Interdisciplinary Computing Blog

No Minced Words & a Few Sniffles Were Detected at UX Speakeasy

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa C. Kaczmarczyk) — Fri, 05 Jun 2015 00:56:00 +0000

Some people were feeling emotional at last night's UX Speakeasy. If the amazing artwork didn't get you, the starry sky would have done it for sure. It was a lovely outdoor venue at SILO in Maker's Quarter in the heart of downtown San Diego. Perfect setting for this particular event. Last night was primarily a going away celebration for Aaron Irizarry who is one of the founding members of the group.

About 3 years ago, Aaron was one of 13 women and men who decided that San Diego really needed to build community for UX (User Experience) professionals. I've been told there was a feeling that

something was missing - people worked in UX in San Diego but didn't know each other, didn't hang out together, didn't realize there were quite a few jobs in UX, didn't recognize the opportunities to build a career here in UX.

Clearly they were on to something because in no time the group was maxing out space in larger and larger venues. These days we have to regularly put limits on monthly meetings in the range of 80-100 people because it's hard to find space to fit everyone interested in attending. The original group of 13 put themselves out in pursuit of a vision, and according to a tribute last night, Aaron was in the thick of all the early activities, taking leadership positions sometimes on short notice. In those days, there weren't the teams of volunteers and enthusiastic members there are today.

So when Aaron spoke about his experiences here, and said to the crowd "Be grateful you have a community of people you can connect with on a regular basis" I wasn't surprised to see some people looking almost teary eyed.

A secondary, and related reason for the meetup last night was the coincidentally timed release of Aaron's Book "Discussing Design". An overarching theme of his conversation about it was the importance of learning to have the "right" conversations. By way of example, Aaron explained how community contributed to the appearance of this book. He said that a casual conversation led to a blog post, which led to a conference proposal, which led to the book being written. Things happen when we share and explore ideas, pursue opportunities and do it with others in community.

Sometimes it wasn't clear to me when Aaron was speaking about the book or on a wider scale, but it doesn't really matter because the point is the same: it's critically important that technical professionals learn how to communicate better about our work. When people speak in buzz words or stock phrases no one knows what is really going on.

Aaron said he wanted to vomit - or something to that effect - when someone says "Can you make that pop more?". Rather...find out: What is working, not working exactly? What is it that makes you feel it isn't going to work for our persona?

Never one to mince words, Aaron continued,

"We need to set the ground work for those conversations. We need to learn how to talk about our work. It doesn't matter how skilled you are, you'll just be another talented asshole".

Although he was focused on Design, I was thinking more broadly. Conversations are hard; confrontations suck (that's Aaron again being direct about what we all know). I'd like to read Aaron's book because it appears to be about the topic of setting the ground for those hard conversations. I'd like to read Aaron's perspective on the matter. I'd like to see how it is similar and different from other writings on technical and science communication.

Bringing the conversation back around to why all 80+ of us were there last night, Aaron wrapped up his farewell remarks by reminding everyone that they need to understand the value of this community; it's not just a monthly party. It's an opportunity for support and finding new ways to frame important conversations.

An Innocent Visit to a Women in Tech Group Leads to An Unplanned Time Warp

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa C. Kaczmarczyk) — Fri, 15 May 2015 22:11:00 +0000

Why are we still asking the same questions about women and technology?

Somewhere along the line when I wasn't paying attention, I passed through an unseen door into a place where I'm now looking backwards as much as forward when it comes to women in tech. I have been noticing this for quite some time but it really smacked me in the face a few weeks ago when I attended a meeting of a new, small, group of mostly tech industry professionals. Women, the vast majority of whom were in their 20s and 30s.

Without planning it, the few of us who were not Millennials found ourselves clumping together randomly throughout the evening. Not all at once, but over and over I found myself having similar conversations with post 40-somethings about differences in our perspective about the issues and concerns of women in tech. We compared notes about what happens when you've been around long enough to see what lies beyond the ideal of a meritocracy in tech.

The larger group formed, from what I can tell, rather spontaneously, as a result of a few women wanting a smaller more intimate space for women than currently exists in larger social & networking groups. This was their second meeting and part of the conversation was about what topics they cared most about. Creating a female oriented space. Work-Life Balance. Designing Your Environment (where "environment" is broadly defined to refer to "world" and "life"). Several people noted that they weren't into some of the more traditionally male associated networking activities that center around "hanging out and drinking and kegs".

Now that I find myself a holder of "institutional memory" I am having weird flashbacks.

Back in the 1980s (the oh so distant past when it comes to tech) I remember having very similar discussions from the context of wanting to break into the tech industry, to be accepted for what I could do rather than what I might look like (i.e. female). Business wasn't about social activism was it? I flip flopped from wanting to be one of the guys in order to be accepted, to wanting to have a place to talk about why that approach never seemed to really work. Determined to succeed by being the best technically and assuming that if I ignored my gender everyone else would have to as well.

Anyone remember Andrew Dice Clay? The guys in my group of developers thought he was hysterical and watched his misogynist Stand Up at off site socializing events, checking with me to see if I was going to fit in by laughing along with them. I remember "Lisa, what do you think? He's funny, right? ... See, Lisa is ok with it". I was offended but didn't say a word. I had lots of reasons. Reason: I needed a job. Reason: I should let things roll off. Reason: I was afraid of not being accepted. However, I was a feminist outside of the office. I once took off for a weekend to attend a rally in Washington DC and when I came back, someone found out, and two of the guys refused to speak to me for weeks. It was a lousy way to tackle work life balance.

There was a divided opinion at the recent women's meeting about whether it was better to go along with male dominated structures and systems, or whether it was better to take explicitly women focused approaches when working for change. The arguments pro and con were the same ones I heard 25 years ago. The concerns about the effect on men were the same ones I heard 25 years ago. The implicit fears about what taking a stand or speaking out would mean for one's career were the same ones I heard 25 years ago.

Several of the women at the meeting worked for a company that makes a cutting edge tech product for athletes. They were discussing their jobs enthusiastically. One of the women listening to them pointed out that the demographic for that company's products is 18-30 year old males. A discussion ensued about why that was, and if the company could expand their market demographic in order to stay competitive. No longer the only player in their market, the competition is heating up. The entire group discussed what men or women might do with the company's products. No one in the room (that I remember) had bought the product for themselves, although a few had bought it for a male they knew. It seemed clear to me that here was an opportunity to do something good for business and for women in tech by, at the very least, changing the product's marketing.

As I later surmised, fears of rocking the boat are sometimes subtle. There wasn't much enthusiasm for altering the existing product or marketing. So I asked if any of the women working in this male dominated tech company on a male oriented product, had any thoughts about the contradiction (?) of their employment situation while we were sitting here in a group explicitly devoted to supporting women in the tech design business?

The initial response was a shocked look and a pause. Then "We have to focus on our target user". Oh, to know history! In a competitive environment, that phrase is the reason many initially successful companies decline and become irrelevant. Nothing related specifically to gender there; it's a business and marketing basic. Yet someone added, unprompted and dismissively : "It isn't a business issue". I had to restrain myself from beating my head on the table.

Sadly, that wasn't the last of my throwback moments. Later in the same discussion someone said, as a reason for not changing the existing product / marketing: "Women aren't interested in technology". As Millennials love to say: OMG.

If I had ever been in doubt about whether or not there were still serious issues for women starting out in tech, (and for the record, I wasn't), the fact that we are having the same conversations, the same fears and denials as we had in the 80s would have dispelled them.

By the way, in the 1980s I remember women who were then in their 40s and 50s saying the same darned things about how they were hearing many of the same darned questions and conversations they heard in the 1960s about women with career ambitions in business.

Oddly enough, I initially attended this meeting not knowing if this was the right place for me. It had not so much to do with the idea of a women focused group, but more because of the fact that I felt so much older than most of the women there. I have experiences and perspective that only come with having been around the block a few times. I wasn't sure if there was a place for me in this group of women. How ironic. After decades spent as one of very few women in my tech world, I found myself one of very few mid career professionals in a room full of tech women. Neither situation is ideal or particularly comfortable.

Well...I come away from that meeting with more questions and more to think about than I came in with. But one thing I am more sure about than ever: as long as people (women or men) are still asking the same questions about women and technology in a male dominated environment, groups like this one are needed. I hope we can find a way to move forward so that 25 years from now the current group of women in tech don't find themselves having the same deja vu.

The San Diego Women's Hackathon Codes++

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa C. Kaczmarczyk) — Tue, 28 Apr 2015 04:00:00 +0000

Just over 65 young women descended upon several computer labs and their adjoining classrooms at California State University San Marcos on Saturday. Yes, it was the third instantiation of the San Diego Women's Hackathon. The event was organized and implemented so that everything appeared seamless by Dr. Youwen Ouyang, a Professor in the Computer Science Department, and Shauna Ruyle, a marketing consultant and Cal State San Marcos graduate. They were supported by approximately 10 student volunteers and 18 adult mentors, many of whom were themselves technical women.

The Hackathon has been growing at quite a clip since I wrote about the inaugural event a year ago, as witnessed in part by the growing list of sponsors, which included the Gormally family, Intuit Corporation, Equinox Center, Girl Develop IT, 4BoneHealth and CompTIA. Students came from as away as Riverside County and the south side of San Diego proper. Grouped into teams, and given the choice of two coding tasks that aim to make the world a better place, they hit the ground running.

Sporting my "Media" badge I spent the day zipping around talking to the participants, student volunteers and mentors. Much of the time however, I hung out and observed the dynamics of the coders that were so noticeably different from the dynamics in the computer labs I've spent so many hours in over the years.

The coding challenges were supplied by two of the event sponsors: 4BoneHealth and the Equinox Center. The teams that chose the first challenge had to create an app or game to educate their peers about the importance of getting enough calcium - and how to do so. The teams that chose the second challenge had to create an app to help people learn about the current drought in southern California. As if to encourage conversation about the usual lack of precipitation, Saturday it rained all day.

According to the official website, Hackathon participants were age 16 and up. However, I'm pretty sure I saw two girls who looked to be about 9 and 11. They were both firmly attached to mice and keyboards and one of them was right smack in the middle of a group of older participants as they all plotted and strategized. Go Girls! In addition, there were at least a few women who were returning to school to study computer science after having spent some years working in other occupations. They too were seamlessly integrated into their teams.

So why did these women decide to get up in the dark, drive as much as an hour or more in the rain to hang out on a college campus? On a Saturday? The slightly older ones had a variety of reasons, but many of the younger first time participants said things like this: "I had nothing else to do" "My teacher told me about it" "I'm going to take a class in it". Interesting.

Would they have come today if boys had been participants too? "NO". That much was quite clear. One of them added: "You mean to a normal one?" Hmmm.

A few hours later, what did these same, younger first time participants have to say? "At first it made

no sense, but now these lines of code make sense". "It's cool". Aha...

Many of the groups spontaneously formed into organizational patterns that closely mimicked a technique known in pedagogical circles as Pair Programming. Well researched, this cooperative approach to learning to code has been shown to have many benefits for learning. Especially in many non-traditional populations. Read: women and girls. Yet, in traditional classrooms there is often resistance to Pair Programming because it defies the stereotypical solo, competitive, programmer behavior.

The vast majority of the groups I observed functioned amazingly well, without overt or even subtle power plays and jockying for dominance. I watched them resolving differences of opinion by sharing

and compromising, rather than having one person aggressively attempt to take control. If you have spent any amount of time in the sometimes anti-social world of male dominated tech, you know just how unusual this can be.

There were poignant moments. I spoke with one participant who seemed a bit sad. She told me she was "passionate about everything" related to engineering and computer science and felt that she should know already what aspect of these she wanted to pursue. Mind you, this young woman was in high school. We talked for a few minutes and I hope that by the end of our conversation she was able to view her wide ranging interests as the valuable and often unique interdisciplinary perspective that it is. In our globally interconnected technical world, we need young women like her.

There is a lesson in that encounter for those of us who have "succeeded" and now want to nurture and mentor those coming along after us.

