I can’t believe how fast this summer has gone. It’s slipped through my fingers, leaving me feeling a bit at a loss. I had hoped to have accomplished more…certainly to have written more. But for some reason, this summer I’ve found myself not at my most articulate. Words haven’t come easily…and thus the relative lack of blogging.
Last week I had occasion to go back through some of my older posts, looking for something I wanted to send to a colleague, and I was disheartened by how much more interesting my writing used to be, compared to what I’ve generated recently.
I think the biggest problem this summer has been the limited amount of interaction I’ve had with others at MSR. With Lili away for the past month, I’ve spent too much time sitting by myself in my office, writing code (which, I must admit, has been fun—it’s been a while since I’ve actually built something, even if it’s just an internal site for tracking all the information associated with the social computing symposium) and dealing with email. The real work of putting on a good event is inviting the right mix of people—it’s like holding a dinner party, but exponentially harder. So that’s taken up more time than I really had intended.
There are a lot of things bubbling around in my head, though—having to do with two main themes. The first is the kind of semi-synchronous presence that tools like Twitter and Facebook have made so prevalent. The other is the extent to which work and play are (or could be, or should be) intertwingled.
In a week, I’ll be aboard the Norwegian Pearl cruise ship, en route to Alaska. I’ll be cut off from email and Internet and phone calls…and I can hardly wait. I’m hoping that the break with communication technology, combined with the grandeur of the Alaskan landscape, will help me focus my mind a bit, and knock loose whatever it is that’s gumming up the works in my head.
After that, it’s back to Rochester—we arrive home on August 27th, whereupon I’ll be immediately caught up in start-of-year meetings (ack) and course prep. I’m teaching a course I love this fall—two sections of the introduction to multimedia and the web course—so prep won’t be onerous and neither will teaching.
So there won’t be much blogging ‘til then…and after that, my hope is that quality and quantity of writing output will increase significantly.
I always have mixed feelings about being on the same program as Lee Rainie from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. He’s totally amazing, and I love listening to him. But I hate having to talk after him, since he’s such a difficult act to follow…
Starts with a confession (‘because it’s Sunday’) that his initial proposal to Pew didn’t even mention libraries as potential users of the data—but they turned out to be the biggest consumer of their data. “The library-industrial complex is amazing to behold.”
Talks about how Internet use changes communities of learners. Cites McLuhan, and every technology having its own “grammar.” If that’s the case, their research indicates that the grammar of the Internet seems to be to create and foster communities.
93% of American teenagers use the internet!
Most notable gaps are age (young people use it more), education (increases use), disabilities (lower use), and language preference (new surveys on Spanish-speaking people indicate much lower adoption). Race is becoming less of an issue, at least from a cultural standpoint—it’s economic class that’s more important.
A growing number of broadband users see the Internet as a place to “hang out.” They also see the Internet as their most important source of news.
People have phones, but (surprise, surprise) the majority don’t use all the features they have access to. Partly they’re frustrated by the interface, but more often they just want phones to be phones. They have “feature fatigue.” (from an HBR article)
Women want maps on their phones.
Pictures are becoming a critical part of conversation and communication. (Yes! I”ll be talking about this.)
Wirelessness is more important as a predictor of active use of the internet than even broadband access.
55% of 12-17yos have profiles on social networking sites. 55% are users. These are not exactly the same 55%! Some lurk but don’t have profiles; some have profiles but don’t spend much time using the sites.
Girls use the sites to support and reinforce existing social networks. Boys use it to “meet new friends.” 2/3 of profile creators limit access to their profiles. They’re not indifferent to privacy.
Five New Realities
1) There are more people in more communities thanks to the Internet. 84% of internet users belong to an online community, including communities that pre-dated the internet presence. You can find the groups more easily online. Internet use is a predictor of whether people have joined any kind of social group!
2) Many communities with heavy online communities are highly socially meaningful. They often have a “real life” component. Online communities are tremendous places to build online capital.
3) New kinds of communities afforded by the Internet. The newer breed is built around individuals themselves. For example, communities that emerge when someone falls ill. (Or, perhaps another example, the community that arose around Jim Gray’s disappearance.) Communities around user-generated content. Around a blog post, aYouTube video, for example. We’re not bowling alone.
4) Communities behave in different ways. Groups are much more on “high alert” status, responding more rapidly to new inputs. Quotes Gillmor “If someone knows something in one place, everyone who cares about that will know it soon enough.” (I may have that quote wrong.) Talks about Howard’s idea of “Smart Mobs.” (Tells a compelling story about 30 kids being notified and arriving at the scene of an accident involving their friends—before the police got there. People customize information not just for a daily “me,” but also for a daily “us”. (Yes! Facebook news feeds, for example.) Librarians should think of themselves as nodes in these information networks.
5) People in groups tend to need other people. (“Who knew Barbra Streisand would be right?”) People who said the internet was useful in major life changes—34% said the net put them in touch with people who offered information and advice, and 28% said it helped them find professional sources. The internet, for most people, was tool to find other people. IN a world of information abundance, social networks and other people matter more and more and more. So, action item for librarians—you need to be a visible node in the network.
In conclusion…the people libraries want to serve are changing the way they interact with each other, and the way they learn. They’re more self-organizing and self-directed. They’re better equipped to capture and disseminate information. They’re more tied to group outreach and knowledge. They’re more tied to group insight. More attuned to friend and foe, competitors and allies, through scanning their networks.
I’ve been somewhat vague about the work I’ve been doing at Microsoft this year, for a couple of reasons. First, much of the work was vague…I spent a lot of time talking to people, acting as consultant and catalyst, rather than creating things. Second, some of the projects I worked on were (and mostly still are) still not public knowledge.
There’s one project, though, that’s really my baby. I conceived it, spec’ed it, and am in the process of seeing it get built. And I’ve reached an agreement with MIcrosoft about the IP for this project that means I can now blog about it unfettered. So, for those wondering what I’ve really been working on, here it is.
It’s called PULP…for “personal ubiquitous library project.” (It was originally just “personal library project,” but I added the “ubiquitous” so it would have an easy to remember name.) And it’s the result of mashing up features from social bookmarking tools like del.icio.us and CiteULike and LibraryThing, personal library tools like Delicious Library and MediaMan, and mobile scanning and annotation tools like Aura.
So, why does the world need another social bookmarking/library tool? I’m not sure it does. But this one is intended to address some problems I’ve had with the tools listed above.
