Women & Technology

Back to PWI Magazine- Q1 2015 edition

by Corina Ciechanow

You are deeply involved in the organization of TEDxBarcelonaWoman , taking place this June in Barcelona.  Could you tell us why and what this event is about?

What I love about TEDx events is that it gives visibility to people who bring solutions to our world, in a very media-friendly and appealing way.

I know many women doing great things and men who also work towards a modern society. I like to give them visibility, to get them known and heard by other people, and be inspired by them.

Why do I care about women? Because it’s ‘The topic’; it's still a battle.  Even if you may think that now it’s ok, it’s not.  For me it’s also a personal subject: I grew up in the south of France where women had to fight to have a voice, and if you had a strong opinion then you ran the risk of being ostracised.

At the time I worked for Oxfam, in Ethiopia, most of the camp refugees were women, men were fighting or hiding.  Women were very impacted by the conflict. We tried to involve them in our decisions, usually about sanitary issues such as where to put the latrines or water points, to calm them and give them back some sense of responsibility and control over the situation. Having had that experience, my first TEDx event in December 2012 was about Mediterranean women who changed their world. Women explained the different projects in their countries and we had around a hundred people, mostly women, attending. That’s when we realized that we needed men in our speakers and in our audience in order to change something regarding gender balance.

So in December 2013 we organized the second TEDx event specifically on the topic of getting men involved in gender equality. We had 50% men, 50% women, but the men who came were already working in that field, changing the role of boys and men and their perception of manhood.

For this year, our third event, we followed this reasoning: what are the leverages that really can shift the balance?  We came up with 2 things: money and media.  So we added them to the previous one and we now have 3 special topics for June 2015 on TEDxBarcelonaWomen: Money, Media and Men.

For the first topic, we want to show that investing in women is not only a question of human rights, not only a question of social good, but that it is economically profitable. We’ll showcase different initiatives at employee, board and entrepreneur’s level (crowdfunding to invest in women, investment funds for women entrepreneurs and projects that have an impact on girls)

Our second topic is based on the idea that if we change the perception of women in media a lot will change.  Geena Davis, actress of Thelma and Louise film, launched the Institute on Gender in Media with the motto:  ‘If she can see it, she can be it’. There is also a gender gap in the filming industry, with 1 female character out of 3, so I would like to put it my way: you can’t be what you can’t see.  To change the balance, we want to show female role models in movies, TV, journalism and photography.

The third topic ‘Men’ is, as before, intended to showcase men involved in gender balance.

It will be the biggest event I organize in Barcelona, with 900 participants.  And the day after, we will try to use all the brain power or the speakers and do workshops to shape solutions.

As you told us, this is not your first TEDx event, how did you get involved in this?  Please tell us about your journey.

Like many of us, I watched many TEDx.  In 2011, I was on holiday with a friend in Salvador de Bahia when I met 2 ladies that were all day long with their computers.  Curious, I asked them what they were doing, and they explained to me that they were organising a TEDx event.  We sympathized, they showed me how it was done and they invited me to the event.  That triggered the idea of doing one in Barcelona, where I was (and still am) living, so I did my first TEDx event in 2012.  I think it was more than just a coincidence, I met the right person at the right time, but nothing is random in life, is it?

I am French, I was born in the south of France, in the Pyrenees, and I studied in Paris at the HEC Business School.  After graduating I moved to Barcelona in 2002, and began working in  management consulting in the Health sector . I was helping hospitals with their strategy and management, but even though hospitals were helping people, I found that I was lacking a direct social impact; I wanted to contribute to create a better world.  So I looked at the non-profit organisations and switched for Oxfam . I helped them to design and implement the processes and policies for emergency situations, where there is a need to act fast in the field. I did that for 3 years, coordinating the implementation of the plan in 10 countries from Barcelona.  It was pretty exciting and I loved it, so I asked them to move to the field, and went to Ethiopia to work in a camp they had at the border with Somalia. 

Back at home I wanted to work with a more bottom-up approach as it is done with social entrepreneurs, and not  so much in larger NGO’s that have more of a top-down management system.  That’s when I joined Ashoka , which is a network of entrepreneurs who want to improve the world.  I read a great book ‘How to change the world’ by David Bornstein, who went around the world interviewing social entrepreneurs. This was a key moment for me, because I realised that you don’t have to work for an NGO to do something good, you can create your own project to improve your local reality. Previously I thought that there was a gap between the ‘good’ people working in NGO’s and the rest of the world. At Ashoka I learned that we can ALL change the world wherever we are.