At the end of the day, everyone piled into a room to eat dinner and watch the project presentations. Each group got up on stage and made a pitch to the audience and the judges. They fielded questions from the judges about their technical choices, most difficult moments, how they resolved team challenges and why they made certain design decisions. Every group had completed a significant portion of a project, even those groups whose members had little to no prior coding experience. They were justifiably proud of themselves. I noted as well how virtually every group made sure each member presented a portion of their pitch. It had been a very long day but energy radiated from the stage.

I asked many of the participants if they would attend another hackathon? Yes...definitely, absolutely, I can't wait. But not if boys are there. Why not? They just looked at me like I was slightly odd for even asking.

Fortunately, the next San Diego Women's Hackathon in October is a mere 6 months away.

UX Speakeasy Confessions

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa C. Kaczmarczyk) — Fri, 03 Apr 2015 00:30:00 +0000

I just have five grand

Make me an iPhone UI?

Who am I, Steve Jobs?!

Ponder it.

Deeply.

It should resonate at a sub-cellular level.

Not yet? Were you there last night? No matter. It will come to you.

This motivational Haiku (5 - 7 - 5) was the product of the Black group's UX Confession at last night's

San Diego UX Speakeasy meetup. Their task was to discuss and divulge about experiences when "The person who hired you wanted to design it them-self" and report back out to the larger group.

No more needs to be said. It should all be as clear and satiating as the ever present snow melt flowing from the Sierra Nevada range.

Get back to me with your revelations. This team took the Silver (2nd Place) award so you know their creation was profound.

One of the other groups contained a recruiter who was no doubt the inspiration for that team's Bronze (3rd Place) win. Unfortunately I can't report what they said because it was so deep I was awash in the avalanche of buzz word nouns liberally dusted with high powered adjectives and superlatives. Superbly done team Bronze!

I can only presume (hope) this was the Purple group whose discussion and presentation task was around "Your new client or boss insisted that UX and UI were the same".

AKA: A statement leading to The Resume Kiss of Death.

Oh... Bronze winning Purple's job descriptions were an April Fool's Joke. They were, right?

Then there was the Gold (1st Place) winning confessional entry. Most appropriately it went to a team

that tightly and with laser focus captured the essence of the Crazed Boss. That person we all know who doesn't understand ... well you decide:

The essence of this group's meme was captured shorthand in a chirpy UX Speakeasy twitter feed post: 5 pm Friday Product Manager says: Design it Enterprise social mobile sexy it has to pop design it and code it by Monday. No Sweat

Poetic in its own right isn't it? I think their prompt was "Your boss wanted the UI to be as intuitive as their iPhone". Oh wait... that sounds like the iPhone Haiku. Perhaps it was "The person who hired you wanted to design it them-self". No wait... We used that on already. Should we have? With only a little imagination it could apply to "When you got negative user feedback and a manager said "the user opted in, they asked for it!". But maybe closer to "Your product team insists that epics and user stories are the same".

Incredible how so many of last night's confessional prompts apply to so many situations with so little cognitive effort.

Having thought at great and complex length about the matter, I suspect that the actual cue was: "When the product manager wanted mockups before any requirements were defined".

Keep pondering the meaning of this profound instructional creation and get back to me with your revelations. Especially if your memory of the evening is somewhat altered from mine. After all, it isn't often we get such an educational and deeply stimulating experience wrapped up in the guise of something as innocently innocuous as hanging out at an Irish Pub.

But don't sweat the little stuff: If you don't see all the pieces falling into place - ask around the meetup attendees. They all seemed to get it. By the way: last night was our 400th meetup. Something to be very proud of. We've grown in a few short years from 13 starry eyed visionaries to some 4 digit and growing kick butt professionals. Cheers!

SIGCSE2015 Comings & Goings in New Directions

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa C. Kaczmarczyk) — Sat, 07 Mar 2015 17:01:00 +0000

It's that time at SIGCSE, when the sheer volume of coffee and unhealthy food is starting to catch up with me. This morning's egg and cheese on bagel put me over the top. Thank goodness I am not having a cholesterol test any time soon. However, all that protein is good brain food for processing the deluge of activity of the past few days.

There have been some real patterns. I started my teaching career in the community college system and I have never lost a feeling of affinity with them. So I really noticed this year that the Community College contingent is out in force at the conference. The palindromic ACM Committee for Computing Education in Community Colleges (CCECC) has been swooping in to help community college teachers network with one another, work on curriculum development in cyber security, talk about articulation with CS2013 curricular guidelines, host a large networking lunch, and give presentations and workshops in a way that I haven't seen in all the many long years I've been coming to SIGCSE. If you are a community college faculty or know some community college faculty in the computing field, and want to find like minds, I'd definitely recommend dropping them a line. They are active all year, and from what I've been told are planning on ramping up opportunities to stay connected.

There has also been a lot of talk about the enrollment surge at many if not most CS departments in the US. I don't have the full picture yet on what the situation is like outside the US, but all but one person I have spoken to from the US has told me they are experiencing record demand for CS courses. Great on one hand, highly problematic on the other hand because personnel and resources are so strained.

I attended a panel on the subject of the enrollment surge and capacity problems yesterday. The dominant theme was stress and worry. There are many ways to respond to the jump in numbers and many of them are not healthy for students or faculty. The way in which different institutions respond is tied to many things including institutional historical context, what part of the school the department is in (Arts & Sciences, Engineering, Business etc), attitude of administration, budgets, public or private. It is clear however that already there are some short sighted and non sustainable responses such as requiring overloads, increasing class sizes dramatically, enrollment caps and GPA minimums, eliminating non-major classes and electives.

What I didn't hear, and this worries me significantly, were creative think outside the box ideas for strategically tackling the capacity problem. It's hard to think creatively and strategically when you are being pressured from all sides on a daily basis to take on more and more. I also noticed that there was a divide in the audience about whether or not this boom is simply the third Bubble, or permanent as a result of economic changes and the ubiquity of computing. When asked, 1/3 of the audience said they thought this a Bubble, 1/3 said long term/permanent, 1/3 had no idea.

Whether or not you think the boom is a short term phenomenon or not is important because it affects how you react to it. We also have to look at history. We've been here before; if you were around in the 80s you remember the enrollment surges then and similar responses. As a result of historical memory and contemporary experience and research on the subject, we know that diversity is negatively impacted when we blindly fall back on a "best and the brightest" set of class and programmatic filters. Yet another reason to find a way to get the mental space to come up with creative responses. And to be proactive about sharing those ideas.

I'm on an active search to find people willing to speak out about healthy and creative ways to address the capacity surge. If you have ideas, whether or not they've been implemented, especially if your idea is different from the run of the mill ideas, contact me.

On another note, I'm noticing a generation gap, so to speak, among those at the conference who are plugged in to social media as a mode of communication and those who are not. If you can hold onto your seats until June, you can read in my next ACM Inroads column about why you should pay attention to how communication about our science is taking place on social media. But meanwhile, I'll point out that there is an active Twitter feed going about this conference #SIGCSE2015 and there you can read a somewhat random but interesting and often informative stream of info about things going on. More importantly, you can get a sense of what people consider important, what they choose to share with others. This matters. Taking the pulse of the community is important to understanding what people care about, what their perspective is, where they are headed.

But when I meet the twitter folk, they are almost always the younger contingent of the SIGCSE conference crowd. Sure, perhaps predictable, and I can only say "YES KEEP COMMUNICATING!"

For the rest of you, those for whom social media is not your best friend and constant companion, consider coming up to speed with some aspect of it. If you want to be plugged in to current and future thought leaders and decision makers and rabble rousers alike, this is a place to go. There is a whole aspect of SIGCSE going on virtually. I've met several new and interesting people via SIGCSE twitter exchanges the past few days. We've then met in person. People I'd never have met and perspectives I would never have heard. I value all these perspectives. I can, and do, plan on bringing what I have heard into the in person meetings and committees I attend.

Meanwhile, I'm going to get out of this chair and go to...lunch. I hope there is lots of leafy green salad.

Mind Stretching at ACM SIGCAS (Computers & Society) Meeting

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa C. Kaczmarczyk) — Thu, 05 Mar 2015 05:16:00 +0000

Hidden Near a Freeway Old Meets New

As always, my SIGCSE (ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education) week hit the ground running. Barely had I gotten to my hotel room and hooked up with my roomie than she and I were plotting and planning. So far this year we have not blown up anything or needed to call hotel mechanics. Such a shame.

My day today started off with a bone chilling walk to explore the Kansas City area in search of...whatever. Bone chilling mostly because it was below 20F and I didn't have winter clothes. My eyebrow had just about frozen together along with the freezing of my knuckles as I kept whipping out my camera to capture something just too good to pass up (see archaeology picture above) when I ran into three guys with no jackets at all (they must be natives because they didn't look half as brittle as I did in my fleece jacket) who directed me to a local independent coffee shop where I recuperated while supporting free trade coffee.

Some time later I found myself (by design) in the SIGCAS meeting (Special Interest Group on Computers and Society) which traditionally takes place the day before the start of the SIGCSE Technical Symposium. One interesting presentation after another about incorporating socially beneficial projects and activities into the computer science curriculum. Some projects were very local and some were global. From Latina community concerns to water scarcity allocation modeling to Bangladesh. By the end of the afternoon all sorts of ideas were flying through my head.

For example...

What makes a "Good" computing professional? We're talking "good" in the sense of socially beneficial, rather than technically good. More to the point, how do we know? How do we evaluate this term? (Do we want to evaluate it? Define it?) It's interesting to think about this because if we want to encourage the integration of socially / environmentally beneficial considerations into the very heart of the curriculum, how do we know we are doing it well? If we want computing professionals to integrate a social consciousness into their work how do we determine what that looks like? Or, do we even want to do this? It is worth pondering from a first principles perspective.

How are Codes of Conduct interpreted across cultures? Several global organizations such as ACM and IEEE have codes of conduct that professional members are asked to adhere to. It hadn't occured to me until today that this could be tricky due to differences in cultural interpretations of what is ethical. The idea was planted in my head because one of the presenters today said a segment of their students (economically disadvantaged, from some developing nations) said the hardest part of these Codes to adhere to would be the prohibition on taking bribes. Really? The hardest. Well, when you think about cultures where taking bribes is endemic, and business is done that way, ... sure it might be really hard to imagine bucking the system. I ask myself...how might one determine how "bad" this activity really is? Might one for example need to follow the chain reaction effect of individual bribes? How bad is it if it gets things done? Whoa....

We know that story telling, making content personal, is an effective way of making material (academic in this case) engaging and accessible. Some programming languages, (many?) don't, by their very nature, lend themselves to story telling. Java comes to mind. Python. Scratch? As opposed to a language like Alice. So, how might we talk about incorporating story telling into teaching introductory programming? This sounds like a really interesting challenge. Can it be done? I'd love to see ideas kicked around about this.

I gotta say that this was one dynamic meeting. The group made some decisions about action items to take, which, darn it, I missed due to having to boogie off to a meeting of the ACM Education Council. However, I'll find out and report back on this at a later date with a followup.

Tomorrow, the SIGCSE conference starts. Turbo charged. Stay tuned.

The Fact is, Sticking Intently to Facts is Not Enough

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa C. Kaczmarczyk) — Fri, 13 Feb 2015 08:01:00 +0000

Maybe there was a time in my life when I believed that science, that logic, that being rationale was what would lead people to make the "right" decision. Especially about how the world worked and how it could work. Because once you had all the facts lined up, the answers about what to do would be clear. I believed the real problem was that people just needed to be shown the facts. Facts were neutral and told the truth of the matter. I learned that in great part from my dad, for whom logic backed up by facts ruled when it came to decision making.

Dad loved a good debate, especially when it came to science - he was an academic to the core and he loved to tell you what he thought was the logical thing to do based on science and logic. He wanted to hear your side as well. If you had greater solid evidence than he did, he'd graciously concede. But it was very difficult to win an argument with my dad because he never took on a topic until he had more facts and data behind him than most people could ever hope to marshal. When dad advocated for a position he usually came out on top. If he didn't have the facts, he'd defer the conversation until he could find them.