First, it’s going to be an enterprise-based tool, that will be installed and managed on your own server. That’s because centrally-owned and managed social bookmarking tools present a problem for people working on non-public projects. I was made aware of how much of a public trail I can leave in my bookmarks when one of my students knew about my plans to come to Seattle before my department chair did—all because he’d noticed what I was bookmarking and how I was tagging it. When I started working here at Microsoft on competitive projects, I cut way back on my use of del.icio.us, because I was concerned that I might give away too much of what I was working on to competitors.
Second, it’s going the leverage the extreme coolness of Marc Smith’s AURA project to enable SmartPhone and PocketPC-based data entry. I love that Delicious Library and MediaMan let me use a webcam to scan barcodes. But that’s not useful when I’m walking through a bookstore, or visiting a friend’s house. I want to be able to scan in the barcode of a book with my mobile device and add it to my collection.
Third, it will distinguish between items that I have (or have access to), and items that I’d like to have but don’t. I love the idea of being able to browse a colleague’s virtual bookshelf…but it’s much more helpful to me if I know that these are items that s/he actually has and that I can therefore look at or borrow. That’s even more helpful when I’m in a bookstore, since I’ll be able to find out immediately if the book I’m considering purchasing is one that someone I work with already has a copy of.
That’s all planned for the first version of the system, which I’m hoping we’ll be able to deploy at RIT and MSR this fall so that we can do some research into how people use the system.
In the second version, I have a more ambitious plan. I want to develop a rich desktop client for the data that will incorporate p2p sharing, much like iTunes does for music. That way, even if my server is at RIT, and yours is at, say Yahoo, we can meet up at a conference and share items with each other. I can browse the stuff that people near me have marked as public, and I can share out items tagged for a talk I’ve given or a topic I’m studying. (I was delighted today when I came across this post describing how someone essentially turned iTunes into a paper-sharing tool.)
The way this is going to work from an IP and development resources standpoint is that MSR is developing the backend database for the service, and the mobile client will be based directly on the AURA client that will be made widely available in the foreseeable future. Everything that my students and I create—the UI, the web pages, the code to make the interface talk to the database—will be in the public domain. MSR is quite generously funding my students for this work, with sufficient funds for me to be able to get some great RIT students working hard on it all next year. So really, everybody wins. And I’m very grateful to Marc Smith and Turner Whitted at MSR for supporting this project, and making it possible for me and my students to continue working on it even after I return to RIT.
As we get further along in development, I’ll be posting more information about the project.
It’s not like I don’t have enough on my plate these days. Despite that, I’ve been made an offer I couldn’t refuse—to join the august list of contributors on TerraNova, the world-class blog on virtual worlds and gaming.
When my colleague Andy Phelps started working on a game design and development program at RIT several years ago, I said I had no interest in being involved. “Games really aren’t my thing,” I said. And from a professional standpoint, that was mostly true. From a personal standpoint, it wasn’t true at all. I’ve always loved computer and video games—from Hunt the Wumpus and Zork in high school through Pikmin and Katmari and World of Warcraft today.
As games have become more social and less solitary, however, they’ve forced my personal and professional interests into a point of intersection. And I can’t pretend any longer that I’m not interested in studying the social aspects of gaming and game development. So the invitation from TerraNova came at a perfect time.
I can’t begin to say how honored and delighted I am that they’re willing to welcome me—a relative neophyte in this field of study—into their ranks. And I’ll do what I can to carve out the time to post there on at least an occasional basis. I’m rather hoping that this will help me to get my blogging groove back, since I’ve not been posting much lately to any of the group blogs I’m associated with.
At any rate, my introduction and inaugural post are up and ready for your perusal.
This afternoon is a series of presentations by selected past grantees—including yours truly, so I can’t blog much. It’s worth calling attention, however, to the Girl Scout Girls are IT web site, which is really well done. I can’t find (right now) information online about their “big purple bus,” a technology-outfitted super-cool bus that they bring to various venues as part of their outreach. Great stuff!
This panel starts with Juan Gilbert from Auburn, whom I wrote about yesterday. He’s editing a new IEEE computer society “Broadening Participation in Computing” series. The inaugural issue will be in March 2006. This helps to bridge the “real research” gap. (The article announcing the series, linked above, is excellent.)
He also recommends a number of other publications, starting Communications of the ACM (ITWF PI Roli Varma has an article in the February 2006 issue on making computer science minority friendly). Other journals he mentions are Jorunal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, ASEE Journal of Engineering Education, International Journal for Service Learning in Engineering, Int’l Journal of Eng Ed, IEEE Transactions on Education. Most journals ask for suggested reviewers—and he strongly suggests that we use other people from this research cohort.
How do you make your research “count” for promotion and tenure? Funding helps enormously. (Amen.) As a faculty member, you have to do research, service, and teaching. Leverage your graduate students. (“Am I overworking my graduate students? No! I’m introducing them to reality!” :D )
Shows a Flash-based game he built to teach algebra with rap, hip-hop. The game is absolutely fabulous. I want this for my kids!!
Next up is Margaret Ashida from IBM, talking about increasing diversity in industry. Discusses an article by David Thomas on “Diversity as Strategy” in the September 2004 Harvard Business Review. It costs $6 to buy the reprint from HBR, or you can read the free interview with Thomas on the IBM web site.
Last speaker is Revi Sterling, whom I first met at MSR. She left Redmond for Boulder last summer, though, to become a PhD student at UC, and it’s great to see (and hear) her again. She talks about some of Microsoft’s initiatives, both internal and external. Getting businesses to look beyond the ROI-driven, quarterly mindset to longer-term intiatives with slow payoffs is a challenge. Focusing on concepts like “infrastructure” and “end-to-end solutions” gets more positive response from technology organizations. It’s about contextualizing properly. She encourages more creative thinking and bolder partnerships. (She’s amazingly articulate and poised, even in the face of often inaccurate criticism of “industry” generally. Makes me sad that she left Microsoft before we had a chance to work together more closely…)
I’m not blogging most of this, but I’m super-impressed by what’s happening with Auburn University’s Scholars of the Future program. Going beyond understanding why to fixing the problem is refreshing to see. And I really enjoyed the presentation by the PI, Juan Gilbert (despite his obviously inaccurate assertion that Auburn is the “flagship” institution of the state. ;).
One important takeaway was the value of supporting students’ attendance at Tapia, a conference on minority involvement in computing that alternates years with the Grace Hopper Conference on women in computing. (I’m going to Grace Hopper this year, and will be looking for ways to take as many RIT students as I can…)
Diana Oblinger, the keynote speaker today, is the VP of Educause—which has recently put out an e-book on this topic of “Educating the Net Generation,” which I downloaded last week but haven’t read yet… She’s got quite an impressive vita, including a stint at Microsoft. And she seems like a dynamic speaker, which is great.
