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NCWIT wishes you a happy new year!
Save-The-Date: Upcoming Meetings
Our May 2009 Meetings will be held May 12-14 at Google headquarters in Mountain View, California.
Our theme will be the “Global Status of Women in Technology.” We will also celebrate NCWIT’s 5th anniversary!
This meeting intends to provide NCWIT members with information from around the world that will inform and advance their reform efforts. Our distinguished speakers will discuss important global research on women and technology, offer personal insights concerning their international work, describe the development of technology for use by women around the world, and compare/contrast the global status of technical women.
Confirmed speakers include Ms. Claudia Morrell, CEO, Multinational Development of Women in Technology (MDWIT); Dr. Vivian Lageson, Norwegian University of Science and Technology; Dr. Maria Charles, University of California, Santa Barbara; Dr. Bernadine Dias, Carnegie Mellon University and Founder of TechBridgeWorld; and Dr. Sophia Huyer, Founding Executive Director, WIGSAT Group.
Our November 2009 Meetings will take place at the University of Virginia. Please continue to check our website for updated information about dates, speakers, and events.
We look forward to seeing you!
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November 08 Meetings Wrap-Up
Holding the NCWIT November Promising Practices Workshop just on the tail end of the presidential election made for a high-energy event, and the focus on “Multiple Pathways to an IT Career” fit right in with the spirit of change in the air.
The three-day event took place at the Hyatt Regency, Irvine and the University of California at Irvine. Attendees participated in panels and breakout sessions focused on numerous educational and career pathways to an IT career — critical avenues for preparing and increasing the number of women and underrepresented minorities seeking to join the IT workforce.
Workshop speakers included Deanna Hanson, California Director, National Academy Foundation; Dr. Lisa Servon, Senior Research Fellow, Center for Work-Life Policy; Dr. A Nicki Washington, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Howard University; and Dr. Belle Wheelan, President of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS). For a full agenda of presentations, download the workshop program here.
The workshop’s morning panels looked at Innovative Pathway Programs, such as accessing talent from returning military personnel and military spouses, community colleges, and tribal colleges. The second set of panels focused on Research on Alternate Pathways, including The National Academy foundation’s work on a career-focused approach to bringing underrepresented groups to IT, RAND Corporation’s research on military spouses in IT careers, and work out of RPI on using contextual computing to attract underrepresented groups to computing.
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NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing
Of the 28 winners of the August 2008 NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing, 11 junior and senior award-winners and their chaperones spent a day at the UCI campus to get a taste of college life. They attended classes, toured the dorms, enjoyed a pizza party with current computing undergraduate and graduate students, and joined NCWIT members at an evening reception where all 28 August 2008 award-winners were honored. It was fun to see these young women, filled with energy and ideas, connecting with each other and with our members. One parent commented that the award was “life-changing” for his daughter. We look forward to the ways in which these young women will continue to revolutionize the face of technology!
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| Congratulations to our August 2008 award-winners! NCWIT and Bank of America honored 28 students from the metro Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, and New York City areas as winners of the August 2008 NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing. |
The 2009 award-winners will be announced in January. To view the videos profiling past winners, or for more information about the NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing, please visit http://www.ncwit.org/award.
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New NCWIT Resources
NCWIT unveiled several new resources to help members initiate and carry out plans for reform and outreach:
- NCWIT researchers produced “Gearing Up for Change: Institutional Reform in Undergraduate Computing Programs” to address the components that affect a student’s experience in an undergraduate computing program and conditions that need to be present in order for organizational change to occur.
- We added four new additions to our growing line of Promising Practices: “Snap, Create, and Share with Scratch: An Engaging Way to Introduce Computing,” “Scalable Game Design for Middle School: An Engaging Way to Introduce Computing,” “Military Spouse Reentry Programs: Helping Mid-Career Women Return to Work in IT,” and “Patenting Learning Communities: One Way to Promote Diverse Innovation.”
- “Talking Points” is a new series of resources that provides suggestions for what to tell young women to encourage them to consider a career in IT. The first entry of this series, with a Spanish version coming soon, is a parent resource addressing why young women should consider a career in IT and how they can prepare for it.
- NCWIT was a research underwriter for “Climbing the Technical Ladder,” a new report from the Anita Borg Institute on mid-level technical women.
- “Evaluating Promising Practices in Informal Information Technology (IT) Education for Girls,” the third phase of a research project conducted with Girl Scouts of the USA and Puget Sound Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology, uses the results of a survey with over 1,000 women in IT to help determine promising practices for attracting girls to IT.
- Several “in-a-Box” programs are currently in production and will be available at http://www.ncwit.org/boxes in early 2009: Pipeline-in-a-Box: Promoting Advancement of CS/IT Students from Two-Year to Four-Year Institutions; and Pair Programming-in-a-Box: The Power of Collaborative Learning.
- We’ve syndicated the NCWIT Entrepreneurial Heroes podcast series with http://www.w3w3.com and InformIT (owned by Pearson Prentice Hall), which extends the reach of this already-popular NCWIT resource. The NCWIT Entrepreneurial Heroes campaign is a series of magazine-style audio interviews highlighting women entrepreneurs in information technology (IT) careers, sponsored by the NCWIT Entrepreneurial Alliance and the Ewing Marion
Kauffman Foundation. Listen as these successful, creative, and technical
women discuss their lives and their work – how they first get into technology, why they chose to be entrepreneurs, and what advice they would give to young people interested in IT or entrepreneurship. Look for a new entrepreneurial interview series, the NCWIT Entrepreneurial Toolbox, coming soon.
- A new interview series, NCWIT Entrepreneurial Toolbox, promotes fundamental skills of entrepreneurship. This series interviews both men and women about a range of topics critical to entrepreneurial success, such as networking, how to procure funding, writing a business plan, and the importance of failure. Visit http://www.ncwit.org/etoolbox to listen.
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New NCWIT Board Members
We welcome several new board members to our NCWIT team, including Phillip Bond, President and CEO, Information Technology Association of America (ITAA); Lisa Brummel, Senior Vice President, Human Resources, Microsoft; Merle Waterman, CFO, OneRiot; Thaddeus Arroyo, Chief Information Officer, AT&T Services, Inc.; and Carol Mosely, Sr. Vice President, Information Systems, Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. For a full listing of NCWIT’s Board of Directors, and to view their bios and photos, visit our website at http://www.ncwit.org/board.
The Board of Directors provides corporate governance, strategic advice, and development assistance. Board members represent academia, industry, policy, and the community. The Board’s functions include: approving the NCWIT annual budget and strategy and operations plans; auditing finance; providing CEO oversight; ensuring legal and ethical integrity; and enhancing NCWIT’s public standing.
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