I thought of dad this morning after listening to Noah Diffenbaugh at the live-streamed panel "Scientists Communicating Challenging Issues" at the AAAS meeting. Diffenbaugh, a Stanford climate science researcher, called himself a "fundamentalist" about sticking to the facts, much like my dad. Also like my dad, Diffenbaugh said he was pleased to tell you if he didn't know anything about a topic; I took this to mean he too would not engage in speculation about it. Finally, both Diffenbaugh and my dad felt that scientists were best positioned to rigorously discover the way the world worked and explain it to whoever wanted to know.

But here's where Diffenbaugh and my dad would have diverged: Diffenbaugh believes that scientists lose credibility when they suggest policy, or positions, or actions based upon their scientific findings. He lumps the entire spectrum of expressing an opinion or making a suggestion into advocacy and advocacy as a bad thing. I'll speculate that my dad wouldn't have liked the word advocacy either, but he certainly believed that he, as a scientist, had a responsibility to recommend actions to solve humanity's problems when the science provided facts to support those recommendations.

Diffenbaugh appears to be operating (and here I'm speculating) under the historically debunked idea that if people stay out of the way and don't get involved in politics, good things will happen. Or at least nothing bad will happen. In his somewhat strange example of talking to a US Senator and climate change skeptic, Diffenbaugh explained how after an hour of answering questions with facts, the Senator told his aid to have him "taken off the list". He didn't know what "the list" was and didn't seem particularly interested in knowing, rather, pointing out he believed he had "balanced the conversation", and by implication swayed the Congressman's skepticism of climate change. And, by extension, effected how that Senator would act on the matter in the future.

Lots of assumptions without sufficient facts to back them up. Lots of hopeful thinking that facts would change strongly held views, which, as other panelists pointed out, the research shows is simply not the case. Lots of wishful thinking that staying neutral will earn deep and lasting respect from others. Need we trot out history to drive home this point?

My dad perhaps knew better than anyone that people are irrational beings. As a young boy my father was caught up in Stalin's ambitions for what the world should look like, spending part of his childhood in Siberia and the rest of it in refugee camps across the Middle East. I suspect the trauma of this experience had a lot to do with why he became an academic and wanted to understand how the world worked. I suspect it also explains why he chose the sciences, where logic and reason provided a well defined and stable framework for understanding the world.

But most importantly, I believe that early confrontation with reality led my father to believe he had a responsibility to society to take a stand on societal and environmental issues and to defend them as strongly as he could. Credibly. With Science. With Facts.

You can study history for endless examples of how refusing to express opinions (political or otherwise) had little effect on other people's attitudes or behavior. Check the research for the peer reviewed studies on human behavior to back it up.

It's not merely an academic conversation. It's about understanding how the world works and acting on that knowledge.

Who thinks Computer Science is less relevant than Physics?

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa C. Kaczmarczyk) — Thu, 29 Jan 2015 20:30:00 +0000

Find all the interesting Computer Science in this picture

Computer Science is different from Physics; we don't have examples that we can bring to a presentation that will be relevant to a large population.

If that's the case we're screwed.

Recently, I heard someone say that. If I believed him I might as well hang it all up and go live on a dairy farm. I wanted to do that after I graduated from high school but my parents had other ideas in mind. I still have a soft spot for dairy cows but I'm in computer science for the long haul now and I don't believe him.

Computers are ubiquitous; they hold together our global economy. What aspect of your daily life does not depend in some way upon computer systems or software? Hmm? Let's see...brain dump...

Get up in the morning, eat a banana, eat a bowl of cereal, answer email, have a conference call with a client, take part in a virtual meeting, drive in my car to another meeting, work out of a coffee shop for a while, take part in a twitter conversation, brainstorm a conference presentation, respond to an email from my mother, pay some bills, make a doctor appointment, remind clients that they need to send out the surveys I created for them... is it lunch time yet?

Which of those activities ARE NOT tightly connected to the global computing infrastructure and which of those types of activity ARE NOT relevant to a large population? Let's say YES for connected and NO for not connected.

Get up in the morning: if I use my smart phone to set the alarm: YES

Eat a banana: that banana arrived from Ecuador in the San Diego harbor on a boat that was almost entirely loaded and unloaded by robots: YES

Eat a bowl of cereal: the bowl was hand thrown by an artist in Texas, so perhaps: NO; the cereal was grown, harvested, packaged and shipped efficiently (or perhaps not) using vast software tracking systems: YES

Answer email: YES (need I say more?)

Have a conference call/take part in a virtual meeting: Skype, Google+, the beep beep beep of telephone software: YES

Drive my car: The vehicle would gather dust in a nearby canyon without that little chip the mechanics charge an arm and a leg to plug into for diagnostic purposes: YES

Work out of a coffee shop: Free wi-fi: YES. Computerized receipt generation: YES

Twitter conversations, answering mom's email, online bill pay, annoying automatically generated paper bills anyway, making appointments via the tangled electronic phone tree: YES

Creating surveys, and emailing clients... ditto conference call note above. YES

Now, is any of this relevant to a large population listening to our hypothetical presentation? In other words are these types of activities interesting beyond my and my clients' and colleagues' worlds? Of course. Why wouldn't they be? Let's give people credit.

If one thinks that economics, history, communication, relationships, nature, biology, and caffeine aren't relevant to a large swath of the population, then we aren't thinking very creatively. We all eat, drink and communicate. Most of us drive, make appointments and (however regretfully) pay bills.

The issue of relevance is more than an intellectual exercise, it is a communication exercise.

If computer scientists, educators, researchers, want to make our field relevant, first we have to see for ourselves that computer science is relevant and interesting.

We must believe that computer science is, can be, should be, relevant and interesting to a large population.

We have to get out there and tell the story of the relevance of computer science in a way that speaks to our audience.

Or else we're screwed.

Having a Technical Impact Goes Beyond the Bits

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa C. Kaczmarczyk) — Wed, 14 Jan 2015 02:54:00 +0000

Technical Communication Failure

I'm contemplating the human and personal side of science, particularly computer science, more than ever. Both of the courses I taught this past Fall at Harvey Mudd College, Computer Science Education Research (co-taught with Colleen Lewis) and Great Papers in Computer Science, had a pervasive emphasis on the human and the personal along with the technical. I posted about the CS Ed Research class earlier this year, tweeted about it regularly, and my next column in ACM Inroads Magazine (March 2015) will be about that course.

The Great Papers class was perhaps a poster child for the how and the why we need to understand the non-technical factors swirling in and around computer science, and our need as professionals in the field to be able to communicate well about them to diverse audiences. We should talk more about how scientific and technological advances are communicated, understood, accepted or rejected. I suspect most of us recognize that those seminal articles we may take for granted had a significant impact only partially because of their technical merit.

It's about being the right person, in the right place, at the right time, saying the right thing. That last point (saying the right thing) is where we find the technical most heavily, although even there, the "right thing" is more nuanced than the bits and bytes of the matter. If we pause and take a look at the contextual big picture of any one of the technical innovations that have shaped our field, we see the truth of the matter. A range of social, historic, economic and psychological factors either inhibit or increase the visibility and impact of any technical work.

For example, in the domain of computer architecture, Howard Aiken's "The Proposed Automatic Calculating Machine" (1937) deservedly takes a spot in the annals of the most impactful papers in the field. Yet the paper that led to the creation of the Harvard Mark I was not a shoo-in; if not for a complex series of historical and economic factors the ideas presented in the proposal might well have languished in the "Don't call me, I'll call you" dustbin. Then there was Aiken's ability to assemble a rock solid team. Grace Hopper, herself no intellectual or personal pushover, was on that team. Aiken did not succeed in a vacuum.

Psychological factors leading to technological change are blindingly obvious in the infamous 1968 Dijkstra Letter to the Editor of the Communications of the ACM entitled "Go To Statement Considered Harmful". Dijkstra effectively and efficiently communicated the potential negative technical consequences of an unbridled use of the "Go To" statement. However, he used arguably tactless language, upset a lot of people, and his comments went viral 1960s style*. Dykstra wasn't the first person to argue against using Go To statements but he often gets the credit for the ideas that led to eventual changes in coding practice.

By spending a semester delving into issues such as these, I hope that students will come away with more than increased intellectual breadth and depth in the field of CS. I hope they will have a greater understanding of the deep connections between society and technological success and failure. I hope they will appreciate the importance of successful communication about complicated technical subject matter to technical and non-technical audiences alike. It's not just for people in Marketing - it's for them too.

I just got back my teaching evaluations - feedback to me about where I successfully communicated all these things to them and where there is room for work. It cuts both ways - I'm feeling good about that.

*In class I make a point to spend a few minutes discussing why, in spite of Dijkstra's technical brilliance and fame, pissing people off is not professionally wise.

Thoughts From a Live Node in the Network

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa C. Kaczmarczyk) — Fri, 21 Nov 2014 00:08:00 +0000

Last night's UX Speakeasy meetup was a bit of a mind bender when you stopped to consider the implications of everything Matthew Milan (CEO of Normative) tossed at the audience. After a momentary thick silence at the end of Milan's talk, the flood of questions started. Too bad the guy had to catch a red eye to Miami. We could have kept him talking late into the night.

It was all about design, but not design in any way you are likely to have thought about it before. After flipping up a rather staid and traditional definition of "design", Matthew said something to the effect of "we're still talking about making sh*t up". But that's ok, because one of his company's mantras is "Always Be Learning". A phrase worth bolding.

When you consider his suggestion that "the network" is everything connected by an IP, and that more and more we are connected to multiple IPs in a constant slurry of invisible signals zinging through the air, and technology companies are fire hosing us with new wearable or embedded everything, just like this sentence, Matthew pointed out correctly, at least for the majority of people in the developed world "we spend the majority of our time being a live node on the network".

I never thought about myself that way. This notion makes me think of the time a few weeks ago when I was on a business trip and my internal GPS had been lost on a contrail somewhere. I decided to use Google Maps to look up the location of the city I was in. I got more than I bargained for. Google Maps not only showed me the city I was in, but put a nice little label on the location of my hotel along with a tag listing the dates I was staying there. The *only* way they could have accessed that last information was by scanning my gmail account and pulling the information out of a reservation confirmation message. I was creeped out. Not cool Google. Perhaps Google thought it was being helpful but all I could think was: Get OUT of my email!

One can understand the audience member last night who said that after listening to Milan's talk he was very uncomfortable. He felt like he was part of one big experiment. Yup, I'm afraid that he may be correct. We love our toys but through them we are live nodes dangling on the end of a virtual fish hook. To his credit, Matthew replied to the stressed out audience member "This stuff isn't supposed to make you comfortable". No attempt to cover up the ubiquitous networked nature of everything with some sugar coated marketing gobbledy gook.

For me, a message I received from Matthew's talk was that we need to wake up and pay attention to what we are designing and how we put it to use in society.

There was a good deal of talk last night about "computational design" that left me sucking on my pen and rolling my eyes upward in thought on more than one occasion. It wasn't what you might think; people and machines are to be thought of on an equal footing in our oh so networked environment. In trying to describe some aspect or other of this point, Matthew said in an unscripted moment that we should think about how to be empathetic to the machine. He then corrected himself, suggesting that "empathy" probably wasn't the right word because, well, you know ...

Not so fast. Check out this news release from the National Science Foundation about a robotics initiative which contains the quote:

"people not only trust [the robot's] impeccable ability to crunch numbers, they also believe the robot trusts and understands them"

and

"The humans trusted the robot to make impartial decisions and do what was best for the team...As it turned out, workers preferred increased productivity over having more control"

Now that is scary. It may be too late to suggest we not have empathy for digital technology.

On a lighter note, (and at this point I need to remember the lighter moments), one of my favorite Matthew Milan quotes was "we are always putting ourselves in these crazy boxes". What made this really funny for me was that rather than going down some intense psychological route, his first item in the list was clothing!