She says she’s not going to talk about IT directly. She wants to help us understand more about the differences in today’s learners. We’re all products of our environment, she points out, and there are very different factors influencing the “Net Gen” (web, cell phone, IM, MP3s, online communities) than those influencing Baby Boomers and Gen X. She shows a chart shwoing the average amount of media exposure the “average person” will have by age 21. (Average starting where, I’m not sure…)
Talks about “neuroplasticity”—the brain reorganizes itself throught life. Stimulation changes brain structures, the brain changes and organizes itself based on the inputs it receives.
Who are these learners? (She notes these are generalizations, broad-brush portraits, and of course there are exceptions.) Five characteristics: digital, connected, experiential, immediate, social. (Her definitions of “connected” and “social” seem quite similar…)
Educationally, what does this mean for learning preferences? Peer-to-peer learning. Interaction and engagement (this doesn’t mean “entertainment,” or “easy,” which seems to be how Baby Boomers perceive it). Visual and kinesthetic—images, movement, and spatial relationships are important. “Things that matter”—they want socially relevant, problem-solving contexts for learning.
(Five-minute assessment: she’s great! and her slides aren’t awful! Also, it appears that I’m a NetGen mind in a Baby Boomer body!)
These are also time-constrained learners. 87% of college students commute, 80% work, 35% are adult learners, 31% of enrollment increases will be in adult learners. (Wow. These are stats I hadn’t heard before.) But much of what we do in education is not designed for people who are time-constrained.
She shows figure about children 6 and under consuming media. Interesting that “screen media” (which combines both TV and computers, things I see as very different) is one category, and “reading” is another. Much of what my kids do on the screen involves reading. Does reading only count if it’s books? If so, I don’t do much “reading” anymore.
“Interpretive flexibility”—meaning is shaped by culture, technology, our understanding of education.
Students are harbingers of social and cultural change. Back to the “connected” issue—the Internet is their primary communication tool. “Peer-to-peer”—she talks about social bookmarking! She mentions del.icio.us and CiteULike!! In my head, I do a happy dance!!! Wikipedia as an example of “distributed cognition.” Talks about the culture clash between traditional academia and “amateur culture.” (Implicit “wisdom of crowds” references—I’m currently reading that book, and have a post or two brewing on it.)
Another characteristic that’s emerging is “self-service”—people are doing more for themselves, like online banking, shopping, travel arrangements. It’s an obvious segue to self-service learning, as well as informal, organic, activity-based, self-activated, open-ended learning.
(Yow. I can’t keep up with her.)
She talks about Flickr, and shows screen shots. (!!!) She talks about how hard it is for her to go from her inherent preference for text to multiple media. (This is forcing me to rethink my current development project, which is good but also daunting.)
Time-shifting—from TV it’s a short hop to controlling other kinds of content delivery.
This is a move away from the traditional hierarchical higher ed model.
Now she’s talking about MMORPGS (she calls them “alternate realities,” which I find somewhat problematic). She shows numbers on amount of time spent on games, number of players, revenue for the industry. Points out the average age of an online gamer is 37.
Now she’s on to participatory media and culture. Cites estimates of number of blogs, blog readers, posts per day and hour (Lark, 2005 — don’t recognize the reference).
[I am beside myself with delight that the topics I’m most passionate about are being inserted into this event, and being done so by someone who’s so engaging and articulate.]
The cultural shift is towards networked, mobile, participatory. There are also different perceptions. Today’s students were born after the change curve had started its dramatic upwards curve, and as a result their expectations are different—they don’t expect to have 3-5 years to master a technology before a new one supplants it. (That’s an important point, one I’ve not heard made before. Academia has so not kept up with new technology, and the idea that we can or should spend 5+ years studying the use of a technology is becoming increasingly problematic.)
These interfaces are shaping learning. She talks about Alice in Wonderland—new technologies are offering that model, the ability to “fall into” these immersive virtual environments. Cites JSB’s “learning to be.” Points out that we need not just immersion, but also reflection. Need to be able to take a step back and think about how it worked. That combination is very powerful.
Shows some sobering figures on US higher ed generally, challenging the “we’re number one!” perception.
New critical skills for the workforce: expert thinking (identifying and solving problems for which there is no routine solution—pattern matching, metacognition), and complex communication (persuading, explaining, interpreting information; negotiating, managing, gaining trust, teaching, etc).
Key point: education is not equivalent to content. Lots of good points she’s making, but I can’t keep up.
If you sum up everything we know about educational research, you find that we get educational value from:
* challenging ideas and people
* active engagement with challenges
* supportive environment
* real-world activities
* social activity
* unbounded by time or place
Provides some interesting examples:
Games are fundamentally immersive (she points out it’s not just the graphics, it’s the gameplay that makes them immersive and engaging).
Shows a classroom just like ours—everybody stuck behind a big monitor. Contrasts to room (apparently at NCSU) with circular tables and laptops, designed for “built pedagogy.” A single focal point at the front of the room with chairs bolted facing forward—this forces a mode of teaching. Putting people at round tables says “we want you interact.” (Which is why we’re doing the symposium setup in rounds of 10, rather than classroom/lecture layout.)
Talks about NCSU’s SCALE-UP program (“student centered activities for large enrollment undergratudate programs”). This looks fabulous! Need to read more about it.
Emphasizes the need for more informal learning spaces. NCSU again—“fly spaces” in the student center, easily configurable for small group work. Glass matters—seeing people practice their profession is fundamentally engaging (I love this about the Golisano building at RIT).
Moves on to information literacy—cognitive, ethical, and technical aspects (gives props to librarians, who’ve been talking about this for decades).
What do employers really want from students, in terms of learning outcomes? It’s not being able to program in C++. It’s the more abstract skills like communication and problem solving (how many times have we heard this from our advisory board? but this isn’t completely true—often the technical skills are the baseline, and what differentiates two students with the same skills are those higher-level cognitive abilities).
Shows figures on satisfaction with web-based learning (study done at UCF); younger students are least pleased by the web-based environment. (She translates that to the young people wanting to have more social interaction, but it seems to me there’s more going on there. I suspect that some of it is that the majority of the web-based course management tools are horrendously awful, and younger people have higher expectations.)
She’s done. (Phew. That was an amazingly content-packed hour. I wonder how much, if any, got absorbed by the audience.)
First question—how do we convince our administrators to put in the kinds of collaborative spaces that she described? She answers that Educause is doing a lot more executive outreach to help facilitate this. They’re trying hard to raise awareness of the importance, but they need face time. They’ve got a book coming out in August on learning space design—will have to look for that. Like the NetGen book, it will be a free e-book.
(lunchtime!)