I collaborated with Ashoka in Paris, and it’s with friends from there that I travelled to Brazil and learned about organizing TEDx events, as I just mentioned.  With that ‘aha’ moment in mind, I looked for my license to organize TEDx events in Barcelona, and then setup my own consulting activities. 

What else do you do in real life apart from TEDx events?

I coach companies about diversity and how to develop men and women's full potential. I also train people in storytelling.  This is particularly important for women entrepreneurs and leaders to bridge the voice gap. It helps them communicate better and be more confident, to dare raise their hand for action pickup.

As I connect with many people from profit and non-profit organisations, Tedx speakers, entrepreneurs, I organize what I call ‘Learning journeys’: I set up events for managers with one particular type of leader having the place of honour, so they get to know her or him and be inspired.

You mention ‘storytelling’. Being a good presenter is an essential skill nowadays as people's attention is so in demand. People just don’t have the time nor the patience to hear your proposal if you don’t captivate them from the beginning. And not only we, women, are lacking that skill. Could you tell us more about it?

As you said, we now have an attention span of 10 minutes, so we really need to capture the attention of people. Storytelling is definitely a key skill for that. And a second aspect is that I think that we lack meaningful conversations, there are so many people speaking because they are used to talking, they occupy the space but they're not actually saying anything. It is really important to reconnect with our emotional side, to what make us social beings. 

When I do a workshop on storytelling, I don’t coach so much on presentation techniques but more on that emotional aspect I mentioned, to help them be more connected with the audience. I make them identify the reason why they do what they do, the profound meaning behind the actions. That’s what’s interesting for the public, to know why you do what you do, what are the values you pursue. The audience can relate to you when they know what is moving you. Because we are all an individual representation of a more general story.

For me, the trick when creating your story is to put yourself out there and say what YOU think about the situation you are talking about, what YOU believe in. This is much more powerful to communicate to others. 

Storytelling is powerful not only because people like your speech, but also because it makes you change the perception you have of yourself. When writing your story, if you write it well, it can make you change the way you think about yourself. The way you portray yourself to others is intrinsically linked to how you see yourself. This is extremely powerful. I have seen social entrepreneurs working with kids victim of violence, making them change the way they perceive themselves by saying to them: what happened to you is your strength, not your weakness. They rewrote their story from a different point of view. This is a very powerful tool!

What are you planning for the near future?

Basically the idea for me is to combine my different activities: to coach different companies, to visit the balanceshifters all around the world, to finally produce a book or video series.

I started a blog, 'Shift balance' , to publish the portraits of men and women that are shifting the traditional balance. I am planning a ‘Shift-balance’ tour this year in different countries, interviewing men and women, doing storytelling workshops for companies or universities, and doing it pro-bono for women who need that and may not be able to afford it. 

And I’ll be speaking about what exists around the world, because there are solutions that exist, that we should diffuse to shift the balance. I'll also be demonstrating that we can all be change makers.  I strongly believe that we all have a role to play in changing the world around us and especially for gender balance, because the tools may be as simple as changing words on an everyday basis. We have so many cheap tools in our hands that have the power to make a difference. I want to be a change maker.

Thank you Aurélie for this interview, we appreciate what you are doing and keep us informed about your new developments. We wish you a great success on shifting the balance around the world!

REFERENCES

http://tedxbarcelonawomen.com/

http://seejane.org/

http://www.oxfam.org

http://www.ashoka.org

http://shiftbalance.org

Back to PWI Magazine - Q1 2015 edition

Disclaimer -Any views and opinions presented in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of PWI, nor do they constitute a legally binding agreement.

Ian Harper Producer, The Bradfield Company Limited

Ian, you are the spiritual father of the digital story and educational tool 'Inanimate Alice'(1), could you first introduce Alice to us?

From time to time Inanimate Alice is referred to as a game. My first task, then, is to clarify that it is not a game but a story about games and the people who make them, conveyed in such a way that the resulting production – an interactive, audio-visually illustrated, narrative - has the look and feel of a game-like world.

Our protagonist, Alice, grows up dreaming of one day becoming a videogame designer. Over the series of 10 episodes - 5 completed to date and the 6th in production - we see her develop her skills from the stickman character she draws when she is 8 years old to the highly rendered 3D game images that are typically found in high-priced AAA game titles. By the end of the series, those final episodes will have the look and feel of such titles while still being primarily a reading experience.