I never thought of my clothes as a box, did you? Since that moment, I've been thinking about my shirt as a box. A box with 4 air vents to provide circulation. A box with flexible siding. A red box (today at least). I have a closet full of boxes to put myself into. And then...ok, I couldn't help but think about myself as that live node and the future of wearables and I began to have empathy for my soon to be sentient shirt.

Today my shirt might be thinking: "oh dear, not that cheap moisturizer again" or "did she forget to use deodorant today? That means she is going to drool on the underside of my sleeve. Talk about a bad hair day. Sigh...the things I put up with in order to see the world"

Parting words from Matthew Milan included: Design Creates Culture.

"Having your head in the clouds" takes on a whole new meaning doesn't it?

My Spider Plant Made Me Write This.

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa C. Kaczmarczyk) — Tue, 04 Nov 2014 22:40:00 +0000

Now what? An Outer View

I can't blame the foliage, but it's because I want to stop dictating blog posts to a piece of greenery at 4am that I'm breaking my unplanned silence. I've been dictating blog posts to the Spider Plant. Ok fine, but they haven't been getting from there to here. What gives?

In a recent Twitter message, someone pointed out that science bloggers write when they just can't stop thinking about something.* But I have been thinking non stop, at speeds that defy measurement, for months now. I have been radiating ideas, any one of which could have become, but haven't become, a great blog post. For example:

The Computer Science Education Research class I'm teaching this Fall provides endless opportunities to discuss what happens when you have undergraduate CS students conducting real, not toy, research on real, not toy, human beings. The qualitative research methods we use cause the computer science and social science worlds to collide. No number crunching here. One of my favorite quotes from a student discussing his experience conducting a research interview "...and then my brain exploded". Hearing what people are really thinking in an unfiltered way can do that to you sometimes. It's one reason I love qualitative research. It's one reason I love this class.

My other class, Great Papers in Computer Science, is no less stimulating. Unlike a traditional "Great Papers" class, we wrap our heads around the non-technical factors that aided and abetted a seminal paper having the impact that it did. Just yesterday, when someone asked what an example of a psychological factor would be, we found ourselves discussing how McCarthyism bred fear, and speculating how that fear likely led to certain kinds of research and publications being supported while others were suppressed. On a lighter note, and in another era, someone jested that Hippies might have had a connection to the development of Unix. Maybe not Hippies per se, but I can envision formulating an argument that there was a direct relationship between the Civil Rights Era mindset and the later Open Source Movement. I love that class!

In my work as a Independent Evaluator for education research projects, I have been crisscrossing the country quite a bit recently and each trip fills my head with ideas. For example, just last week I found myself thinking, not for the first time, about how early childhood development relates to the ability to acquire computational thinking skills. How early can children learn to code? What constitutes coding anyway? How does teaching computational thinking morph eventually into teaching computer science? What role do teachers play in this transition? What do teachers need the most to succeed? What are the critical leverage points?

Those examples from my teaching and research are only for starters. Why hasn't it all come out in blog posts?

For the past few months I have been focused on People and Process. Relationships. In itself nothing new, but perhaps more than ever; it's like a fire under my feet and burning up and out. Among other things, ever since I stumbled on the Science Communications community a few months ago I have wanted to know where computing and technology fit in. Can fit in. Should fit in. Why aren't we there?

My mind was like this

Yesterday in class, one of my students said something to the effect that it could be hard to speak up in class when there was so much going on, so much being discussed, so many stimulating ideas, that you could get lost in a sea of potential.

That's it! My radio silence wrt blog posts hasn't been about writer's block or lack of ideas. The process of writing, assuming there ever was "a process", is, yes, about being unable to stop thinking about something, but that something isn't always directly a technology or science issue. Perhaps I thought I had nothing to say to my predominantly tech audience because I was being consumed by thoughts of the importance of people, process and relationships.

What ever was I thinking? I'm going to go fertilize the Spider Plant right now.

*Thank you Paige Brown Jarreau @FromTheLabBench for aiding and abetting the foliage

UX Speakeasy Enlists Big Data & Qualitative Research to Explore its Growth

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa C. Kaczmarczyk) — Thu, 02 Oct 2014 23:51:00 +0000

Data Data Data

San Diego UX Speakeasy has a problem. We are popular. Yes, that is a problem. Sort of. We find ourselves in a growth spurt reminiscent of adolescence when things ache because they are being stretched beyond the current physical boundaries.

Such it is with us. Last night's Meetup about "Big Data & Qualitative Research" hosted by Mitchell International maxed out at close to 90 attendees and we had a wait list almost as long. Our seemingly unstoppable growth in popularity is a topic we have been discussing in Board meetings for a while. In a mere three years we have grown from a dozen crazy UXers who knew, just knew, that there were others like them in San Diego and wanted to do some community building to prove it, to hundreds of diverse and crazy UXers who just love to hang out, socialize and learn. We have built a community. How do we manage our growth without taking ourselves far too seriously?

This all sounds suspiciously like a Startup Problem. However, no IPOs will ever be involved, no stock shall be issued. (We incorporated as a Non Profit at the beginning of this year in case you wanted to know. Primarily to make our lives easier at tax time).

Last night was perhaps one of the best of our meetups I have attended in the past three years. We decided to harness the enthusiasm and commitment of attendees in an analysis of The Problem. After all, we are all about inclusion, and we don't like having to say No to people. Yet, we want to keep the informal, interactive get-to-know-you mission that clearly works so well.

It just so happens we have some awesome members who have accumulated oodles of statistics about attendance at events. We also have some awesome members well versed in how to look beyond the numbers. Hence, the attendees were divided into groups and tasked with taking either a quantitative or qualitative look at The Question.

Somehow I missed hearing just exactly what The Question was. No one I randomly asked seemed to know exactly what it was either. But it was not a representative sampling. Perhaps like me they spent critical moments during the Introduction drooling over the melted Brie with jam stuffed into it and fresh raspberries placed on top. I thought this absence excusable because I work in qualitative research almost daily; besides I wanted to check out the cheese. Qualitatively. With random sampling to ensure self-selection bias was not overly present.

No matter. Everyone set to work exploring the data about UX Speakeasy. For example, we have 405 members who have never (ever!) attended a Meetup. These are Lurkers and they have no clue what they are missing. But stats can be misleading. Because we don't know why they didn't attend do we? Is it because they wanted to but couldn't get in? Is it because they gave up in despair - if so, those people do have an inkling what they are missing.

We also could see from the brightly colored graphs that attending a Medium Sized event is more likely to result in someone becoming a Regular Attendee. Regular attendees are those who have attended 3 meetups. Being Wait Listed for a Medium Sized event decreases the chances of a person becoming an Active Member more than being Wait Listed for a Large Event, although any sort of Wait List decreases persistence. And then there are those Dabblers - those who have attended 1-3 meetups.

Why might that be? What can you conclude? Theories were flying. For example:

"More engaged people come to smaller events"

or perhaps

"Smaller events lead to more engaged people" ?

The quantitative groups were playing madly with the data and making insightful discoveries.

Oh *that* meetup [Name Withheld To Protect the Innocent] produced all sorts of Dabblers and a high overall attrition rate. But *that* meetup [Name Withheld For Equity Purposes] clearly blew the socks off the local community because attendees came back and back and back and back.

The qualitative groups delved into things such as how they feel about coming to a meetup before, during and afterwards. What factors affect last minute changes of mind? Long day at the office? Tired....grumpy.... Commuting through traffic? Seriously depressed.... Awesome food and beverages? Happy Happy So Happy to have braved the traffic! When they reported back to the larger group they used words such as "guilt" "regret" "happy" "anxiety" "pumped!"

Experience Mapping

The really interesting thing was that in the greater group sharing it became quite apparent to everyone why both qualitative and quantitative data have something to offer. One group would spur a question that the other group was able to answer. Back and forth. So it went.

People were so engaged last night - everyone had the opportunity to contribute to the UX Speakeasy community. Lots of new people were there mingling with long time attendees. For 80+ people it felt like a much smaller crowd.

At the end of the evening they had to practically throw everyone out of the building. People wanted to keep talking and discussing the future of UX Speakeasy. People wanted to know what more they could do. A member of the Board explained that we are in the process of instituting several measures to accommodate more members while keeping the warm and fuzzy feeling we have all grown to deeply appreciate.

These initiatives include adding additional activities each month (UX Karaoke? someone did suggest that really). We have another conference in the works (save the date November 8) and more. For all of which Volunteers will be needed!

Seriously, at least as seriously as we ever get, the networking and job announcements and socializing and Random Acts of Education will continue. As we grow.

ACM Education Council Meeting - Day 1

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa C. Kaczmarczyk) — Wed, 17 Sep 2014 05:54:00 +0000

Ceiling Lights with an Encoded Message?

What a wonderful brain sucking invigorating day at the ACM Education Council meeting. We hit the ground running with a stimulating discussion of Data Science and Computing Education and barely slowed down until many long hours and too many sugary cookies and bad coffee later, we ended with a discussion of the current status of the Ensemble Computing Portal. In between we heard about and discussed the latest on AP CS Principles, (I learned what a "MOOClet" is*), code.org 's education, advocacy and outreach activities, goings on with the CSTA, various ACM SIGs with education initiatives and ....

I happily tweeted about it all day, performing a spontaneous ear to brain to finger transfer of interesting goings on. (twitter handle : @lisakaczmarczyk) You can check my feed for a dynamic view of the day. It crosses my mind I could go back, pull those tweets and create a poem from them. I'm putting it on my To Do list for when I need a mental break . I feel creatively inspired.

Unofficial theme of the day: interdisciplinary. The discussion of Data Science, presented by Heikki Topi from Bentley College, was an exciting way to start the morning and get us off on a brain stretching foot. Data Science is an intersection of statistics, IS, CS, Math, Informatics, and various domains of practice. Methodologies in use include those found in machine learning, data management, data visualization, statistics, sensors, programming, scalable hardware and software systems. We find Data Science in the environmental, physical, and social sciences. None of this would be possible without significant contributions of the computing disciplines.

The above begs the question: how should computing education be involved? Not a straightforward question and the answer deserves deep and broad consideration. We barely started the conversation this morning. For example, consider this: Should there be universal learning objectives?

A conversation to be continued! As Heikki pointed out, there is an opportunity (an imperative?) for interdisciplinary collaboration, with a goal of our contributing to achieving a high quality of [education] programs.

I have come to think of active and engaged teamwork and team building as an interdisciplinary enterprise. Teamwork opportunities and challenges came up often today. For example, we heard a report on the [deep breath long name coming] Partnership for Advancing Computing Education Research (PACE) Workshop hosted by the National Academies and funded by the NSF. Attendees represented a range of computing sub-communities and, among other things, revisited the truth that they have common interests across computing education (e.g. the pipeline problem). An important question becomes: What can we do to build structural mechanisms that enable these computing education research sub-communities to work together?

The most intense part of the day for me came when we broke into sub groups to make actionable education priorities for the Education Council. The groups were: Diversity, International, Cybersecurity, Curriculum (there was one more but I'm blanking on what it was). Each group's task was to come up with two concrete recommendations for the Council and Board.

I joined the Diversity group. It was a challenge - we rapidly found ourselves discussing the recent media storm around the revelations of poor diversity numbers in tech companies, the violence that takes place in some online communities and the fact that even when URM groups make it through a degree program unscathed, they all too often encounter a culture that causes them to leave. The word "ugly" came up more than once. At moments it was painful. The long and the short of it was that we decided to take the initiative to form a task group and further discuss how we can work for cultural change. We felt we had so much to say and so many ideas for consideration as action items. I'm proud of our group for deciding to take this on.

I don't want to end this post on that note. It is an unfinished story and there will be more. I'd rather note that across the several SIGs we heard from

(SIGCAS - computers & society, SIGCHI - human computer interaction, SIGGRAPH - siggraph..., SIGPLAN (formerly OOPSLA), SIGITE - Information Technology, and SIGCSE - computer science education )

we heard over and over again about the intersection and overlap of education concerns, even within separate sub-contexts. People want to find common ground and combine forces on many concerns and initiatives. Someone pointed out that we (computing education) have come a long way in a short 4-5 years. It is heartening and exciting when you step back to look at the big picture.