The first panel here is focused on disseminating research, and includes Andrew Bernat, the executive director of the Computing Research Association, Kathryn Bartol of UMCP, Bobby Schnabel of the National Center for Women & IT at UC Boulder, Eileen Trauth of Penn State, and Catherine Weinberger of UC Santa Barbara.
Bernat talks about “what goes wrong?” with getting women involved with computing research. He points out that finding a woman or minority takes more time (because they’re scarce resources), and faculty are often under the gun on producing research results. What do we do? “Make it easy.” Need to find the people who want to make a difference, and provide them with support—facilities, workshops, reinforcers. And if none of that works, bribe them. (Depressing note: He talks about a program where they did this, and it was really successful, but…only about half of the people participating got tenure. Ouch. What does that say about institutional commitment to these kinds of efforts to broaden participation?!)
Bartol discusses management-related publications and conferences where researchers can disseminate their work, the idea being that the ideas need to get out to business and management faculty who consult with industry. (Why not go straight to the trade press so people industry will see it themselves, though? Probably because there’s no reward in academia for publishing that way…)
(I think I’m going to come down with a serious case of powerpoint poisoning before this workshop is over…)
Trauth differentiates between direct interventions (contributing to practice), and indirect interventions (contribution to future research). When we publish in academic channels, we’re doing indirect interventions, helping to foster research by others that can build on what we’ve done. When we work directly with schools and businesses to implement the kinds of changes that our research results suggest would be useful, that’s a direct intervention. She tosses out a great line—“What good is power if you can’t use it?” So, for example, when asked to chair the SIGMIS conference in 2003, she did so under the condition that the topic be diversity. She also discusses ways she contributes to practice—teaching a human diversity course, giving lectures and presentations. For the lectures, she’s not always asked to speak about gender issues, but she brings those issues in by using her gender research as a case study in her discussions of qualitative research methods, etc.
Weinberger shares a striking factoid: women with college degrees in computer science earn 30-50% more than women with degrees in other fields, regardless of age. (Wow. She says her article will be in Eileen Trauth’s upcoming Encyclopedia of Gender and IT—would really like to see how that figure was generated. And yes, the encyclopedia is outrageously priced. :P On the one hand, I’d like to say you should ask your local library to consider buying it. On the other, I’m appalled by the price, even for a library, and wonder why this work couldn’t have been done as an open online publication…) Another interesting factoid from her article—women are more likely to see themselves as unable to complete CS work than any other field (including medicine).
She offers the suggestion that dissemination should start with teaching undergraduates, and also with teaching faculty. And she suggests that we put together a short guide to the research we’ve been doing in this field, geared towards busy faculty who don’t have the time or inclination to read through this body of work. A short, focused publication that could be easily and inexpensively disseminated. (What a great idea!) She asks “what if new NSF grant recipients were required to spend time online learning about our most compelling research results?”
Last up is Schnabel, talking about “Effective Practices and Dissemination.” One of the key areas of focus for NCWIT is “creating a national community of practitioners with a sustaining infrastructure,” which has involved creating alliances with academic institutions, K-12 schools, and industry/workforce. They’re still trying to learn how to make this an effective organization for social change. Becoming a partner in the alliance carries with it a responsibility to do more than just attend meetings and be “part of the club.” It looks like they’re doing some interesting things, and they’ve definitely got some great people working with them.
They’re doing a weird thing with questions—people have to write them down on index cards and pass them up, where they’ll be read by the moderator. There are fewer than 75 people in the room, so I’m not sure why they aren’t letting people voice their own questions.
(I stepped out to get some coffee, and apparently a heated discussion about how research proposals are evaluated, and how faculty are evaluated on research…trying to pick up the pieces of the conversational thread to see if I can figure out what’s going on.)
Ah…apparently one of the panel members (who shall remain nameless, as I didn’t hear the whole context and don’t want to implicate improperly) implied that research into underrepresentation isn’t “really research,” and that this kind of research doesn’t get faculty “fame and fortune” the way other kinds of research do. There’s clearly a cultural divide here between the technologists and social scientists. For the social scientists, obviously this is the “real research.” For computer scientists, it’s harder to make the case for this focus.
This issue has troubled me since my first interactions with the ITWF research community. So much of the research comes from the “outside”—people studying computer science/computer scientists without being a part of that world. I’m often struck by how non-conversant in basic CS concepts and terminology many of the social scientists studying underrepresentation are. But I think it’s true that it’s very hard for those of us in technology to justify taking time away from our applied research to focus on this topic. In many research universities, it’s far more important for junior faculty in technology fields to be doing research in their areas of specialty. The model at CMU, where Margolis and Fisher worked together, is one I’d like to see more often. (In that case, the CS representative was someone with sufficient seniority that they didn’t need to worry about things like tenure and promotion—but if that model becomes more widespread, it may become easier for less senior faculty to do similar work.)
There’s an interesting side discussion about the CS/IT divide, and the extent to which a faction of CS doesn’t see a value in IT. But when CRA goes to the hill, they talk about IT, not CS, because that’s where the money goes.
…and that’s a wrap. break time. back later. (today’s keynote on the “net gen” looks interesting, and I’ll definitely blog it)
For the next two days, I’ll be listening to (and participating in) a series of discussions on research into women’s participation in computing. The ITWF program, which funded my grant research into gendered attrition in IT, has funded a number of really interesting research and implementation programs, and many of the researchers will be talking today and tomorrow about their work.
Two years ago, I attended a similar meeting and didn’t blog it, because people seemed quite edgy about preliminary results being reported out. This year, however, I intend to blog the interesting things I hear—this is, after all, government-funded research, and the proceedings I received have no disclaimers limiting my ability to share the information. I promise to clearly indicate where results are tentative or preliminary, and to point you to the people you need to contact if you want more information.
Posts related to this workshop will have itwf 06 in the title, so you (and I) can keep track of them.
(It’s odd—I’m surrounded by a bunch of really talented, intelligent, accomplished researchers, but I keep getting this feeling that “this is not my tribe.” Very different from attending events more focused on social and collaborative computing. Nobody I’ve talked to here seems to have any idea what I’m talking about when I say “social bookmarking systems,” for instance—I keep wishing I’d brought a giant stack of this week’s Newsweek cover story so I could just hand it to them and say “I study this stuff.”)
Two years ago, I was thrilled when I received an invitation to Microsoft Research’s first social computing symposium. I had a wonderful time at the event, and found a lot of kindred spirits in the world of social computing research and development. I also made my first contacts with Lili Cheng and Linda Stone, who’ve gone on to be the best mentors anyone could ask for. Lili, who managed the social computing group at MSR (until she left to direct the user experience team for Windows Vista), was responsible for my sabbatical invitation.
