internet as a broadcast tool. (The description begins with the outrageous line “The Internet is finally emerging as a true entertainment medium.”) The world is divided up into “content owners” and “consumers.”
Burnett says the “new primetime” is 9-to-5, because so many people in offices have broadband access and use it constantly to access content for personal reasons (chat, email, shopping). But there’s “nothing to watch or do,” he says, which is what he sees as his job to remedy.
(Must. Not. Speak.)
Am looking around the room…once again, I seem to be the only person with an open computer. The free wifi has disappeared, much to my chagrin, but I’m using Ecto to write this so.
Moderator raises the “user generated content” flag—“what about YouTube? Will it make you more accountable?” Mark Burnett says he thinks YouTube is great. Why would anyone who’s a professional content maker fear user-generated content? In the end, it makes you better at your job, which is to give the advert-watching public what they want. And there are incredibly talented undiscovered filmmakers out there, who are using YouTube to get things out.
Burnett claims that the Intenret will allow us to know everything about who’s watching what. The complete disregard for privacy issues here is stunning. He dismisses those trying to block this kind of surveillance as blocking inevitable progress. “Of course we need to know exactly who’s watching.”
Burnett again: “Who would buy a computer without Intel? They’d be crazy to do that!” (Oy.)
AOL guy says “Version 1 of the internet was about typing in a URL and going to what we think of as an immersive experience.” (Huh?) New profiles are people who aren’t interested in going to a URL and being in the environment you create—they want the material made available to them (widgets, gadgets, etc). I think what he’s trying to describe is the aggregation process—people wanting to pull in your content into “their” space (MySpace page, etc). Ah, yes. Now he uses the “Web 2.0” term.
They’re all convinced that text gives way to audio which gives way to video—and that everything’s about video. Why would anyone want audio when they could have video? (And, implied, why on earth would they still be bothering with text?)
Blair gets tagged on DRM. “Unfortunately it’s gotten a bad reputation.” Notes that the Sony root kit was a big factor in making the perception more negative, but says the root kit was not DRM, and that those shouldn’t be confused.
AOL guy says this is a non-issue, that we just need a “rebranding effort” around DRM. All DRM is intended to do is establish some business rules. If you get it right, you can have new business models (like pay-per-view).
Burnett says he’s not concerned about illegal downloads. “Nobody up here is missing any meals as a result,” he points out to laughter. The opportunities to sell more content are massive, he says. Bigger than ever.
“It’s gone from the information superhighway to the content superhighway,” says the Intel guy.
The AOL guy says they’re building an interactive programming guide to online content. Search and browse becomes the organizing principle for finding interesting timely content. (That’s not an organizing principle!)
At this point I think I’ve heard enough. I’m off to take a break before the last panel of the day.
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