Tomorrow, we continue. My twitter feed will continue. I'll be doing my part to get the word out and incidentally generating material for my future poem.

*a small MOOC

Grading Rubric, Why Oh Why Art Thou as Thou Art?

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa C. Kaczmarczyk) — Mon, 01 Sep 2014 01:02:00 +0000

Having to construct a grading rubric has a way of bringing one down to earth with an unforgiving slam. You know, you are all caught up in visionary ideas of how to do your part in engaging student minds in various exciting and unquestionably marvelous ideas - oh the places we will go. We will read this, talk about that, pull apart and put back together that, create construct and write write write. Stretch and ponder and percolate and ruminate.

You see, I'm going to be back in the classroom this Fall (er, next week) after a few years doing other things. I'm still doing other things, but in addition, I'm about to land myself in front of two sets of computer science undergraduates. I'm psyched. Yes, I am. There is something that just says "yes" about teaching. So, along with a zillion other faculty around the western hemisphere I have spent much of the past several weeks whipping together "the plans". Two courses, one of which is called "Computer Science Education Research".

The chickens came home to roost first and foremost with that class. For CS Ed. Research I have teamed up to co-teach with a friend and colleague; together we have been putting together the pieces on a subject we both hold near and dear. How to conduct this type of research, how to write it up afterwards, how to present it to an audience.

I must say, my colleague writes a darned good grading rubric. She's great at it. She reminds me that we must be concise and clear. State expectations. Avoid fuzziness. I'm good at fuzziness sometimes.

Back when I was in grad school and simultaneously teaching a course called Technical Writing for Computer Science Majors, I took advantage of workshops funded by a large grant to help instructors teach "substantial writing component" courses. Clearly that was my class. We weren't writing boring user manuals (much); we focused heavily on how to deconstruct a research paper. After we had spent a fair amount of time talking about what a well constructed conference paper looked like (in CS Ed. of course), I would do one of my favorite activities which was to hand them a paper to perform a constructive critique on.

Predictably, they would tear it to shreds, because it wasn't a particularly well written paper. It needed a lot of help. Also predictably, and this happened semester after semester for 6 years, the students were stronger on the "criticism" than on the "constructive" part. They were often less than kind in their assessment of the unknown writer. This, in spite of our having discussed the role of a reviewer and the importance of remembering there was a person behind this paper. Someone who had worked very hard and done their very best.

There was always a deathly sick silence when I eventually told them I wrote the paper; it was my first ever attempt at a conference submission. It was, quite understandably, rejected. But rejected kindly, which was fortunate for my then fragile sense of researcher self. By the time I was in the front of the classroom several years later, I had developed a thick enough skin to take the worst kind of reviewer commentary (and if you have submitted enough papers you know what I'm talking about).

The point was made better than when I ever just said it - be kind when you must critique someone; there really are real people behind the written word; finally, you never know how things will come back around. My students were luckier than they might have been "in the real world" because I didn't hold anything they had said about the paper (or me, unwittingly) against them.

But back to that grading rubric. The substantial writing component workshops I took advocated for an idea that sounded really great at the time. The idea, roughly, was this: you get highly explicit about what constitutes an F, D, C, B. And what you indicate in the criteria for a B is that you get a B if you do everything you were supposed to do and you do it really well.

So how do you get an A? You go above and beyond. You do something that blows it out of the park. You get creative, innovative, insightful, or visionary. You do everything you were supposed to do for that B and then you come up with something I the instructor couldn't predict. I can't tell you in the rubric what that is, because then it wouldn't be creative would it?

And herein lay the problem. It sounds great doesn't it? Find a way to set that bar high and provide incentive for people to really GO FOR IT. The problem is....

Well, there are multiple problems. It's subjective. Boy is it subjective. My idea of mind blowingly innovative may not include your idea of mind blowingly innovative. My idea of creative may well not be yours. So right off the bat there is all sorts of room for bias. Not only that, students hate it because it is confusing and stressful and not at all the way they have likely ever been graded before. And notice I say "graded" and not "assessed" because let's be real here, it's a table with itemized instructions for obtaining a grade!

The people who ran the substantial writing component workshops and who advocated for this type of rubric claimed there was all sorts of literature backing up the effectiveness of this approach to grading writing intensive courses. They probably had that literature available, and knowing me I probably read it.

But it didn't work for me and I tried it in several different courses. I really worked at it to make it work. I was all for the idea - sounds great for a free ranging thinker who likes to push the envelope and encourage the same in others. But not so great for people who see the world differently. And that's a lot of people. And in educational system that doesn't operate this way as often as it might. But frankly, the potential for rampant unrecognized bias is what really bothers me now. There are other ways to encourage creativity and innovation in class. I feel confident in saying we will be doing so.

As I worked with my colleague on our CS Ed. Research class I got tasked with making the first pass at several of our grading rubrics. Yuck. Ok, I said it: yuck. I'd much rather have worked on something else. But it has been very good for me. It reminds me that vision and grand ideas have to come down to earth sometimes, especially if you are in front of the classroom. At least for a while. Having to push against my natural instinct to avoid the precision of the grading rubric, and having my colleague point out every time I have gone fuzzy, is an excellent opportunity for me to learn too.

A Newbie's Introduction to UX Speakeasy

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa C. Kaczmarczyk) — Thu, 07 Aug 2014 06:14:00 +0000

Someone reminded me this evening that we created UX Speakeasy almost 3 years ago. I didn't realize so much time had gone by. We started with a dozen people and suddenly we have more people than we can fit in a good sized auditorium. Not that we ever meet in auditoriums. This month we met at Societe Brewing Company, hidden back off a busy street. Very pleasant atmosphere, lots of wood, and a very nice bartender.

As luck would have it, my friend Reynaldo was hanging out with me this week and expressed curiosity about UX Speakeasy. I asked him if he'd like to come along and give his perspective on things. He was all for it so I snuck him in. Board membership has its privileges. Reynaldo is on the small side and was feeling a bit shy

so he clung pretty close to my shoulder all evening. I didn't mind, because as long as he stuck with me it was easier to show him around and explain this eclectic group of people. Even better, I was able to hear what his experience was like as it happened.

Prior to the official Meetup we held a short Board meeting. Reynaldo was impressed by the fact that this group of people, meeting in a local brewery, were actually incorporated as a non-profit and concerned about making sure there was a structure, designated roles, goals and Vision. He was curious about what UX meant, and I whispered to him that this was sometimes a contentious question. I told him he'd be ok this evening as long as he didn't randomly swap out "UX" for "UI", or worse yet, "web design" in casual conversation . He understood, pointing out that sometimes people confused him with an ocean crab. (This would make sense if you met Reynaldo in person)

Out in the parking lot we had custom oven fired pizza by Red Oven Artisanal Pizza. One of the reasons Reynaldo and I hit it off when we first met is that I'm a vegetarian. So there was no chance I was going to get

us a seafood pizza. We both agreed the pizza was outstanding; it was custom made and fired in the stove as we watched. Somehow they managed to bring in an entire pizza making operation and kiln-like stove just for the evening. Reynaldo tried to pinch more pizza than he was entitled to.

Once the Meetup officially began I walked around saying hi to people and introducing Reynaldo. The guy's a bit of an introvert and didn't say much. But he wore a silly grin and enjoyed watching the 70+ happy attendees playing the card game UX Against Humanity.*

UX vocabulary can be confusing if you are new to the scene. So are the rules to this card game. I was having trouble trying to explain, mostly because I was taking the detailed instruction sheet too literally. It was Reynaldo who pointed out that the small groups of people hunched laughing around the barrel tables were ignoring most of the rules. At that point I decided he was doing just fine, so I begged off to wander around and take photographs.

When I got back from my photo shoot, Reynaldo explained his new understanding of the game. I share his

explanation with you in case you weren't there:

It's reminiscent of Mad Libs, if you are old enough to remember that game. There is a sentence with blanks you have to fill in and the funniest one wins each round. But in this case, the sentences were UX based and the fill in answers had to be chosen from phrases on cards in your hand - UX based as well. So you might end up with totally meaningless sentences like this:

"The future of UX depends upon a hipster's beard dandruff"

or

"I'm no designer but have you thought about adding a double rainbow?"

Reynaldo thought this one was particularly funny:

"The worst UX superpower is sniffing your research participants"

I should explain that Reynaldo comes from a sheltered background and tends to retreat into his shell when things get dicey.** So he felt a bit crabby with some phrases people created that used four letter words and anatomical references. Out of respect for his sensitivities I won't repeat them here.

More to his liking were these phrases:

"The future of UX hinges on one thing: a hair on the rim of your Starbucks cup"

"When I am wire framing I first like to sketch out relieving the cognitive load"

"When I am wire framing I first like to sketch out James Tiberius Kirk"

"When I am wire framing I first like to sketch out cat memes"

It was a long evening; things got quite silly. Reynaldo and I had a good time, as did a lot of other attendees, judging by all the laughter and enthusiastic game play. He asked me how the group is going to top this event next month but I had to demur.

Instead, I left him to ponder:

"Life imitates: ________________"

Hint: Starbucks is not part of the answer.

*I have Reynaldo's approval to write about him. He read my post, and had the opportunity to edit it.

**His Latin-sounding name not withstanding, Reynaldo spent his formative years in China.

Science Communication Team Building - with Paint. Seriously?

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa C. Kaczmarczyk) — Sat, 26 Jul 2014 04:20:00 +0000

How do you tell a male or female scorpion?

The idea of having to sing in public or play an instrument made my stomach flip. I usually feel that sensation only when landing in the turbulence that seems to always surround the Dallas/Forth Worth airport. However, here I was, feet planted firmly on the Arizona sand, and that sick almost pukey sensation wouldn't go away. I didn't know anyone - how could I possibly say anything?

Along with 35 or so others, scientists and engineers, a philosopher, someone from theatre and several artists, I was newly arrived at the C.O.D. Ranch for Sonoran SciComm. We were here to work on communication and team building and we had been warned (promised) that we'd be pushed outside our comfort zones. We all wanted to be there, some of us (ahem) having almost fallen all over ourselves at the opportunity. I think it safe to say everyone had a passion for the environment and was working one way or another for sustainability.

But at that moment I thought I might be ill. Try as I might I couldn't bring myself to choose the Music activity. The mere thought that I might suffer a panic attack in front of dozens of people I had never met before was intolerable. Ever since the summer after my Freshman year, when I had an ill fated on-stage encounter with Cole Porter's Anything Goes while working at a Lake George NY resort, I have preferred my singing take place at 75 mph with the windows rolled up. They said they were letting me go because I couldn't make hospital corners. True, I wasn't cut out to be a chambermaid, singing or otherwise.

So, 30 odd years later, back at SciComm, I opted for the Painting. A nice, reasonably solitary activity with which to get my feet under me. So I thought. A dozen of us stood ready to wield our instruments against the canvas: Let us at it!

Then they told us to give our tightly gripped (favorite) painting tool to our neighbor. Bummer. They teamed us up and let us loose with the acrylics. My new friend Liz and I hit it off immediately; she a marine biologist by training and me a fan of all things small and wiggly in the water. We happily created waves and little tadpoles and oceanic abstractions together.We negotiated each other's styles, learning about one another as we had a running conversation about our emerging masterpiece. Perfect.

Until they told us to pause, move to the right and continue painting on someone else's canvas. But, but... ok, don't get attached to material things. I tried not to look (too often) at what was happening to our abandoned Work of Art. Instead, Liz and I discussed what to do with the canvas left to us (no doubt with an equal level of regret) by another team. We started off tentatively, trying not to change their vision. Whatever it was. Tippy toeing around the edges. Wider ranging discussions developed between the two of us as we not only figured out what to apply where (which by this point had started to include some artifacts stuck to the canvas), but tried to psych out what the whole exercise was really about.

As a result, we weren't particularly surprised when we were told to change canvases again. And then again. Eventually it was IMPOSSIBLE not to "mess up" prior work. There simply wasn't that much untouched canvas on these easels. Our original work was by now unrecognizable. However, Liz and I had decided we weren't messing it up, they weren't messing it up, but that we were contributing to a group project.