Last year, with my plans to join the group over the summer well underway, I combined attendance at the second symposium with a househunting trip, and once again connected with people who amazed and inspired me.
This year, I find myself not just attending the symposium, but running it. Upon Lili’s departure from MSR, followed quickly by the departure of Shelly Farnham (who’d masterfully managed the event for the past two years), Marc Smith inherited the event and asked me to run it. The event takes place May 7-9 this year, and we’ve narrowed the focus a bit from past years. The two areas of emphasis for this year’s symposium are online “third places” and/or mobile social software. As in past years, we’ve split the group approximately into thirds—Microsoft & MSR, industry experts, and academics. We’ve also made a significant effort to bring in new names and faces; the repeat rate from past symposia is quite low (38/90 who have been to at least one of the events, only 19 who’ve attended both; those numbers are 23 and 9 if you look only at non-Microsoft attendees).
First, the bad news—the symposium is totally full. We keep the event small, both to foster community and to keep the cost manageable. Microsoft covers the entire cost of the event—facilities, meals, and transportation/housing costs for those presenting (and for doctoral students). Now the good news—if you weren’t invited, you’ll still have a chance to participate. We’ll be webcasting the event live (the panels and the closing keynotes, though not the “open space” discussions.) We’ll also have a live backchannel, probably IRC. (I was thinking about trying Campfire, but they’ve got a limit of 60 concurrent users, and with 90 participants onsite and an unknown number of external visitors, that’s probably too low a cap.)
I’m working on getting a public web page up with information about the event, including the schedule and participant list—with any luck, that will be available by the end of this week, at which point I’ll update this post to point to it.
This year’s event wouldn’t be happening if Microsoft Research wasn’t maintaining its commitment to social computing and open dialogs, and if MSN/Windows Live hadn’t stepped in to help support the cost of the event. Also providing some support were Channel 9 (and its new sister, on10), and MSCOM. (So you understand why the number of invitations had to be constrained, the cost of the event will end up being over $60K. Seattle’s not a cheap place to throw a party.)
It’s easy to hate Microsoft—there have been many reasons over the years (from business practices to blue screens of death) to do so. But it’s worth giving them credit for activities like this one, which benefit the community as a whole through fostering community and collaboration. Anyone who’s attended the past events will tell you this is not a marketing ploy, and that they got something of value of out of the experience.
Currently playing in iTunes: Nobody Else from the album “Los Lonely Boys” by Los Lonely Boys
As noted in the earlier entry, I’m on my way to Durham, NC, for an NSF PI meeting. (No, the grant research isn’t done yet. Yes, it was supposed to be done a year ago. No, I don’t really want to talk about it.) I was up painfully early this morning. Note to self: never to book a 6:30am flight on the first day of daylight savings time; the clock woke me up at what it claimed was 4am, but my body believed it was 3, and I’ll end up with an extra hour of jet lag.
I only got back from Rochester on Tuesday night (edging towards Wednesday morning), so it wasn’t much of a respite. Barely time to empty the suitcase, run the clothes through the laundry, and repack. The PI meeting lasts through Tuesday night, but I’m not headed home from there. Instead, I fly from Durham to Boulder (well, to Denver, where I’ll take a shuttle to Boulder), to participate in an NSF site visit of the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT). I arrive in Boulder Wednesday afternoon, the site visit is Thursday, and then I head back to Seattle that night.
At that point I get to stay home for over a week, after which I take a two-day trip to DC to speak about social information tools at a Knowledge Management conference, the details of which escape me at the moment.
Then I’m home, and in full-on crunch mode preparing for this year’s MSR Social Computing Symposium (more on that in the next post). Yikes!
Every year I seem to have two “crunch” times for back-to-back travel commitments—early spring, and late fall. This year is shaping up to be no exception. On the books for the next two months:
I was also supposed to attend an event in Santa Barbara, but it conflicts with the PI meeting. :( And I’m cancelling a commitment to speak at a KM conference in DC in April, because the travel is just too hard on all of us here in the Lawley household. And because I’m hosting this year’s Social Computing symposium here at MSR, and the planning will probably be taking up a good bit of time at that point.
Not as bad as some spring travel stints I’ve had, but busy enough that I’ll be glad when it’s over.
Last week, MSR put on its annual TechFest, which is basically a giant science fair that lets researchers show off their cool projects to the rest of the company. (Most of it is Microsoft-confidential, but a few projects get shown to the press—including two that my colleague here in the Community Technologies Group, AJ Brush, worked on.)
Though a stomach bug knocked me out on Thursday, I got a chance to check out some of the exhibits on Wednesday, and was overwhelmed by the brilliance and creativity of my colleagues here. Which was followed quickly by overwhelming self-doubt. “What the f*ck am I doing here?!” Seven months down (hard to believe), and not a paper to show for it.
That resulted in some deep consideration of what exactly I’ve been doing here, and I found myself thinking about all the connections I’ve sparked—between people in research and those in product groups, between people in different product groups, between people outside of Microsoft and those within. About the events I’ve worked to help make successful, about the meetings I’ve sat in and provided feedback and suggestions. I told Gerald a month or two ago—probably about when search champs happened—that I was finding myself to be most useful as a catalyst, rather than an creator.
Of course, that’s not what researchers are typically rewarded for. Being a catalyst is great fun, and it’s something I’m really good at. But quite frankly, it’s not enough.
[Ha! As I was writing this, I got a visit from another MSR researcher who’s working on a very cool imaging project and wanted to show it to me and get feedback. After seeing it, I realized there was a great possible connection with a not-yet-announced product over in MSN/Windows Live, and gave him the contacts for that group. That’s the kind of thing that I know adds value, but that you just can’t put on your CV! It’s also an example of yet another thing I can’t really blog, because the details of both the research project and the new product are still considered confidential. :P ]
The good news is, I’m about to embark on a project here at MSR that involves creation rather than catalysis. I’m going to be building (well, specifying and helping to build) something that I’m deeply interested in, and will then (if all goes as I hope) turn into an interesting ongoing research project as I study the use of the system in multiple environments. I hate, hate, hate that I can’t be any more specific than that, but I’ve promised the lawyers that I’ll keep my mouth shut about it until we at least file some predisclosure forms. (Please don’t go ballistic on me about the evils of software patents. The reality is that the patent system is broken, and all companies are doing what they need to do to survive in this climate. If I don’t file on this idea, it’s all too likely that someone else will, and will then prevent me from working on it. I agree that it all sucks, but it’s the reality of the current world of software development. Plus from a selfish CV standpoint, it sure doesn’t hurt to have a patent or two listed…)
This week was the fourth version of Microsoft’ “search champ” program, and the first one where I’ve been heavily involved in the planning (rather than simply being an attendee). It was a great meeting, with some amazing people providing input into new product development in MSN/WindowsLive. I got see to old friends (like Cindy and Walt), and be a fangirl (hi, Merlin!).
