LOVE THESE POSTERS!!!!

Who would of knew, eh? A poster for international computing conferences with all women.. Amazing! And not just (stereo)typical white, able-bodied, western, subtly "sexy" business women either, but an array of racial backgrounds, styles, and body-mobility.

Reflections

Welcome to the reflexive part of our blog!

Here you can read our personal reflections, throughout the process of our Engaging Girls Project.

From our initial thoughts or hesitations, to our thought processes and frustrations, you will find our individual journal style entries from planning to implementing.

This process has not been a linear one, as we are constantly developing it, improving upon in and critically engaging with the content simultaneously.

Subjectivity plays both an important role in Girls Studies and in life, so we cherish the opportunity to dedicate a section of our learning process to this empowering practise. This enables us to have a record of how much we have grown during this project; how we as students and friends have developed alongside our assignment and as a result of it.

Enjoy our Reflections!

I've got a problem: Blogging and Bedroom Culture

I noticed the very groomed and potentially airbrushed photoshoots of girls using technology in their bedrooms: and this is my resistance to it!

I blog from my bedroom. I always have, and in this particular instance, I am ready for bed and in my pajamas!

This is the reality of blogging-You can do it from anywhere and it is not restricted to business hours and does not require a uniform. I share information, ideas, photos, opinions and recipes online all the time. The fact is, I can do this from the comfort of my home-I can make money, produce content, contribute to the web, and create a space for myself in the 'public sphere' from my 'private sector'. This blurs the boundaries of the public/private divide that has been asserted to why research on girls has been only recently established.

I assert that the popularity and prevalence of internet technology in the home is a huge step in the direction of girls creating their own presences in very public ways in the very publicly accessible domain of cyberspace. Girls are literally creating space for themselves and for their realities through contributions to blogs, online zines, in their comments of links and participation in online gaming. This space is progress. It is empowered. It is girls engaged! And in relation to our Driver reading, the internet is a place to find alternative messages about girlhoods, the bedroom where these messages are both produced and consumed; a contrast to television where girls are only the consumer, and in no way in control of making the messages about girls and their experiences. The internet technology available is a venue to talk back to messages and popular constructs girls, by girls for girls.

Blogging is both valid and valuable.

Blogging happens! And it happens in my bedroom! I am not being sexualized, I am being subjective! We are creating inclusive alternatives for girls that they, themselves can contribute to, and it is all done from the comfort of my room!

Pretty powerful position to be in, if you ask me!

Brainstorming...

These are some notes from our project brainstorming sessions. We had so many ideas and connections it was hard to keep up at times!!

Whitney's further Reflections on Bedroom Culture

"Boys are thought to occupy the public world for their leisure and subcultural activities, while girls are thought to resort to the private sanctuary of the bedroom where they read teeny bopper magazines and indulge in fantasies with their girlfriends about rock stars and Jackie pin-ups" (McRobbie 1991: 72).

I love this Erin! I remember you saying how you created your first blog because you were tired of reading fashion blogs. What we are doing is resisting the reality portrayed in the above quote. This technological shift in bedroom culture is uniting the private and public spheres so girls can create alternatives for other girls to be inspired to live out who they truly are instead of subscribing to and reproducing heteronormative cultural clichés!!

Girls, Technology and Bedroom Culture

“Bedroom Culture” is the name given to nature of girls’ lives, which prevented the advancement of the academic study of girls. In the past, and in many ways still to this day, girls involvement in society was confined to the private sphere, they remained at home learning domestic trades while boys engaged in the public sphere by being involved in the education system and the “outside world”. This caused barriers for scholars who wanted to study girls and many found it difficult to locateand comprehend the agency of girls (Driscoll, 2008, p.p. 21).

Bedroom culture among girls has continued to this day, but this bedroom culture is driven by the vehicle of technology. Many girls have powerful views on politics, rights, justice and the like and they express it to their friends on facebook, text it to their friends on their phones, and email it to their teachers, but they do not blog or make their thoughts for public access. Many girls express themselves on

Skype, or web cam, or on short videos done on their desktop computers, but only their friends and family ever see it. Many girls sing to brush in front of there mirrors, play their guitars on their beds, or compose their original music on Garage Band, but they

never put their music up on public sites or become D.J.’s. This is bedroom culture, all of this can be done from the comfort of the bedroom, the private sphere.

Why then do we want to encourage girls to make their opinions, movies, and music, expressed through technology, public? Because we value girls voices and believe the world needs to hear them. We believe this technological bedroom culture has starved the public of an equal representation of what needs to be said. Girls voices tend to be a minority in terms of what is represented in technology but they are not a minority in terms of the population of the world. Let's bring the girls ideas out of the bedroom and into the public!

INTERNET DISRUPTED!!!

We also want to disrupt the internet and technological public sphere. The pictures I show around this post are results from a Google image search of girls and their relationship with technology. What do we typically see? Smiling, pink, middle-class, mostly white, happy girls whose family can afford to get them their own laptop at age eight. Where are the queer girls? Where are the girls of ethnic minorities? Where are the girls of lower class engaging in technology? We want all girls to make their technological endeavors public so ALL girls are represented not just the "pretty" ones the internet wants us to see.