It was only 10am. My attention span was starting to wander. This activity was supposed to continue until noon. I was feeling like I was done. DONE. I think Liz was having similar thoughts. I said something to one of our activity organizers. His polite but firm response was "You must continue!". It wasn't an order; in fact we had been explicitly told the evening before that nothing was mandatory and we didn't have to do anything we didn't want to, so no one would have said a word had I taken a break - and never come back.

I sucked it up. I had a little conversation with myself "I'm not going to sulk. I'm not going to slide out of the room". "As much as I want to go off somewhere and stare meditatively at a cactus, I'm not going to do so. That would mean abandoning the group" .

Yet I was feeling a tad irritable. My cognitive state told me one thing but my affective state was not cooperating. Liz had wandered off somewhere, also feeling a need for change and some time apart. It turned out she was doing something really nifty with the paint out on the porch, a la Andy Warhol, to a series of magazine pictures of stuffy old men .

For myself, I reasoned that no one had said we had to paint on the canvas, so I proceeded to pour long trails of blood and guts black and red down the side of a supply box. It was very satisfying. And you know, after a while it started to look kinda nifty. Not long afterwards I was back with Liz, sharing the box desecration together and watching her deface the stuffy old men.

Things went on from there. We covered the box, and still an hour remained. So we picked up the paint bottles, threw aside the tools and proceeded to sling great blobs of drooling oozing highly satisfying paint all over the canvases. Other people joined in and soon many of us were smearing, swiping, pouring, and slithering paint all over the place. Attachments were Bye Bye. Interpersonal shyness was a thing of the past. Conversations were as fluid as the running paint.

In hindsight, I think that was the point. After three and a half hours, we had gone from being self conscious, protective of "our" art and ways of doing things, carefully negotiating perceptions of other people's preferences, to happily smearing paint every which way and learning to at the very least appreciate what each other was doing no matter what it looked like or how it got there.

The whole weekend was like that. In case we'd thought we were "done" after the morning's Painting, we were wrong. I never went within range of the musical group, but I did get a chance to scream at the top of my lungs during the Improv Session which was most cathartic.

So began Sonoron SciComm. So continued Sonoran SciComm. So... no, it isn't over. This wasn't just a solo weekend event but a community building activity among a bunch of people who might very well, perhaps now more than before, work together effectively on some very serious and important (and no doubt fun) science.

I'm not ready to belt out Stevie Nicks in public, but perhaps some day. Maybe. With a good team.

Summer: the Good, the Bad, and the Not Quite Sure

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa C. Kaczmarczyk) — Fri, 18 Jul 2014 20:16:00 +0000

Summer can be an odd time. I had been been thinking I would write a new post when something interesting came along. I realized today that my understanding of interesting was skewed. There have been a lot of very very interesting things happening. Lots of events worth pondering and taking action on. Good or bad, it's all interesting and more importantly, we are immersed in opportunities to drive change.

The Bad: The tech world has been awash in one media report after another revealing poor diversity numbers and overt and subtle (yet highly damaging) acts of sexism and discrimination. It seems that at least once a day something comes across a major media outlet about the latest painful situation. The vitriolic responses that fill the Comment sections accompanying these articles are unbelievable. The seemingly ceaseless flood of stories and reaction has been painful evidence that something is structurally very very wrong.

All this makes me, along with many other people, sick. And yeah, like a lot of women in tech, I can relate personally to some of these stories. Yet, in another way I'm relieved (?) when I see the barrage of headlines. Part of me thinks "it's about time this stuff came out into the mainstream media" and therefore the more I read, the more I think that perhaps now, it will be harder for some people to pretend discrimination and harassment don't happen, are isolated incidents, somehow the fault of the woman involved, "not my problem", exaggerated etc. So maybe the media reports are good?

bleh...

The Good For Sure: On the other hand, the surge in media reports surrounding girls getting involved in tech, via coding, conferences, meetups, and hackathons is wonderful. The widespread positive attention being given to these initiatives is long overdue. Isolated events for girls and women in tech have been around for a long time. Not only are there a lot more of them now, but people beyond the usual suspects are jumping on board. We need that because we need to reach a critical mass in order to achieve cultural shift.

I'd like to see this enthusiasm for encouraging women to learn computer science and consider careers in computing result in more long term sustained efforts. For example, as I've mentioned in the past, what happens after the tech camp? the hackathon? the intro online coding class? the celebration? We need to morph that Hour of Code into a Week, Season, Year of Code - and beyond.

yes...

More Good: Earlier this month I was at Bryn Mawr College* in the capacity of External Evaluator on an NSF funded project that is introducing introductory computer science through the use of digital art. A group of high school and college teachers, men and women, were learning how to use Processing; they discussed pedagogical and technological issues surrounding teaching with this Java based language. As with other Processing workshops I have observed, the level of enthusiasm was unusually high - people routinely tried to work through breaks and dawdled at their computers when it was lunch time. Collegiality and mutual support were running high.

Really Good (and oodles of fun): During a workshop break I intentionally "got lost" in one of the oldest buildings on the Bryn Mawr campus, stumbling around dark, stone walled basement corridors lit only by my cell phone. Many of these buildings are architecturally inspired by English medieval castles, complete with gargoyles of owls reading books. At one point, I popped out into daylight in a Cloister containing personal and often emotionally worded plaques dedicated to deceased alumnae. Late 19th Century and early 20th Century Philadelphia was clearly teeming with Bryn Mawr women breaking barriers in law, the sciences, politics. Walking around reading these weathered and stained narratives,which were not at all like the usual "in memory of" blurbs, I was reminded yet again of the power and potential of safe, supportive environments where women and girls can come into their own.

yes...

The Future is Now: This weekend I'm attending a retreat that centers on team building and communication among a group of scientists, engineers and artists working on sustainability issues. Women and men who care about building bridges among people and disciplines. Out in the desert, far away from the usual technology. Other than 5am yoga, I'm not really sure what I'm in for but it sounds like an opportunity for doing good.

Summer is indeed a time for reflection and taking action.

*Bryn Mawr College is a women's college founded in 1885.

Geek Girl Tech Con - Getting Out There and Doing It

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa C. Kaczmarczyk) — Wed, 25 Jun 2014 01:25:00 +0000

As I wrote in my last post, there were 13 different simultaneous events going on at any one time for most of the day during the San Diego Geek Girl Tech Con. There was of course the Sharkette Tank, (see that last post), but also a slew of workshops, a Hackfest, the Vendor Marketplace, Demos, and a few other interesting odds and end (which I'll get to shortly).

The Technical Help Desk At the Ready

Workshops were what most people were after and the number and variety of them was staggering. At any given time there were on average 10 workshops, changing every hour on the hour. They ranged from beginning technical topics (e.g. HTML and CSS for Beginners) to intermediate (e.g. JavaScript) to advanced (e.g. Programming with Python III). There were also workshops to help advance your career such as Resumes 101: Leverage Your Strengths to Land the Job and Job Seekers: Learn the Secrets to Being Discovered by Recruiters, and for running your business such as How to Write About Your Business Online and Social Media Analytics: Yes, they Really are Important. As I staffed my post at the T-Shirt table in the main lobby, more than one attendee lamented to me (while picking out their spiffy T-shirt) they were having a really hard time deciding where to go!

Despite my best intentions (and the lure of the Sharkette Tank) I didn't make it to any of the workshops, but I did visit the Hackfest where I had an interesting experience. The Hackfest was a drop in as you like event with people popping in and out all day. Teacher/tutor/speakers addressed various coding topics. During the afternoon, when I popped in, there was a large group in the back of the room learning how to create iOS apps. In the front of the room I found June Clark, lead teacher for the "League of Amazing Programmers"*. As there was no one with her at the moment, we compared notes about the importance of providing explicit and ongoing encouragement to girls who might be interested in coding so that they don't feel marginalized. We talked about the research that clearly shows how important events like the Geek Girl Tech Con are for contributing to the creation of an ecosystem where girls will feel empowered to pursue coding.

Just then, two girls came running into the Hackfest room and practically flung themselves into chairs in front of open laptops at our table. Their fingers took off on the keyboard. As I peered over and saw the Java code appearing on the screen, I asked, oh so casually, about their prior programming experience.

Way to Go!

None. Absolutely None. They had come in to the Hackfest room earlier that day, never having coded before and with June's help had learned enough to create simple animated programs - which they proudly showed me. No fancy IDE layered on top of code to do it for them - they wrote their programs line by line in a no frills editor and then ran them. They had enjoyed it so much they were back for more. They barely glanced up to tell me how cool this was. I was momentarily at a loss for words. What a great example of everything June and I had been talking about.

It was hard to beat that experience, but I would be remiss not to mention the fun adults were having at the Con. Next to my T-Shirt distribution table in the lobby was the free headshot station, where attendees could have a formal or not so formal photo taken by professional photographers. On the not so formal side I could have sworn I saw Princess Leia (aka one of the Geek Girl staff) , and two members of Star Fleet (two of the workshop instructors) offering to pose with anyone who wanted to - as many did.

Live Long and Prosper Geek Girls

All in all, the Con was a nicely balanced blend of high energy learning and fun. If the Mission, as Geek Girl Tech Con founder Leslie Fishlock said in her opening remarks, is to get more girls into tech, what I observed all day is that things are moving in a good direction. But we have a long way to go, as anyone in the tech world knows. We have to keep on working to build that equitable ecosystem.

Leslie also said that it's about doing it; taking the time to get out there and do it. Geek Girl is more than a conference; they have a Meetup (San Diego incarnation here) and do a variety of activities throughout the year and around the country. Hopefully the momentum generated by this day will keep those girl's and women's fingers coding joyfully.

*June told me the organization has been known as Wintriss Tech, and is in the process of transitioning to the new name and a new URL (although not functional as I write, the new URL will be jointheleague.org)

Geek Girl Tech Con - View into the Sharkette Tank

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa C. Kaczmarczyk) — Mon, 23 Jun 2014 21:22:00 +0000

San Diego Geek Girl Tech Con took place on Saturday and as predicted I wished I'd had a clone so that I could be in half a dozen places at once. The scope of activities was impressive: 13 (yes, 13) simultaneous workshops, speakers and events going on most of the day from 9am-6pm. Energy was high and people seemed thrilled with the opportunity to dive into such a diverse and supportive environment. For those still standing at the end of the day (which many were) there was a lively outdoor reception. Minus a clone, I nonetheless had some amazing experiences; I decided to focus much of my time on entrepreneurial sessions. So in this first post about the Con, I'm sharing observations and insights of the Sharkette Tank.

Sharkette Tank Judges

There were three sessions of the Sharkette Tank, which was made up of a panel of 5-6 judges and 10 local start-up companies making their best pitches to promote their business. With my bird's-eye view from the audience, it was a fascinating opportunity to watch everyone. Some of the product and service ideas were brilliant. In addition, the Sharkette Tank provided a great learning opportunity for anyone thinking of jumping into the start-up world. With that in mind, here are some take home messages.

- Focus, focus, focus. The judges, always polite (unlike their counterparts on network television who can be scathing), suggested more than once that a company was trying to solve too many problems, or trying to solve a big problem before nailing down their core solution to a targeted customer pain point. This can be easier said than done of course, because having vision and a passion to scale impact is what gets entrepreneurs up in the morning. Lose that passion and you lose your reason for existence.

This pitch left no stone unturned

- Distribution Strategy? Quite a few companies received feedback that they had a great product or product idea, but didn't have a concrete, viable plan to get it out there to the people who would want it. In a related vein, had they done a solid test of their idea in the target market? This is another tough issue. It's easy to fall into a "build it and they will come" mentality. Especially when you think, you know, that your product or service is the next best thing since sliced bread. Besides, the leg work necessary to gain a foot hold in competitive markets isn't exciting (to most people).

Which brings me to my next observation:

- Who is missing from the team? A few teams were told that they were lacking a key principle person in some area (e.g. technical, marketing). Companies that want to make an impact, that want to scale, can't be companies of one. Now, here is something really cool I learned about later on when I was having a conversation with one of the judges: Founder Dating. Connecting entrepreneurs with other entrepreneurs. Kudos to the people who came up with this idea!

