Increasing Women's Access To and Use of Technology

Now this was by far my favorite session - There were probably 50 participants, with a dynamic speaker - Karen Sobel Lojeski - She is a professor in the Department of Technology and Society in the College of Engineering and Applied Science at Stony Brook University. She is also the founder of Virtual Distance International (VDI), an advisory firm helping organizations boost productivity and innovation in the virtual workforce.

Karen spoke about the affect of technology on society. She is certainly a user and proponent of IT, but also sees it's limitations.

We need to encourage girls, and engage with them but with their interests.

Karen spoke about what virtual distance is - The entire world has changed. In 2010, over 1 billion virtual workers in Asia. A virtual worker is anyone working with a screen. Organizational models are based on 60's structures and assuming commerce was a face to face communications. Not any more.

Major disconnect with what we're doing. Need to look at global organizations of the future.

Paradox, the more connected we become, the more isolated we become.

In three years netscape had over 100 million users - don't have time to adapt. The phone, it took 50 years. Karen spoke about a column in the NY Times - that on line education beats out class room teaching - but when it was reviewed, the research was funded by software companies, and a year later he retracted his statements.

Virtual Distance is the perceived distance that grows between people when we rely on electronic communication. It includes physical distance, operational distance and affinity distance. Think others "think as me".

What is affinity distance? Cultural differences, leads to gigantic stereotypes, social distance. When virtual distance is high, innovation is low - don't get citizenship behaviour.When virtual distance is high, learning is low.

Technology can lose the human relationship - how we're connected to the world. And important to remember every career in the future will be a technology career. How to use it to make a difference to the social condition - and that will interest girls and women.

The group then discussed the topic and came up with some points to consider. One of the major point was the incredible disparity for many countries in terms of access to IT. Who needs to learn more about these challenges? Who needs to be formally trained to mitigate the risk of inter/intra organizational communication challenges with the NGO ecosystem?

Accessibility, Affordability and Ability still are major issues for many.

Karen is to send me her paper and if I can, I will share it on the Blog.