Month: April 2016

Methods for Contacting Librarians

I chose to contact the Oregon State University Library for research on Hedy Lamarr in hopes that I would find more resources that I may not have thought of before. I played around with two different methods when it came to contacting the library.

The first method was the online chat. It is located on the Oregon State University Library website and has a schedule of hours that let you know when the chat sessions are available. This was my favorite form of contact. The librarian was quick to respond to my first chat call and gave me useful information all within 10 minutes.

The second method was contacting a librarian through text message. You basically are given a number to text and you start your first text using the word BEAVS. I found this method to be more for general information on the library itself (for example, library hours and scheduling private quiet rooms).

I chose to not email a librarian for information only because I am usually someone who needs information on the spot. Emailing to me can be considered snail mail and I don’t want to have to wait around for simple answers that can be answered my the methods I mentioned above or by even a phone call.

The Accomplishments of Hedy Lamarr

Austrian actress and inventor, Hedy Lamarr, made herself a big name in the field of wireless communications. She developed an early technique for spread spectrum communications and frequency hopping, which helped combat the Nazis in World War II. Hedy had help with all of this from her co-inventor George Anthiel. It was in 1997, when she was honored with the special award for “trail-blazing development of a technology that has become a key component of wireless data systems”.

She was from Vienna, Austria, and graced the world with her presence from November 9th, 1914, to January 19th, 2000. Th culture back then was very similar to ours today. Expensive presidential campaigns, controversial military involvement overseas, prosperity, fast-moving technology, monopolies, immigration, natural disasters… Although we may not wear corsets, we are facing a technological revolution, and many of the issues and realities in Lamarr’s time are still with us today.

Lamarr was much more than just another pretty face. Earning a place among the 20th century’s most important women inventors, she shattered stereotypes. Lamarr truly was a visionary whose technological advancements were far ahead of its time.

Set Up

Customizing my blog wasn’t as hard as I thought. I was able to breeze through it without any issues for the most part. Creating Pages was a little bit more difficult. I couldn’t get the sidebar widget to show up on the horizontal menu. It wasn’t until I was customizing that I found it did come up on the side. Categorizing was simple enough and the instructions were easy to follow.

Adding a News Feed to My Blog

So in my last post, I mentioned how I am a very visual person. This means that when I am given a task, I need clear step-by-step instructions or picture images on how to do the task. With that being said, adding a news feed to my blog was a lot more difficult then I thought it would.

I had to start out by signing into Google, going to the news section, adding “Gender and Technology” to my list of interests, and then from there had to try to figure out how to add the RSS link to my blog. I had no idea what an RSS link was so I had to research on Google what exactly it was and how to use it. After doing this, I was then able to click the RSS link from a blog that I found (which was a Forbes article). I logged into my blog account and added “Gender and Technology” to my news feed on the side by editing the appearance of my page.

Once it was all said and done, I understood it but the process was a bit irritating and time consuming. I have to admit, you can learn a lot about an article just by looking at the title of it. I do believe it will help in the long run when it comes time to quickly find popular articles on topics that my women’s study class will be focusing on this term.

First Blog Post for WGSS 320

Good evening,

Setting up my first blog was a success. I’m looking forward to learning how to navigate around the site a little bit more. It seems pretty easy, thus far. I have never been a blogger so this will be the first for me.

Setting up the email signature was a breeze as well. I had done it years ago with an old email account so I vaguely remembered how to do it again. I want to add a little bit more to the signature then was required but at the same time, I want it to be simple and clean. I believe that the signatures we created are exactly that -simple and clean.

I’m a very visual person. When someone is explaining something, I want to see it drawn out. With that being said, I do not really care for listening to web pages through the text-to-speech function. I can see why people could get use to it but at the same time, I don’t think that it is something that I will find beneficial for myself personally.

So long for now!