Bet you can guess what this company is about

- Presentation matters. The best presentations grabbed the judges in the first few seconds and kept them interested and engaged throughout. The bottom line message was "Show Me, Don't Tell Me". It is much more effective to demonstrate your product or service in some way, rather than simply talk about how wonderful it is. You could tell by watching the judges' facial expressions and body language if they were intrigued. Long before you got to the Q&A where the nature of their feedback removed all doubt. You could also get a second read on this by looking around at the audience. When a company was really kicking butt, no one was on their cell phone or chatting with their neighbor.

The judges' favorites included Packsack, a new twist on reusable bags, inspired by observations about plastic on the beach by the surfer founder. This is Southern California! Another favorite was Giftovus, an interesting way to crowd source gift buying and giving. They call it, appropriately, "friend sourcing".

The judges' (and my) hands down favorite was USKey*, who are prototyping an ingenious way to prevent laptop theft. As the two college student presenters noted in the first few seconds of their presentation: don't you just hate it when you get settled into a coffee shop or other public place, with all your stuff spread out and your computer set up, and only then discover you have to go to the bathroom? I think everyone in the auditorium, including the judges, could relate to that scenario. I'm rooting for these two women and their company big time.

From my pov, everyone won. Everyone who pitched in the Sharkette Tank received valuable feedback about the content and style of their presentation as well as about their product plan and trajectory. The audience had the chance to observe first hand what a pitch can look like and what works or doesn't work.

The judges generously donated their time and experience to the community through this event. It didn't stop there because they were accessible all day. I was not the only one who had enjoyable and professionally helpful conversations with them.

Meeting new people and learning new things was happening every where at Geek Girl Tech Con. In my next post, I'll share some of the other goings on at the Con.

Just a few of the Sharkette Tank Entrepreneurs

*As far as I can tell, they don't yet have a website.

Bounding Along Towards Geek Girl Tech Con

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa C. Kaczmarczyk) — Wed, 11 Jun 2014 23:08:00 +0000

Warming up my best shoes for the Con

Approximately 10 days from now I'll be writing you about the San Diego Geek Girl Tech Con. I'll be zipping around here and there, helping out as a Volunteer, and taking lots of notes for you. I suppose I just might send out a Tweet or two along the way (get your devices ready to receive). In perusing the latest conference schedule updates I find myself hopping up and down enough that I want to share a small preview. Cool stuff is more cool when it is shared; besides which, I'd rather you were forewarned and had the opportunity to think about signing up rather than hearing about it only after the fact and banging your head on the wall with regret.

First of all, looooook at all the cool women speaking and presenting. I mean oy! I may need a clone or two of myself, because when I mentally take that picturesque 2D matrix and overlay it with the array of workshops (from programming through UX and design to entrepreneurship) I realize that I face a looming temporal anomaly.

Coder alert: Yes, there will be a hackfest. Just in case you were wondering. The last female hackathon I attended was so much fun to watch that I'm pondering whether I'd prefer to be there, or OR OR OR

AT THE SHARKETTE TANK PITCHFEST!!!!!!!!!!!! I can't begin to tell you how psyched I am about this. "Default Font" just doesn't carry the communicative weight of emotive body language. Ever since last Fall when a good friend of mine and woman start-up founder up in the Bay Area told me I should check out Shark Tank on TV, I have been hooked on the idea. Even more so here because of the focus on tech girls and women entrepreneurs.

So yeah, this is serious business. There are going to be more techie girls and women in one place than I've seen in a very long time. There are going to be years of wisdom and experience to network your happy way through and along. Techie stuff to learn. Fascinating people to meet and speak with, share ideas and plot and plan. I love to plot and plan.

This conference (did I mention the date: June 21) is bound to be mind blowing and transformative. How can I be so very confident about that? The very first time I went to a women in computing conference oh so many years ago, (I cut my geeky girl teeth at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing), I was blown out of the water by the vibe that emerges when you have technical women congregating en masse. I was also blown out of the water the second time. The third time. The fourth time. (instantiate While (TRUE) loop)

I expect no less this time. So I hope that many of my women tech friends and colleagues will attend. Especially, especially if you are already here in the San Diego area. For those of you living in the nether reaches of the universe I'll be writing something to fill you in on whichever portions of the day I manage to teleport myself in and out of.

San Diego UX Speakeasy Report aka Dealing with Issues

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa C. Kaczmarczyk) — Sat, 31 May 2014 23:18:00 +0000

Today's post will be of most interest to those of you who are part of the San Diego UX Speakeasy/IxDA group. To the rest of the world, perhaps less interesting. With that said and out of the way:

Ready to go to work

Last night the Speakeasy Committee (i.e. Board) held one of its periodic planning and plotting meetings. A cohort of our enthusiastic Volunteers joined the meeting as well. We had serious business to discuss that required the energies and creative input of many. We met at Intuit in a building that assaults you at the entrance with the sound of happily chirping frogs. I think the frog sounds are pre-recorded, but nonetheless it is pretty cool to come out at night and be serenaded with happy croaking.

Our big task of the evening was to tackle the list of Issues that you all (meetup members) assembled at the April meetup. A few additional Issues were added. Here is that list:

Issue: With the size of the group it is hard to find large enough venues

Issue: People have a hard time coming to events from farther away (N. County)

Issue: The group is so large that it is difficult to navigate and initiate meaningful connections

Issue: Some people want more learning opportunities

Issue: We have a hard time retaining new members

Issue: We should have more conferences

Issue: We should have a yearly conference with big names

Issue: There is a lack of perceived value to the groups activities (conferences are too expensive)

Issue: We need to promote UX more externally (to businesses)

Issue: We need to find better ways to involve Colleges and Students

Issue: Planning Monthly Meetups is hard/time consuming

Issue: We need more variety in our Meetups

Issue: We need a way to find out more about members (either member-to-member or managing)

Issue: We need more focused topics (e.g. Remote Research, Wireframing) rather than one-size-fits-all

Issue: We need more engagement and interaction at our meetups

Issue: We cannot cover our current costs

Issue: We need ways to cover beer and food for meetups

Issue: We are not getting enough national exposure to attract big name speakers

Issue: Waiting Lists for Meetups are keeping people away

Issue: It is too easy to NoShow and they are keeping Active or New Members from attending

Issue: There are some many varied backgrounds (or non UXers) that we are losing focus

Issue: Many people who join are looking for mentors

Issue: There is an overall lack of involvement (helping) in the group (present company excepted)

Issue: We need to have a way to promote design/UX in San Diego

Issue: We do not want to lose the culture that made the group successful but the larger it gets the harder it is to maintain

Issue: There may be people who want to help but don't know how

Issue: We need a way to prove our value to sponsors

Issue: We need a website and branding to help promote ourselves, are people, and our sponsors

Our Fearless Leader Means Business

Fearless leader Bennett led us in a modified KJ Technique, which was most interesting because

Serious Business

this activity requires periods in which no talking is allowed. None. Imagine this group being told they couldn't talk? Yeah, sometimes it was a

challenge. Nonetheless, Ben cracked the whip and waved the Sharpie and yelled as needed to keep things in order and moving right along.

Several steps later we had arranged, condensed and organized the above list into

the following

Categories (ranked highest to lowest):

Mission of the Organization

(sticking to what has made us so successful while we grow)

Keeping the Lights On

(aka Finances. It costs money to run our meetups)

(this also subsumed Waitlist Problems)

People Interaction Issues
(this also subsumed Volunteer Opportunities & Beginning UXers)

Name in Lights

(our larger local, regional, national, international & extra-terrestrial branding)

Planning Meetings/Finding Suitable Venues

(easier said than done)

We formed teams to cogitate on each of these categories and come up with recommendations for the organization's Board to consider.

Sound good? We think so. We're working hard, even on a Friday night, to keep UX Speakeasy fun and responsive to evolving times.

We also spent time plotting and planning great meetups and events for the remainder of the calendar year. Stay tuned. Also, we always need people to help out. Contact any of the Committee members if you can lend a hand, even if you have no idea how. You can do so through the Meetup site. We'll find something for you and we are a fun bunch to hang with.

Engrossing legislative updates for CA Computer Science

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa C. Kaczmarczyk) — Fri, 30 May 2014 21:10:00 +0000

Last evening I sat in on a meeting of the San Diego Chapter of the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA). We met in the San Diego Super Computer Center. In case you aren't all that familiar with the CSTA they are a very active national group of Computer Science Teachers (primarily in K-12) along with supporters and friends of K-12 CS education throughout education, government and industry. Their advocacy work for inclusion of CS throughout K-12 is impressive. They also publish periodic reports on the state of CS Education throughout the country. One of the most recent is "Bugs in the System: Computer Science Teacher Certification in the U. S." which paints a painful picture of the crazily complicated state of certification for would be computer science teachers.

At times there is news to be optimistic about and I heard some of it last night. Jason Weiss, a representative from the office of California State Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins gave the group a legislative update on 6 bills of interest for CS education in the state. As you may or may not know, depending upon how much you pay attention to the political process of passing bills, the system at the state level in many ways mirrors the process at the federal level. Both chambers of government have to pass a bill; one, then the other, and if amendments are made the bill goes back and forth to be resolved. Or perhaps it dies a quiet death for one of a variety of reasons. Eventually, if all goes well, a bill pops out of the system, perhaps like a champagne cork, and heads to the Governors office to be signed (or not).

Of the six bills, (CA AB1764, CA AB1530, CA AB1539, CA AB1540, CA AB2110, CA SB1200) most are making good progress.

They talk about a bill being "engrossed". Most of these bills were engrossed. I don't know who came up with this word choice; believe it or not it means that a bill is in a certain stage of that bouncing back and forth. Specifically, it means the bill has come out of (escaped?) from the chamber that initially filed it and it is on its way to the other chamber. Considering that amendments have often been incorporated, perhaps "engorged" would be a better word.

Most of the bills are doing well so far on their journey:

CA AB1764 would allow 3rd year Math credit to be awarded for Computer Science. This bill exited out at the end of April without opposition. How nice! (I originally wrote "passed out" but that has potential for far too many amusing interpretations)

CA AB1530 would include CS in the K-6 curricula. This bill exited out May 27th also without opposition. Moving right along...

CA AB1539 Sets content standards for computer science. Jason Weiss wasn't sure of the status of this bill as it was being considered yesterday afternoon, but from my wading through the weeds of relevant web pages, it appears to me to have passed along successfully.

Likewise, CA AB2110 which also relates to CS and content standards, continues its journey; gorey details can be found here, as does CA SB1200 which would establish standards for CS to be set that would be accepted by (presumably CA state) colleges and universities. It is on its way ....

And yes, that last one is SB1200 not AB1200. If you look up AB1200 you will find yourself reading about a vetoed bill related to recycled water in agriculture.

The lonely exception to this optimistic news is CA AB1540 which relates to high school students being able to take CS courses at community college. Jason told us the bill didn't get a hearing, which is better than being Vetoed I suppose. Officially, as they say, it is "held under submission" (go figure). Jason told us this most likely has to do with a cost issue of some sort that needs to be addressed. So we haven't necessarily heard the last of CA AB1540. But for this year at least it languishes. It doesn't even get to claim to have been engrossed.

What If a Student's MOOC Assignment POs Someone?

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa C. Kaczmarczyk) — Mon, 19 May 2014 04:19:00 +0000

What would happen if something a MOOC student submitted for an assignment offended someone not involved in the course? It's bound to happen sooner or later. Considering the global reach of a MOOC there could be a lot of blow back. Wouldn't it be a great idea to take a pedagogically proactive approach to the possibility?

I had such a terrific time taking my first MOOC earlier this year ("How to Change the World" read about the experience here) that I signed up for another one. The MOOC I'm currently enrolled in is called "Beyond Silicon Valley : Growing Entrepreneurship in Transitioning Economies" led by Michael Goldberg at Case Western Reserve University. I am having as excellent an experience this time around. Beyond Silicon Valley is challenging, thought provoking, engaging and as with "How to Change the World" I'm learning incredibly useful information that has already paid off professionally in more ways than one.