It is Alice who is narrating her story; as we experience each episode we see the world through her eyes. Written from the point of view of a mid-twenties professional, successful in her career and looking back over her life, viewers are given impressions of Alice’s circumstances and technical capabilities at various points along the way. Each episode is incrementally more complex and 'improved' than the one preceding it, the structure reflecting Alice's artistic skills as she grows older. For example, the recently released episode 5, where Alice is 16, provides a selection of 3D visuals within a two dimensional, linear, storyline while episode 6, where Alice is 18, will be the first episode to be a fully immersive 3D reading experience….just like being inside a videogame.

It’s a story about Alice's travels around the world - firstly with her parents, then on her own during her Gap Year and finally in pursuit of her career goals.

The narrative also tells of her career journey and the relationship she has had with the game character she has been developing, seemingly all of her life. Uniquely, Alice has only ever designed one character, her "best friend" Brad. She just keeps making him better and better. For the record, Brad is the manifestation of the internet world we all seem to occupy these days. Everyone stares at screens, small or large, for endless hours and so, in many ways, Brad is the personification of the screen and our relationship with technology.


I read in Wikipedia that Inanimate Alice was named a ‘Best Website for Teaching & Learning’ by the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) in 2012. You also told me it has been incorporated into literacy and digital curricula in the United States and in Australia. Inanimate Alice being an entertaining tool, how is it then that it ended up becoming a tool in the Education sector?

The story started out as an entertainment, written and developed as the backstory to a transmedia film/game title I had the impression would resolve many of the issues I saw in the earlier works of that genre. Rather than create a game, the creative team came up with the idea of a story with embedded puzzles and mini-games that would provide a deeper impression of what the story is about. Very simple to start with, the challenges become progressively more complex with each subsequent episode. They act as a primer for those who are unfamiliar with videogames.

Early on, from our website statistics, we noticed that most of the site users were teachers and, importantly, that they represented almost all of the returning traffic. At that time, we decided to actively support those teachers in the use of Alice as an educational tool.

There are several factors that make a transmedia story such as ‘Inanimate Alice’ a popular tool in Education. Firstly, that the approach to visualisation embraces the same techniques as videogames. The products of this technique immediately capture students’ attention. This level of engagement greatly facilitates the teacher’s job. Also, the interaction and many embedded games ensure it remains compelling on re-reading and delving deep into the various topics that are discussed in the episodes.

In particular, Inanimate Alice has an extra interesting twist. Our protagonist is a girl who is going into the videogames industry; a rare event in that currently male-dominated environment. We want to avoid stereotypes by creating a role model with Alice and making the point of promoting the videogame industry and the wider ICT sector among girls.


Could you mention the ‘gamification’ elements present on Alice?

There are a number of facets to the production that demonstrate the benefits to educators of working with a story constructed in this way:

1. The script, spare on first reading, has been carefully authored by an award winning novelist who is also a professor of digital media. The quality of the text makes it suitable for the deep reading and re-reading necessary for academic investigation, while the audio-visual backdrop provides a compelling level of engagement that attracts students and teachers alike.

2. Multiple layers that run alongside the main thread of the story provide themes that allow teachers to expand into areas that are of interest to them. Layers and themes provide opportunities to teach across the curriculum, not just reading and writing. Peer pressure and bullying, for example, is the core theme of episode 4. Even after several viewings of the episodes teachers find that there is more to uncover. Even then, most folks entirely miss the fact that there is a strong branding theme running through the episodes. The branding of children is an issue of deep concern to many these days yet we seem to be so inured to branding that we overlook it entirely.

3. Superficially the interactivity provided may appear rather simplistic to begin with. It has been designed in that way to ensure a minimal barrier to entry. By the time we reach episode 5 Alice has produced a fully playable skateboard game with scoring and time constraints that provoke challenge and raise excitement. Perhaps the more important interactive element, one only latterly understood, is the opportunity for students to contribute their own episodes to the storyline. In the long wait for episode 5 to be released, hundreds of "unofficial" episodes fives have appeared, created by eager students. We have seen many of these and enjoyed having students take Alice on adventures to places we would not have imagined. Now, with the release of the “official” episode 5, we have showcased just a few of them on the site. More will be appearing. Students are encouraged to develop episodes and to paint Alice into the scenery local to where they live.

Corina Ciechanow VP Women & Technology PWI

The next Revolution for Higher Education?