During the wrap-up session, when Robert Scoble was talking about designing tools that would optimize everyone’s syndication experience so that they, too, could read 840 feeds, I called him an “edge case.” He didn’t like that. Not one bit. But his defense was, to me, unconvincing.
Robert’s an “edge case” to me in this context because very few people will ever have the time or the inclination—regardless of how good the tools are—to read that many sources. Robert does not because he’s some freak of nature, but because he’s got a job that requires him to monitor activity in the technology community. When I worked at the Library of Congress, I had a job that required me to read dozens of newspapers and magazines every single day, looking for articles related to governmental initiatives. That made me an edge case. Most people don’t read dozens of news publications every day, and it’s not that they want to but simply haven’t found the tools to do it. It’s that they don’t have a need for that much diffuse information.
He felt I used the term derisively, which I didn’t. He’s right that edge cases often push us in new directions, and I’ve got a long-standing interest in liminal spaces (the fancy academic term for those in-between spaces where contexts overlap and new ways of thinking and acting often emerge). But in his reaction, he confused what I see as two very different things—edge cases and early adopters. In this case he’s both. But his response focused much more on how his early adoption of new technologies—from macs to blogs—foreshadowed broader adoption. That’s about being an early adopter, which is not synonymous with being an edge case.
So what’s the difference? To me, an early adopter is someone who recognizes the value of a new technology or tool before it becomes widely used or accepted, and often evangelizes it to others. They recognize trends before they’re trends, and are the ones who are always acquiring the latest-and-greatest technical toys. An edge case is someone who’s on the extreme edge of an activity, regardless of whether they’re an early adopter. Someone who reads 840 blogs is an edge case. But so is someone who reads dozens of daily newspapers, or runs 10 miles every morning. Their choices may influence our behavior—those edge cases are great at recommending things to others—but most people will be far more moderate in their behavior.
There’s a story I cite a lot when I’m talking to people about diffusion of technological innovation. Back in my early days as a librarian in the 1980s, online searching didn’t mean launching a web browser and going to Google. Instead, it meant connecting via dial-up to an online database and doing a searches with complex boolean operators. Librarians loved this, and decided that the whole world needed to learn the “joy of searching.” It was that whole “teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime” mentality. One day at a library conference, I heard a wonderful speech by Herb White in which he scolded librarians for this mentality. “I have no joy of searching,” he told the audience. “I have joy of finding!”
In that context of online searching, librarians were both edge cases and early adopters—much like Robert is with blogs and syndicated feeds. They’re edge cases because they do in fact love to search as much as love to find. They find it hard to believe that not everyone would want to learn arcane search syntax in order to improve their online search experience. But they’re also early adopters—they were finding things online before the web was born, and they continue to push the limits on how you can use online search tools (one of my most popular posts ever was a transcription of Mary Ellen Bates’ fabulous “30 Search Tips in 40 Minutes” talk from the 2003 Internet Librarian conference).
Anyone who’s looked at aggregated query logs from a search engine knows that most of the people doing online searching these days aren’t masters of the boolean query. They didn’t become like the edge cases. But they did follow the early adopters—just in a more limited way.
So, Robert, my point wasn’t that because you’re an edge case nothing you do is relevant to other users. Nor do I think being an edge case is bad (I consider myself to be one, too). But the people who follow your lead as an early adopter won’t do it the way you do. They’re simply not going to want or need to read 840 syndicated feeds. And to try to optimize the user experience based on the needs of edge cases isn’t, I think, in anyone’s best interest.
Ted Castranova has a fascinating post up on Terra Nova entitled “The Horde is Evil,” in which he argues that the Horde races on World of Warcraft are “on the whole evil,” and that this has moral implications for avatar choices:
I’ve advanced two controversial positions: that avatar choice is not a neutral thing from the standpoint of personal integrity, and that the Horde, in World of Warcraft, is evil. Nobody agrees, but it’s been suggested that the community could chew on this a bit.
So here’s my view: When a real person chooses an evil avatar, he or she should be conscious of the evil inherent in the role. There are good reasons for playing evil characters - to give others an opportunity to be good, to help tell a story, to explore the nature of evil. But when the avatar is a considered an expression of self, in a social environment, then deliberately choosing a wicked character is itself a (modestly) wicked act.
I don’t agree with Castranova (my horde character is a Tauren, a peaceful bison-like creature that lives in a Native American-inspired cultural context), nor do many of the commenters—but the issues he brings up are powerful and interesting, and the lengthy discussion in the comments is well worth reading.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the relationship between “real life” and “game life,” since I have personal and/or professional relationships with most of the people in my World of Warcraft guild, including both of my children. Castranova’s argument, in which he bolsters his argument by citing his 3-year-old’s reaction to his undead character, relates directly to those boundary-crossing issues.
When I was playing online on Monday, Joi said that he thought World of Warcraft was becoming the “new golf” for the technology set. I think there’s some truth in that, but it brings with it all kinds of additional social pressures and complexities, of which avatar racial choices are only the beginning. I think there’s some fertile ground for research in that boundary area, the crossover between the real and game worlds, and the extent to which they influence each other.
I just got an IM ping from someone who was curious as to what was in the pile of articles I’ve decided to bring with me on my trip.
Right now my mind is buzzing with questions and ideas related to social bookmarking systems (like del.icio.us or Yahoo’s MyWeb 2.0), information-seeking behavior, and information network formation, so most of my reading has at least a tangential connection with those topics. In no particular order, here’s what I’m planning to dig into tomorrow:
I’m also listening to Alberto-Laszlo Barabasi’s Linked on my iPod this week, and have ordered the book to be delivered to me in Rochester (I pay sales tax to Amazon if I have it delivered to me in Seattle, so it’s worth getting it while in Rochester and lugging it back!)
Y’know, I’d really like a tool to allow a select group of people to build a collaborative bibliography. Something like CiteULike, but with the ability to create a specific set beyond simple tagging, and allow it to be added to by specific people. Is there any such collaborative bibliographic tool out there? (Maybe I should poke around and see if CiteULike or Connotea provide that capability…)
I’m posting this as much for myself as for anyone reading the blog. Lately I keep coming across things that really force me to stop and think, and then they slip away and out of my attention radius. When they’re here in the blog, they’re less “out of sight, out of mind.”