One nice difference this time is that the course faculty are taking active part in the forum discussions. That provides an added sense of connection. On the down side, the assignments are assessed this time based solely upon word count and whether or not you submit the assignment on time. I found this out when I misread a due time (did "midnight" mean the start of the day or the end of the day?) and also when my assignments were scored instantaneously. I have to say that I miss the peer grading from my last MOOC; it wasn't always high quality, but it was interesting. And the opportunity to read and ponder other student assignments was enlightening and sometimes mind blowing.

As with my first MOOC, "Beyond Silicon Valley" asks the student to dig for answers and reflect on their implications for their own situation. But it goes beyond that with a midterm that asks the student to interview local entrepreneurs and write about their findings.

Herein approaches the sticky issue.

Some pretty sensitive stuff can come up when asking business owners about their company. Having interviewed people in a variety of professional settings for years, I know that even the most cautious interviewee let slip things they might prefer not be put in writing. A good interviewer can facilitate this happening. It then falls on the interviewer to employ wise judgement when writing up their story.

Having high journalistic standards (whether as a professional or student writer) is important. I suspect the vast majority of my peer students are not out to muck rake or hurt anyone. Hopefully they pay attention to how and what they write, and in sensitive situations perhaps run proposed text by the people they report on.

But do all students in a given class take such care? Perhaps more important for an educator to ask: Do students even know to think about this?

No, they all don't.

In a Coursera MOOC (both of my classes were by Coursera) the student signs an agreement not to distribute, copy, report or otherwise share anything written by another student without that student's express permission. This is good, and thus, should there be a leak of one student's material by another student, the source of responsibility and liability is pretty clear.

On the other hand, students also sign an agreement when they first sign up with Coursera acknowledging they are aware that all their contributions will be readable by the university course staff and by Coursera personnel. In addition, the student agrees that Coursera may, at it's own discretion, use portions of student submissions. I can't remember the details, but basically the student agrees that Coursera has wide latitude in how it chooses to use student material. I have no problem with that. Coursera has the right to make that request in return for the educational service they are providing - for free. Until proven otherwise, I default to trusting Coursera not to abuse the situation.

Back to the stickiness.

Consider a scenario in which a student in a course such as "Beyond Silicon Valley"submits an assignment based upon an interview with a business entity. It's good. It's interesting. It's quality. As a result, someone on university or Coursera staff uses part or all of it for training or PR purposes. The business becomes offended for some unforeseeable reason.

The business may have assumed confidentiality, especially as this was a student assignment. The student may have not thought about the possibility that either a) what s/he wrote would bother anyone or that b) it would ever be seen outside the virtual course wall. The student may have not discussed the possibility of the the interview becoming public in whole or part. Yet Coursera has the right to use the student material. Everyone was acting in good faith. Nonetheless, the stuff hits the fan.

Who is responsible? Who is going to take the heat? Who is going to come out ok and who will be severely bruised?

It would be completely counterproductive for all concerned if this situation becomes bogged down in legal and bureaucratic wranglings. We're talking about education here folks; social change. Let's take the high road shall we and try to cut this off at the pass.

In a live or virtual classroom there is an opportunity for faculty to discuss issues of confidentiality, privacy, contractual agreements; implications of what you write, possible scenarios of how material can be used. Especially with regards to interviewing and how the material is written up. We shouldn't assume that intelligent well educated adults (as most MOOC students are) know all about this. Even if they do, the topic bears revisiting. It's good for faculty and students alike to remember that you can have all your facts and knowledge and entrepreneurial ducks in a row, yet if you step on the wrong person's toe you are toast.

Pedagogically, there is an important difference here between a traditional class and a MOOC class. The sense of distance inherent to a virtual environment can lead to increased complacency or denial of interpersonal communication landmines. Thus we have a challenge that needs to be addressed proactively.

Pedagogically we have a great opportunity. MOOCs such as Coursera's want to change the face of education and benefit society by leveraging the power of the Internet. I'm all for it. In these early entrepreneurial stages of MOOC development, let's watch for these sticky issues and talk about them until we solve them.

Girls Coding: The International Women's Hackathon

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa C. Kaczmarczyk) — Tue, 29 Apr 2014 03:02:00 +0000

This past weekend I had the privilege to attend the International Women's Hackathon, held simultaneously at 50 universities around the world with approximately 2500 young women taking part. The San Diego regional contingent was held at California State University - San Marcos. Approximately 70 high school and college

students registered and then arrived from all over the region. My informal poll recorded 6 colleges and universities and 6 high schools. One set of students came up on a bus from close to 100 miles away and two high school students came all the way from Tijuana, Mexico. Many sleep loving students must have risen and hit the road well before dawn to arrive for the 8am check-in.

During the welcoming and introductory portion of the morning some interesting information came out. For example, when asked, not one of the participants had heard of The Hour of Code. I was somewhat suprised, because here we had 70 girls who are interested in coding, yet none of the massive celebrity laden publicity had reached any of them.

Here is another interesting piece of information: only 2 students raised their hands to say they had participated in a hackathon before. I was intrigued. So later, I asked around about this. Some girls told me they had never heard of hackathons; one told me she had no idea what one was, thinking perhaps it was an opportunity to hack into computers - apparently one of her parents cleared things up on the drive over. Perhaps most telling, one 16 year old told me

"if it [the hackathon] was both genders most of the women would not have showed up".

Considering that, though officially open to everyone, most hackathons are attended primarily by males, this may have been the most important response to my question. One worth thinking about by everyone who wants to make a positive difference for women in computing.

The range of prior computing experience on Saturday was huge. Some students had never coded at all and some, within a few minutes of gathering into their teams, were talking about appropriate uses of recursion

and how different class hierarchies functioned. Some participants had formed teams in advance and others were helped to form compatible groups first thing in the morning. No one was left out.

I trotted around, trying to pop in on every group of students (13 in all) several times during the course of the day. It was amazing to observe how events unfolded, the students' skills and confidence evolving and growing in tandem.

For example, the first group I dropped in on, at about 9am, was a high school team with zero coding experience. They were clearly nervous and unsure how to get going (in case you worry they were completely on their own, 16 adult mentors circulated around all day, but were not allowed on the keyboard). These team members didn't know each other ahead of time. None of them had taken a computing class, none of them had plans to study Computer Science or a related field. So why were these girls there? One wanted to run her own business some day and thought it would be useful to know something about coding; one had taught herself about robotics from watching YouTube videos and had then joined a robotics club; one didn't know what a hackathon was but thought it sounded interesting. Interesting sounding enough to give up her entire Saturday. Talk about a motivated trio!

By 4pm, when I revisited them, this team was seated in the lab, each on her own computer, writing html code

and confidently talking back and forth about how to integrate their individual web pages onto one site about encouraging more women to go into STEM.

At the other end of the prior experience spectrum was a team of college women, who told me they
were 4 of only 12 females in a department of 500 Computer Science majors. How did they know? There were so few of them that they all knew each other; on the rare occasion when they saw they weren't the only woman in class they immediately gravitated across the lecture hall to meet their compatriot. This foursome was incredibly enthusiastic about the hackathon, and within less than 8 hours had created a complex web platform that blew even the judges away.

In chatting with them earlier in the day, one of the things these women told me was that they felt it was very important to to get the word out that women in Computer Science are intelligent, social, have a wide variety of interests, are attractive, have a fashion sense, and are equally as competent as all the guys (and a few other things I didn't write down fast enough). They were also one of several groups who told me they wanted to change the world.

As I circulated between PC labs and the Mac lab, up and down the hallways, I was impressed with the nearly universal lack of overt competitiveness within groups or of jockeying for leadership position. Cooperation was the name of the game. Often, as I sat off to the side for extended periods of time, I observed an amazing dynamic in which these young women worked together, discussing ideas, deferring to one another, trying to bring others along when they had
questions, dividing tasks based upon interests and experience. This is not to say the groups were unambitious; definitely not. They aimed high, worked incredibly hard and, once they had settled on a mutually agreeable plan, they focused, focused, focused on developing the best possible contest entry. Everyone had a part to play. Yet even then, the focus was on building the best app or web page or game to solve the task - I didn't hear anyone worrying aloud about what the other groups might be doing.

The day was incredibly inspiring. So many of these young women taught themselves to use platforms they had never heard of before. So many of them produced incredible results. They were energetic and enthusiastic and fun to be around. In fact, having watched all of the presentations made to the judges, I can confidently say that all of the hackathon participants were amazing. Every team had something concrete and unique to show for their efforts.

We need more events like this. Lots more. And follow up to keep the ball rolling after the day ends. Lots of follow up activities to hold the excitement and enthusiasm and continue the unique dynamic that girls and women clearly bring to Computer Science.

History and Navigation Adventures in Techie-Land

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa C. Kaczmarczyk) — Thu, 10 Apr 2014 03:47:00 +0000

Officer Mac of the Sunnyvale, CA Police Department

It doesn't get much more awash in tech than here in Mountain View, California. This afternoon I visited the Computer History Museum - an obligatory stop when you make the rounds here. Aside from the expected reminders of how fast tech moves (I saw an Osborne 1, the earliest portable computer, weighing in at a mere 23.5 lbs in its carrying case, a carrying case I hauled proudly around in the days when I didn't worry about yanking out my spine or popping a rotator cuff), I learned some unexpected fun facts that even many of my super techie friends and colleagues might not know.

Did you know that punched cards were critical to the compilation of the British Atlas of Flora and Fauna, published by the Botanical Society of the British Isles in 1962? Data was compiled on 40 column punch cards and then used to create distribution maps. The maps were printed as dots on maps that covered the entire British Isles. Those maps, as well as some of the original cards, are on display in the museum.

Officer Mac was created by 21st Century Robotics (a US company) and in 1985 was known to visit schools as a goodwill ambassador for the police department. Officer Mac, who was as tall as some adults, was operated by remote control. He showed public safety videos. But here's the really good part: Officer Mac (A ROBOT!) was used as a nonthreatening counselor to abused children. I really wished there had been more information to read about how this was done and how well it worked.

Have you ever heard of Barbera Stephenson? I hadn't. An engineering graduate of MIT, she was hired by Digital Equipment Corporation in 1961 as their first female engineer. There was a nice quote on the wall about how she dealt with the many men who were at first unbelieving and then astounded to encounter her. She'd start politely rattling off the technical information they were looking for and then they'd react as if they had encountered a new life form.

Outside of my museum visit, and clearly in the giggle department, is my interaction with Google's navigation system this week. Here, in the heart of Silicon Valley, a few short miles from Google Central, I have had more quirky encounters with their navigation system than anywhere else in the country. As soon as I entered Mountain View the navigation started having trouble with street names. This morning for example, as I exited the driveway, the polite authoritative voice told me to TURN LEFT. Well, turning left was clearly going to go the long way around the block. So I turned right.

A few minutes later, as I encountered the first large intersection, the navigation told me to TURN RIGHT, naming a road that was clearly not the road in front of me. Now, in case you think that navigation was smarter than me, you would be wrong, for I had (as always) done a manual check of where I was going prior to getting into the car. Knowing where I was (a mere 2 blocks from my starting point) I turned right. Perhaps navigation was miffed. Because from then on: no more street names. For the rest of the day I was instructed to TURN LEFT or TURN RIGHT or GO STRAIGHT or CONTINUE without any identifiers or distances. When navigation ordered me to MAKE A U-TURN a split second after turning into the right most lane of a very busy multi-lane street, I could swear I detected a note of smug self-satisfaction.

Strange things like this have been going on for days. Last weekend, as I drove south on Interstate 880 towards Mtn. View, navigation authoritatively instructed me to take one of the exits, go around the block and get back on the freeway. I knew that exiting was in error, but I was in no hurry, and curious to see what the system was up to. So I made the very short diversion through an empty office park before continuing on my way.

Is there a Bermuda Triangle effect at work here? Either that or my navigation system is malfunctioning. Nah...