On Wired this time.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,34175,00.html?tw=wn20000215
Nothing really new here. This one's more about the "industry". More
and more, I've been thinking about how different the computer industry
(Silicon Valley, Microsoft, .com, venture capital, IT, IPOs, etc.) and
the computer "community" (hackers, hobbyists, open source, free
software, etc) are, but that's another rant.
It seems to me that the approach most of those
get-girls-to-like-technology programs seems to be very oriented towards
industry, ie they say "Look, computers are a good career, you can make
lots of money"; they promote technology as work, not fun. I'm not sure
this works. For example, one of the reasons cited in the article for
fewer women in technology is that girls don't get as much exposure to
computers in school. In my case, and it wasn't that long ago[1], most
of my pre-college computer experience was outside of school. I could
probably count the number of times I used a computer in school on one
hand[2]. If computers are work, kids think work is boring, kids don't
do work for fun, so they don't play with computers in their spare time.
Maybe it's just my point of view. Maybe it's because the only reason I
have to get more girls into computers is that I'd think they'd have fun.
Maybe it's just that people my age were children after computers were
popular and before the internet was .com-ized.
On a completely different subject, what is a better, non-adversarial way
of analyzing a design? The whole "you point out problems and I'll tell
you why they're not" thing seems to work pretty well for me...
[1] after the "information superhighway", before "surfing the web"
[2] not in binary.
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