When we think of higher education, we normally think of spending 3 to 5 years of study, in a well-known institution at a considerable cost. What if you could follow the same courses from the comfort of your home, at your own pace, and with a much lower cost or even for free? Welcome to the world of Massive Open Online Courses!

[photo from Mathieu Plourde's MOOC poster]

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs, pronounced “mooks”) are online courses open to almost everybody who has access to the Internet, and they are also usually free, or very accessible.
Top class universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of Michigan or more nearby the Université Catholique de Louvain (UCL) have already adopted this trend and are offering very interesting subjects. Many others are following, as they see this opportunity as the evolution of the traditional distance education, and a new way to extend their reach to a public that was not theirs before as the cost doesn’t vary much even for thousands of students more.



How does it work?

Go to edX, Coursera, or just google ‘MOOC’ and browse through the list of courses until you find a subject you are interested in. To follow a course you have to enroll by giving your name and email coordinates, and don’t forget to check the schedule associated with it: there is a beginning date, a given rhythm at which you’ll be presented with the lessons, and exam dates. The course is usually given through videos or podcasts (audio) that are released every 1 or 2 weeks, and there are exercises and assignments to be done and transferred to the website.


As the audience is extremely large (there are courses of up to 100.000 students enrolled), the assistance and evaluation is a crucial issue in the MOOCs development. It’s impossible to have as many assistants as would be required to correct each assignment :- ), and though it is easy to automatically correct multiple choice questions, it’s less obvious to provide help and feedback on why the student is mistaken.


Also not everything can be evaluated through multiple-choice questions, some subjects demand open questions. Imagine a Creativity course, how could you put the choices in advance when you are asking creativity from people? And what about courses that aim at teaching you writing techniques? You would like them to provide a sample of a text that respects certain constraints, not easy to automatically correct that. Not to count the easiness of cheating if you manage to have the file with the results for a questionnaire …

So they have come up with different techniques to cope with these challenges, such as promoting peer-evaluation, crowdsourcing corrections and more.

The platform where you enroll for a course also provides interactive forums that help build a community for the students and professors. It is nice not to feel alone, to share your problems and get some answers or to help others to solve theirs and gain some reputation on the community.


The impact on traditional education

Classical education is usually given through classes consisting of a professor speaking and conveying all the theoretical information. The student has then to understand and memorize this, do exercises and he/she is ready for the exam.

Now that so much information is reachable through Internet, there is no reason to attend classes. Even if we are not talking about closing universities and other institutions, you could have ‘The Best’ professor on a particular subject in a video. Professors would be more useful indicating where to find the information, and being there in the class to help interpret it, to discuss and go further on the subject.

This graphic shows that a third of the US students follow an online course, so professors cannot dismiss this trend.

“One of the first HarvardX courses, JusticeX, was originally produced as a PBS series by WGBH in Boston. Professor Michael Sandel has 12 video lectures from that series that were posted on YouTube in September of 2009. The first video has nearly 5 million views. The second has 1.2 million views. By the fifth video, views have declined to about 200,000 views for each video. Rather than decry this “5 percent completion rate” as a crisis in public broadcasting, we find it remarkable that Michael Sandel can post a 45 minute video lecture on moral reasoning and get 5 million views. Anyone who watched one video or all twelve is a little wiser for their efforts.

Last year, Stephen Colbert from Comedy Central’s Colbert Report interviewed Anant Agarwal, the president of edX, a MOOC platform that hosts courses from HarvardX and MITx. Stephen asked: ‘why those universities would offer the courses for free?’ Anant said they follow this motto ‘Educating the world is a better world for everybody’

As the best known universities are doing MOOCs, they are giving the opportunity to anyone around the globe who has Internet access to attend excellent education. It’s democratizing education, and I’m sure it will translate in a boom of start-ups that will boost innovation and the economy.

Another radical change is the fact that you can search for courses on the topics that you need in a particular moment, without having to commit to a full educational course of studies. This trend is called ‘learn-as-you-need’.

Higher education offers predefined degrees that contained a fixed list of courses you have to follow. With the abundance of MOOCs, you have the freedom to choose among different subjects as you please, and you could customize the learning to your specific need or will. This is particularly interesting during continuous education, as advances in technology create new fields in your profession, but also along the way you may need competences in domains other than your studies.

Professors and other people with great knowledge are seen as an important group in society. It takes time to reach that level of education, and the effort was equaled by respect from society. But as everything in our economy, now that almost any subject is reachable and there is an abundance of knowledge, its value diminishes. Value is moving from just having the knowledge to how you use it.