C. Driscoll. 2008. Girls Today: Girls, girl culture and girls studies, Journal of Girlhood Studies, Summer 1(1) 13-32

Yet another Brainstorm

To satisfy part of our requirement for the implementation of this group project, we are to submit any document pertaining to planning. Though we relied on our computers for the majority of our project, a couple of good old fashioned pieces of paper were sometime the quickest way to document our thoughts. We made lists, mind maps, feverishly took notes in meeting with Dr. Lee and jotted things down when they cam to us.

These pictures are of this process. We wanted to include these documents in their original form-unedited, crumpled and barely coherent. These were our thought processes that led to the project you see today.

Sometimes when we were talking out our ideas, they flowed quicker than it took to turn on our computers. Because of the wonders of technology, we were able to take digital photos and post them to our blog.

This way the entire process is transparent. This way we don't have to print anything out on more paper, just to end up in a pile. This way we have included our planning process so that our Proff. can track our progress, which was certainly not all online.

In reflection, it has been very rewarding to use so many different mediums to present the information we have gathered together. It is visually appealing, textural despite being on a computer scree, it has impact and creates its own narrative.

It is personally rewarding to look back and see just how far this project has come. I feel a sense of pride considering these crumpled pieces of paper have taken an entirely new format. They are the fledgling steps that we have completed, they are the foundation on which this project was based. I enjoy looking back on them and realizing we have accomplished what we set out to do a short time ago.

From bits of paper to the computer; we have come along way as a group, similarly to Girl Power.

Erin's Guide to adding a menu bar to your blog!

Sometimes I think this project plays to my strengths,
and then I have to learn how to make tabs!!!!!!!

So at the top of a blog you may find something that looks like a menu. It is always present no matter what page you are viewing. We are using this feature to organize our blog, which is acting like a learning journal (a requirement of our Engaging Girls project). So we want to have headings like those you would find in the table of contents of a paper...but online and interactive!

So I learn something new today!

The learning curve always seems steeper when there is the added pressure of a deadline. I think it is really important to make our blog easily accessible so more time can go into enjoy in the content instead of trying to manoeuvres around it.

Here is my How-To if you would like to learn as well.

1. Sign into your blogger account and on your Dashboard page, click Design.
2. Next click the Add Gadget button on the top horizontal section of the template.
3. Scroll down to Labels and press Add.
4. In the screen that pops up, select the Selected Labels option

5. There is an Edit option coloured blue, click that.

6. This will bring you to a screen with all your previous posts, click the boxes to select which ones you want as labels for your menu bar

7. This reminds me, when we are labelling our blog posts, we should label them according to which section we wish them to appear. Now each post with that label will automatically fall under our pre-selected categories. Just like a written learning journal

8. Click Done, and don't forget to press save.

You can now click View Blog to see all your hard work!

I think it is a nice addition to our blog. And I hope it will help you find what you are looking for as well as learn to make some tabs for your own blog.

Enjoy, and happy blogging!

Terri Oda, Debunking Biology

How does biology explain the low numbers of women in computer science? Hint: it doesn't.

View more presentations from Terri Oda

This is reposted from SlideShare.

This post proves the idea that women are not as good as math, and therefore computer science, is false. Ideas like these have been supported in the past by biology and other sciences, and even though many of the studies have been exposed as biased or sexist, there findings can still perpetuate today in to explain the differences in the percentages and participation of women in certain male dominated fields.

These constructions of girls and women were detailed in Nancy Lesko's article Past, Present and future concept of Adolescence, showing the shifts in discourse and accepted beliefs in relation to time period and scientific field of study. She traced the paths to a more accurate and inclusive discourse of 'girlhoods' and this presentation supports Lesko's stance on the drawbacks of discourse based on biology while refuting wrongly applied data to explain stereotypes supported by science.

My critique of this slide presentation is that it does not offer a feminist critique, nor does it attempt to explain why the numbers show there are less girls represented in the computer sciences field.


However, this slideshow does reveal a disconect between the reality of girls’ skills and potential to engage in technology and the socially constructed portrayal of girls’ potential.

“For, example, anthropologists Yanigasako and Collier (1990) argue that inquireies into childbearing and child rearing as socially constructed in particular historical situations are fundamentally undermined by the assumed natural biological division between women who bear children and men who do not. Yanigasako and Collier discuss how an acceptance of the nature/cultural division in anthropological theory and research is concomitant with an acceptance of biology as universal, outside of cultural influences, and with inevitable social consequences for gendered divisions of labour. They argue that in not examining how biological sex differences are socially constructed, feminist theory ultimately is undermined by these biological differences” (Lesko, 1996, p p. 143).

Therefore, we, girl power 3.0 will refuse to let our feminist theory be undermined but not drawing attention to how socially constructions based on biology has limited girls involovment in technology, specifically computer sciences!! Girls, statistically are just as capable of the level of math required for computer sciences as boys. They have the skills, so innate biological factors to not get in their way. However, what does limit girls’ involvement in computer sciences is how computing jobs have been culturally portrayed as a boy’s club. When girls think of computer sciences employees most envision a nerdy White or Asian male typing away at computer desk, when this does not have to be the case. We, girl 3.0 aim to debunk this myth and attack these social constructions to help other girls, and even ourselves as girls feel more comfortable about engaging with computers in the professional realm.