How to Edit Photos Using a Variety of Different Tools

Check out mine and Tanya's tutorial on photo editing media!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whFkXyuaPoU

Why Women & Computers?

It is really important that women realize we need to more competent in technology. Technology is the future and we need to be equal with our male counterparts if we are going to suceed in the business world together.

In my future profession as a social worker, I will need to utilize a lot of technology and this class has helped me learn how to make clickable links, edit/take notes on presentations and publish projects online.

It is up to us that we provide the younger generation of women and girls with the tools to make it in the world. It is important that the digital divide as it relates to gender be recongized so we can catch it early enough so that tomorrow's girls and women will be equally intelligent in the means of computer and technology advancement.

What I Learned from Presentations on Women's Contributions

Many people chose Caterina Fake to do there presentation on. In 2009, she co-founded Hunch which is a system that uses collective intelligence to make suggestions based on user's interesters. She is most well-known as the creator of Flickr. Flickr was founded in 2004 and is one of the most popular photo sharing websites. I enjoyed the presentations by Amy, Tanya, and Becky.

Women's Contribution Project: Beth Kanter

Beth Kanter has one of the longest running and most popular blogs for nonprofits. She is famous for her use of social media to improve non-profit organizations in the fields of technology, training, capacity building, fundraising and marketing. She has worked in the non-profit sector for 25 years. She was named "One of the Most Influential Women in Technology" by Busniess Week.

She co-created Zoetica, which is a website that serves non-profits and socially conscious companies by word-of-mouth communication services. What is unique about this website is that the results of how well you are reaching your audiance are measurable. If the goal that you wanted was not attained, changes can be made to how your social media is structured and hopefully your mission statement will work better.

Here is a link to my Women's Contribution Project about Beth Kanter.
https://show.zoho.com/public/plst0901/Women%26%2339%3Bs+Contibution+Project+WS445

Life Resources Relating to Social Work Practice

When I graduate from St. Cloud State University in Fall of 2012, I will have a double major in social work and women’s studies. I plan to practice at the macro/social justice level helping people advocate mainly around class and gender issues. I searched “social work class and gender issues at macro level.”

I first searched Google Plain and there were a lot of useful websites relating to advocacy work that needs to be done relating to issues around class and gender. A lot of the issues that women face are class issues because they are amongst the poorest in this country. Keeping up with current legislative decisions is very important as a social worker because your practice is affected by what laws are passed. Google helped me find the latest the news relating to the issues of class and gender, as well a general overview of what class and gender issues are. One of my favorite links that I found was an article called “Direct Social Work Practice: Theory and Skills.” It is interesting to see what people in the field are doing relating to gender and class issues.

Google Blogs was a little helpful, but there were blogs that only talked about gender issues and blogs that only talked about class issues. As interesting as those blogs were, I wanted more of an intersection between the two of them. One of the blogs,“Privilege and Safety”  was written by a very intelligent woman with macro practice experience; it was refreshing to hear her personal experience in the field so I can kind of get a feel as to what I could go into in the future.

Technorati, Alltop, Google News and Google Groups were not helpful at all in my search. I realize that my search is very specific and these sites were made for more general knowledge.

International Feminism and MultiMedia

When I read the article "Daughters are not for Killing," I was shocked. I do not know a lot about International problems that women face, but I do know that they are different than what women face in the United States. The article was about a women from India who was in love and was about to get married to a man that her parents had not arranged for her. Her parents seemed like they actually did not care whether she married for love or whether they would decide for her.

A few weeks before she was due to be married, her family abducted her and moved her to a different city to keep her from getting married to the man she loved. They family felt that their honor was threatened so they kept her away from him.

Unfortunatly, this happens a lot in country like India where dowry murders are supposedly illegal but continue to happen with no one being punished. Dowry murders are where a young is killed by her family for commiting some "crime" against them such as getting married in secret or having sex before marriage. Dowry murders also includes when a women's husband is killed, it is said that if the widow jumps on a fire and commits suicide it is a sign of great honor. Of course, men are not excepted to do the same when their wives die... 

Digital Divide-Gender

When referring to gender when discussing the digital divide, we are talking about the gap in between people with effective access to digital and information technology and those with very limited or no access at all. This includes usage and interest in technology, computers especially. When I was researching the digital divide, I found that boys believe they are more computer savvy than girls, even though girls spent more time on the computer and started using the computer at a younger age.

Much research has been done on the digital divide between socioeconomic groups, but not enough, in my opinion, between gender groups. Some of the reasons for inadequate access between the poor and the wealthy overlap between women and men. This may be because the majority of people living in poverty are women. 

Some barriers include lack of childcare, reluctance by other women and girls, family members, tech-related class organizers and tech center staff to support women and girls in participating in tech classes or in using tech, class and tech center structures where "squeaky wheels get the grease", meaning that unless you know how to be very verbal and demonstrative about needs and opinions, you won't be attended to or supported much and cultural barriers, as in a woman may feel uncomfortable being the only one, or one of just a few women, in a computer class.

When I was looking through my classmate's information on the what they found while researching the digital divide, I found this interesting quote from Becky's Blog; “It is important for boys and girls to see that adult women use the computer as well as men. Simply put, moms should spend time on the computer so that sons and daughters view technology as something that adults make use of rather than just dads. This will help boys and girls resist the idea that technology is gender linked.—that is, that it is a toy or tool primarily for men.” I think this is really true because we should never underestimate the power of influence that parents have on their children. Children, especially daughters, need to see strong women in their lives and see that they can grow up to technologically competent as well.

Via Aremy's research, I found that less than 15% of Wikipedia’s editors are women and Wikipedia has set a goal for getting the number of women contributors up to 25% by 2015 to address this gender gap. I think it is great that Wikipedia is doing something to address the digital divide and that they knowledgeable that it even exists. To me. It makes sense that websites would want to do something like Wikipedia is doing because if they are only appealing to men, they are losing half of their possible audience.