Legos (for girls)

I was not raised in a house that only told me I was pretty. Sure I had an ez-bake oven and a kitchen. I had aprons and baby dolls and Barbies. But I also had Lincoln Logs, Blocks, Tanagrams, and loads and loads of Legos. We were raised hearing we were capable and smart and beautiful and funny and a whole other list of things that our parents saw in us.

I was thinking about, however, my interaction with Legos as an adult and I saw a new relationship developing. I am the single, feminist, lesbian mother of a young girl. And when she was little she had all the same kind of variety of toys. But Legos, by the time she was born, were a new thing – there were boy Legos and girl Legos. There were Legos in purple and pink and Legos in primary colors. There were (are) Lego Playsets with dogs and cats and there are Lego Playsets with spaceships and rockets. The dogs and cats are for the girls, of course – to foster nurturing, and the rockets and spaceships and robots are for the boys – to foster critical thinking and science-focused imagination play. One literally builds domestication one literally builds scientific wonder.

Working With Images

I found that the process to upload images was very straightforward and easy to navigate on WordPress. I also think that using Blackboard in class and learning how to properly link and upload as well as being a longtime social network user made this process seem pretty simple. While I don’t always have to use embedding codes on a daily basis, not on Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr, I do remember using them on MySpace back in the old days and this seemed like riding a bike. As for optimizing the image, I was unsure how to properly attack that but what I did was use the preview to make sure that the images were not too large or too small or too off-center and made a decision based on that preview option.

The only real issue that I had was in uploading the youtube video that I added to my Technology subpage in my Cultural Research Project on Aprille Ericsson-Jackson. Because of my incredibly slow internet connection – made worse by the crazy windy and rainy weather in my San Diego mountains today – I was unable to access the embed code so I just linked the page as I would do using blackboard for class.

Challenges and Frustrating Parts of this Cultural Research Project

Well, let me start by saying that it is 4:40 in the morning and I am still working to put all the parts in this project together. And secondly I have found that it is not that easy to find detailed information on my subject. So many of the articles that I found are simply recycling information from the other articles. It was very difficult to get a real gauge of Aprille Ericsson-Jackson’s personality.

The other issue that I have run into this week is that it was incredibly difficult to understand so much of Ericsson-Jackson’s discoveries and innovations without a graduate degree in her field. I had to read everything I could find on the gyroscope and the microwave anistropy probe just to get a general idea of what the functions of these technological advances are.

And finally, the process of blogging -especially with the back-and-forth between my pages file for the links and the wordpress pages for the content – was made very difficult tonight. There really should be a more streamlined way to link files. I just found this process extremely frustrating.

Using Online Library Resources

This week I worked on gathering resources and information about Aprille Ericsson-Jackson’s life, her work, and her contributions to STEM and to women of color. I wanted to use as many databases as possible to attempt to put together a rounded understanding of Ericsson-Jackson as woman, black woman, feminist, and scientist. But to do that I feel that I really need to know first what student life was like for women in STEM at Howard University, what professional life is like at NASA as a person of color, and more specifically as a woman of color.

I also wanted to understand what it is that Ericsson-Jackson really does for NASA. I understand the field she is in and I understand that she assists in discovery and planning for space travel but that’s about all I understand. So I looked to the online databases, research sites, and library resources to help me understand more about Aprille Ericsson-Jackson’s life and upbringing and social contributions, as well as her scientific ones. I hope to be able to find some kind of layperson’s explanation of the work.

I found that Oregon State, my university, has a very user-friendly and accessible online library and database. I found a good amount of information there. I did not particularly enjoy or really get much from jstor and I guess I am surprised by that because that is normally my first go-to database. I was pleasantly surprised by the information available on the Library of Congress Database and I also found a ton of scientific journals and pieces in scientific journals on Google Scholar but they are still so far outside of my wheelhouse that I will need a more simplified source to map out an understanding of Ericsson-Jackson’s work in aerospace engineering.

When I started to search more social and historical sources in order to access a more experential resource that would help me understand life at Howard, life at NASA, life in the projects as a smart girl who sees her life outside of them, I was rewarded with loads of information in multiple academic journals of history, sociology, social work, and black studies. I am really excited about these documents.

I also used the Answerland Library Resource – the online 24/7 librarian. I asked this site if it could explain the work that Aprille Ericsson-Jackson does at NASA. After asking my question it sends you a number, sort of like the numbers you get while waiting in line at the DMV, and then it will answer or attempt to answer – by email – in the order of the numbers assigned. I have another two days to wait until I am up next. So, we shall see. I have used the school library multiple times, and in-person I have found the library a wonderful experience. But I have never used it online and I have never ordered books to be sent home to an out-of-state, distance student. In fact, I was really surprised to find out that was even an option. But for now, I think that the Answerland resource teemed with the loads of information on the multiple databases available will serve me more than amply in my research.

Aprille Ericsson-Jackson: Aerospace Engineer

Aprille Ericsson-Jackson

Aprille Ericsson-Jackson is the current Senior Deputy Instrument Manager on the ICESat-2 Atlas Rocket as well as an engineer working on instruments designed to aid in lunar surface mapping with NASA. She is the first black woman to graduate with a Ph.D in mechanical engineering at Washington D.C’s prestigious Howard University and the first black woman to receive a Ph.D. in engineering at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, after receiving her Bachelors in Science from MIT in aeronautical/astronautical engineering.

Besides her demanding work as an aerospace engineer with NASA, Ericsson-Jackson is an athlete, a committed advocate and outreach coordinator for women and people of color in the STEM fields, a member of the Board of Trustees at Howard University, the chair of the Board of Directors of Howard’s Charter Middle School of Mathematics and Science, and an instructor and lecturer at both Howard University and Bowie State University.