Collin Brooke posted a nice piece tonight on “Blogging Practices, and I found his criticisms of academia to be right on target:
I’m constantly struck by how little we seem to understand or even talk about what it takes to publish, what publishing our work accomplishes (and in some cases, how little it can accomplish), what the real costs and rewards for our work are, etc. As I was preparing that talk a couple of weeks ago, it seemed like the height of obviousness to me to describe humanities scholarship as Long Tail work, and yet, I see indications all around me that we don’t want to think of our work in that way: our aversion to collaboration, our inability to aggregate, our obsession with celebrity, etc. Hell, I have to fight every day to keep those things at bay—I love to imagine being paid lots of money to keynote conferences, to have my work read and discussed far and wide, to be semi-famous. But that’s a Head reward system that disguises the more modest (but potentially longer lasting) rewards at the Tail end of things.
So, I’m in a strange place as an academic. I was recently paid money (“lots” is a relative term, I suppose) to keynote a conference. Unlike many academics, I have little aversion to collaboration or aggregation. But I am a tenured associate professor with a lab of my own, and I often feel like a stranger in a strange land no matter where I am.
Early on in my blogging, I wrote about aspects of synchronicity and collaboration in blogging, as well as my frustration with the fact that I seemed unable to produce original thoughts—that my skill was in synthesis rather than creation.
As time has passed (and I’ve gotten tenure, and some modicum of readership—though that’s been dropping lately with my relative paucity of posts), I’ve started to be able to forgive myself for my lack of traditional scholarly output, and to be able to value my role as more of a human aggregator.
I wish academia did a better job of valuing the kinds of skills I’ve got—sifting and sorting, connecting the dots and seeing the big picture, intuiting and forecasting. It’s not that traditional research isn’t valuable—it’s just that it’s not the only way to put education and knowledge to work. RIT is better than most schools in recognizing a diversity of scholarship approaches (basing its recent scholarship policy on Boyer’s reasonably broad definitions. But they’re the exception rather than the rule.
To the extent that I’m part of the “head,” the best thing I think I can do with that visibility is connect up more people in the tail. I don’t want to get stuck in an incestuous echo chamber of digerati blogs and conferences—which is perhaps why I took such pleasure in being at Internet Librarian, where I was learning every bit as much as I was teaching.
(Collin tagged his post with academy2.0, which made me smile.)
Ben Shneiderman, who was also at the faculty summit, is giving an open (to Microsoft employees) talk today on Creativity Support Tools. I’ve seen Ben talk before, and he’s a lot of fun. He’s put up a web page to support this talk, but I missed the URL. Will try to get it later, once the presentation has migrated onto the internal server.
He starts by saying he’ll be focusing on the topic of chapter 10 of Leonardo’s Laptop. (Which reminds me; I need to get one of my grad students to box up and mail me some of the key research books from my office, including that one.)
Quotes a participant in one of his workshops who says “I’ve spent 20 years thinking about collaboration, but only 2 hours thinking about creativity.”
Much of the literature on creativity doesn’t mention computers at all. This is a new space that he’s claiming. Not making machines more creative (AI approach), but developing/improving computing tools to make people more creative.
Heifferentiates between revolutionary, paradigm-shifting creativity, impromptu everyday creativity, and his area of interest, “evolutionary, normal science, music, and art, creative knowledge work.”
How do we enable professional workers to move a little higher up the ladder in knowledge work using creativity?
Talks about the difficulty of doing empirical research into creativity, and reviews some theorists in creativity research:
Tells about a student who sent him email saying “My PhD proposal is attached, can you tell me what you think?” No context, no definition of expectations, and no reason for him to look at it.
Highly recommends Csikszentmihalyi’s book _Creativity_ (1993) — not quite a software requirements document, but close enough to allow him to take the next step towards that.
(At this point there are a lot of comments and questions from the room; this is like a professor’s dream seminar enviroment—a room full of very bright and interesting people who are here because they want to be, and are enthusiastically engaged in what you’re talking about.)
Shneiderman proposes these eight activities:
Talks about each individually:
For search, we need not just effective basic search, but also improved multimedia search, overviews and previews, result set categorization and visualization, multiple session searches. (Gets a laugh when he says that if you can’t find something to be creative about in search that Google hasn’t done, you shouldn’t be in this business.) We need faceted search, and the ability to preview cardinality of results. (MSN Search folks, take note: you should watch this presentation on the internal resnet site.)
Consulting with Peers and Mentors: Prefaces by saying the next killer app is responsibility, trust, empathy. The problem with consultation is a lack of trust. Need negotiated expectations.
Visualizing data and process—refers to _Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think_. Many data types to deal with in visualization, scientific visualization is different from information visualization. Getting to networks (from trees) is the challenge.
Talks about exploration and discovery. Shows a photo of birds, asks people to answer the question “what’s interesting here?” High dimensional spaces are messy. You can’t be hunting unless you know what you’re hunting for. If you don’t have hypotheses and/or specific queries, you can’t explore effectively. In any field, peopel are trained to look at things in thorough, orderly way. He says we need to develop the same skills for looking at high-order data. (Can’t you argue, though, that those orderly ways can cause blinders?)
Shows a chemical table of elements in spreadsheet form. Anything interesting? Hard to tell. Shows it in a scatter graph, asks the same question. People note outliers and correlations. So, can we build an outlier detector? A correlation detector? (Ah…yes, it’s the outlier detector that’s interesting to me in the context of social networks. We do a lot with correlation, less with outliers…)
Demos Multi-V: Hierarchical Clustering Explorer. Displays demographic data using it. Very complex tool, but at least demonstrates clustering methods. Also provides some very nice correlation tools; this is a data set with 14 different variables relating to US counties. So…counties with a large number of young people have high unemployment. Decreasing #s of highschool grads correlate to increasing levels of poverty. These are not surprising, but you can find interesting second and third level correlations. For example, slight increases in income cause dramatic reductions in poverty. Also possible to find quadratic relationships, outliers, and other kinds of clusters and relationships. Biologists were particularly interested in how the tool could identify gaps.
This is a fascinating tool. Would love to play with this in the context of social networks, tagging behavior, etc.
He’s running out of time, so flies through the rest of the slides:
Free association—suggests Axon idea processor.
Exploring solutions: mentions the work of Michael Terry and Beth Mynatt at Georgia Tech. Create multiple versions at a time, not one at a time.
Composing artifacts and performances—provide templates and exemplars. Need better tools, for better presentations.
Reviewing and rpelaying session histories…record, review, annotate, disesminate. Treat histories as first class objects. Replay them, step through them, etc.
Adobe photoshop history tools…each event is a discrete component; we should be able to do that in all tools.
Disseminating results—need better ways to do this. (Doesn’t mention blogs, but that seems like an obvious tool here.)
Challenges for creativity work: Domain knowledge is vital, it may take years, individuals have highly varied approaches, and the theories (about support tools) are shallow, evaluation is difficult, need better ways to do triangulation and multi-dimensional representation.
Influencing our colleagues: Want NSF to incorporate creativity into existing programs, also encouraging a new NSF program on software tools and socio-technical environments to enhance creativity. (Hmmm…the “socio-technical environments” piece of that is intriguing.)
Mentions Richard Florida’s compelling argument about creativity as a potent economic driver.
And that’s all, folks. Wow. A lot of content packed into a short time frame, and a lot of great ideas to think about. These research talks are definitely one of the big perks of being here…
Jim Witte from Clemson University is here for the faculty summit, and is doing a talk for the community technologies group in MSR today. He’s talking about the lack of focus on sociological aspects of computer-based communication in the literature. Notes that there have been articles in the American Sociological Review in the past two years on everything from cricket to tulips, but not one on social impact or significance of new communication and information technologies.
I asked whether some of the problem is with traditional disciplinary boundaries—does it matter if it’s sociology or anthropology or communication or education? (Similarly, Lilia points out that these researchers are clustering in places like AoIR, rather than more discipline-focused areas.) Another attendee makes a comment about this being the difference between “what can sociology do for us” vs “what can we do for sociology”?
Jim suggests that we shouldn’t be isolating this research, we should be integrating it into the top journals in the fields. In part because of the hiring/tenure pressures, and in part (I think; this wasn’t said explicitly) because the field as a whole needs to understand and appreciate these increasingly important topics.
Someone suggests that much sociological research revolves around inequities, and that we need to identify the inequities in technological contexts in order to catalyze sociological research. When Lilia and I point out that there are lots of forms of inequality and exclusion in online contexts, he agrees, and clarifies that what he means is that we need to be focusing journal articles on those aspects if we want to be noticed in the sociological canon.
Jim moves on to talking about some of his web-based survey research. He’s been doing survey design work for National Geographic (here’s the 2005 survey).
How do their tools differ from others out there? Selective invitation of respondents can be supported, as well as open convenince sampling. Allows monitoring of sample development aparticipant response, including source of respondent. They can support complex skip patterns (branching) to tailor survey to respondent. Incroporates non-text material into questions and prompts (images, documents, audio/video). Allows tracking of respone behavior, including time spent on individual quesitns and use of the “back button” to review or change earlier responses.
(Hmmm…I need to talk to Jim and Roy about using their system for our NSF survey this fall.)
A statement that “this is how you think about X” sparks a great debate between the psychologists and sociologists about whether we “know” what’s going on in somebody’s head. One person says “if I don’t know what’s going on in my head, how could you?” Another says that’s absolutely not the case. Then we argue about the extent to which people, say, play a snippet of music in their heads to represent a genre. Several of us feel that this is not necessarily how “most” people do this—it’s something that’s based on learning styles (auditory vs visual, for example), or perhaps other factors (age? gender? education?).
At the end of his talk, Jim mentions some other interesting projects at Clemson, including “animated work environments” (AWE), which allows your work environment to physically change based on needs. (So, for example, your kids are using their computer to work on homework, and then want to eat dinner at their desk—can the surface change to protect the computer while eating?)
All in all, a really interesting talk with some great discussion surrounding it—this is exactly the kind of event and interaction that makes working here so much fun.
I’m spending the morning at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, an annual conference sponsored by MSR. It’s an invitation-only conference attended by about 400 CS researchers from around the world.
I’m not going to blog the whole thing (I’m not even going to attend the whole thing, since I have some meetings that conflict), but I will blog the ones that are particularly notable, starting with the kick-off event—a dialog between Bill Gates and Maria Klawe, the dean of engineering at Princeton.
Klawe quotes statistics saying that the number of jobs in CS is growing, salaries are going up. (I need to find out where those numbers came from.)
(Gates wants to know why physical education is the fastest-growing field in higher ed.)
Klawe send a softball question to Gates—“Are you finding enough people to hire in the US?” His response is an emphatic “no.” He says it’s not hard to find project managers in the US, but it’s much harder to find excellent software engineers.
She asks him to describe the ideal engineering candidate. He says he wants more emphasis on the basic underlying mechanisms of computers and algorithms. Then he veers into selection process rather than preparation, talking about the success of the intern program. Mentions the intern dinner—apparently they bring in 300 per night, not everyone at once. He says that they ask sometimes about other companies, and then describes Google as “faddishly hot.”
K: What’s your position on how interdisciplinary CS studies should be? Should students be doing double majors and application-focused coursework?
G: There are still plenty of pure CS problems—in privacy, security, navigatio of information. (Hmmm…I wouldn’t call information navigation a “pure CS” problem.)
K: These problems will only be solved if people work on them. We need funding for students to do so.
Her son is going into CS, but her daughter doesn’t want to. One of the issues that stops a lot of women and minorities from wanting to study CS is the image of the career and perception of what a CS professional is like. She says she knows it’s an exciting field that requires interaction, communication. So, how can we create a more positive image for our profession? What is Microsoft doing?
G: Microsoft can set an example of what kind of jobs these are, and how interesting they are. He says MS can promise people that within 2 years they’ll have the opportunity to move beyond basic development roles. If people really understood the jobs, they’d feel differently. He says he just “doesn’t get it” as to why people don’t have more interest in these jobs.
K: Notes the increased number of women who have gone into medicine and law in her lifetime. Points out that during that time television shows and movies have glamorized those careers. Why don’t we have the same thing for CS?
G: Well, if you took a movie camera into one of our buildings, it wouldn’t be that interesting.
K: That’s true for all of those other fields, too!
moves on to next question
K: CS is the only field in science and engineering in which the participation of women has been dropping. What would be more effective in getting women into these fields?
G: Women need to be visible.
K: (frustrated) We are doing that. It’s not working! Things happening on the grass roots level aren’t working. Every woman in the field is doing this. There has to be another way to succeed at this.
G: (Seems at a loss for a moment.) Mentions studies showing that we lose women at every step of the pipeline, and the problem with not having reached critical mass. He asks—is this different in Asia?
K: No. A few countries have high participation. Ireland, possibly because of the prevalence of single-sex education. Turkey, because students aren’t given choices, they’re assigned.
(She’s going from a prepared script, which causes some of this to sound really stilted and programmed.)
K: What are the areas you’re most excited about?
G: What’s happening in MSR is the most exciting, and the most interesting part of his job. TechFest is one of the “funnest” things on the Microsoft calendar. The TabletPC is cool; ev