Ericsson-Jackson grew up in the Roosevelt Projects in the Bedford Styuvesant neighborhood in New York City and was the product of determination, a will to succeed, and the public school system. She has gone on to be widely considered a Woman Who Will Change the World, as well as the NASA representative to the President of the United States, among other enormous accomplishments. But perhaps her greatest contribution to gender and technology is the marriage she has made in the power of self-belief and drive with the recognition of the obstacles placed before women of color in the STEM fields. She uses that understanding to do proactive and constant outreach to women of color and others who are often left out of the conversation about the next great discovery.

Aprille J. Ericsson (Photo by Kevin Allen) from blackenterprise.com

Week Two Recap: Gender and Technology: Setting Up My Blog

So, first thing I need to say is that I have written this directly to the text area of the blog New Post section multiple times and then hit “post” and it not save my words. So I am thinking about cutting and pasting this before publishing so that I have some record of what I wrote and don’t have to rewrite again. This has been a little frustrating.

As for the set-up process, I made a few changes to the set-up of my blog and made some decisions about theme that I would like to share with you. Think of this as a shared journey through WordPress, and blogging in general. We can kind of use this to learn how to do this together. This week I added an RSS Feed, made some design choices for the look of the blog, added pages for future projects I know that I am going to do on here (this was done mainly to learn how to do it), created categories for posts, added and removed some widgets, and changed the order of the widgets to create a more reader-friendly sidebar. But most importantly I sort of wandered WordPress, reading other blogs, learning from much more experienced bloggers, consider aesthetic, and got friendly with settings so that I can navigate my blog and this blogworld from a more equipped place. What I found is that WordPress is entirely navigable and user-friendly, which made me even more excited to get this blog up and running.

One thing about set-up that I think is important to share is the concept of reader-friendly design. I am, what I like to call, a baby goth – meaning that, even as an adult who lives a non-goth’s life, I have inside of me my own little teenage goth girl and I don’t think she and I will ever move on from one another. Because of this, I tend to be drawn to dark patterns, sort of creepy backgrounds, and lots of blacks and greys (or is it grays – I never know). I have also learned this week, from my Gender and Technology instructor as well as from my experience as newly traveled blog-explorer, that white or light writing on a black or super-dark background looks really cool but it is sort of exhausting to read and it strains the eyes of the reader. Here is my fear: what if my readers go away from my blog feeling tired? I don’t want that. So my compromise is a dark top design, a dark image using the Hemingway setting – which is a large top image and then a streamlined reading and writing experience, on a white background with black and green lettering. I like it. It does the dark design without the reader’s experience of a dark design. The most important part of this lesson was to think like the reader. It’s important that you do you, because no one else can. And the design of my blog has to be me being me for the same reason. So I won’t compromise my story and I won’t over-compromise my design. But I think that a blog is a request for people to enter into your life and sort of travel with you. You can’t really be inviting if your needs as travel guide trump the needs of your co-travelers. (Ok, enough with that analogy.)

Another note, or rather final note, I think that the RSS feed is a genius edition to your blog. First, consider it a built-in brainstorming tool. Also, it creates a moving/changing space inside the blog that I think lends itself to this kind of expanding written format. Because my blog is Gender and Technology-centric. I decided to include in my blog feminist magazines, queer magazines, as well as tech magazines and journals. I also am subscribing to news from local, national, and international large press like San Diego Union Tribune, the New York Times, and Ha-Aretz but controlling for Women in STEM, Gender and Technology, Gender and Science, Feminism and Technology, and other like topics. I love this section of the blog.

If you have any questions about how to navigate your set-up and how I did specific things, if you would like to have a conversation about widgets or categories or pages, please comment below and we will learn this stuff together. Thanks for doing this with me! It’s more fun with friends.

Basic technology to fight the dominant, heterosexist, cisgenderist, racist, xenophobic, patriarchal paradigm. SLEDGEHAMMER.

Week One Recap – Gender and Technology: Gender and Blogging

I am so excited to be starting this blog. This is something that I have wanted to create for myself for eons now but was unsure how to begin. This is not on the prompt list but I am hoping that I will be able to change the name after the class. If not I guess I will use this for school stuff and a jumping off board.

The process to set up this blog was so pain-free. It was easy to add pictures, to format, to begin. I think that because most of us are so comfortable on social media, we are increasingly at ease with these setups. My only issue is that I think these would be more exciting on a format like tumblr. I think that tumblr is super alive right now and it has an easy blogging format that gets so much more traffic. I am almost certain that when I do start my own topical blog it will be on tumblr.

Setting up my email signature was also painless, probably because it is a process I have to go through professionally with every new job or internship. I added more information than was asked for only because I think it makes sense to include my major department and student ID number so that I have it in communications with advisors and counselors as well as instructors. Like others I have seen I included my email address but that always seemed super redundant. What do you all think about that? Do you have a quote in your email signatures? I wanted to put a line from RENT but I thought that might be a bit pretentious. Feel free to comment below with your opinions on that.

Oh, and I cannot believe that I waited this long to hear the text-to-voice options on my MacBook. That was the most hilarious experiment. I am basically obsessed with Junior, Princess, Delirious, and Hysterical. But no, I don’t think I will use it for class material. I like to read to myself – often out loud if the work/reading is challenging. And I think I need the two, my eyes and my voice, in order to sort of own the information, to kind-of create a relationship with it.

Just to start us off…a quote from one of the bravest feminist bloggers ever: