Monthly Archives: August 2014

Education and Information – Part II

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Since the core of my activism plan (STEMLinks) is a web-based, virtual mentoring program, I decided to create an online lesson on best practices in virtual/web-based mentoring. Virtual mentoring is becoming increasingly popular since it is more flexible both in terms of time and place, unlike traditional face-to-face mentoring. I found quite a few virtual mentoring programs – MentorCloud, MentorNet, WitSon, CanTEEN, EngineerGirl. A common thread in the successful virtual mentoring programs was a well designed web platform that addressed privacy and security concerns while providing an easy to use communication and management platform. This would be an important point to keep in mind as I develop STEMLinks.

Education and Information project – Part I

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In working on creating the online lesson/how-to for the STEMLinks project, I unearthed a wealth of information on mentoring. Search strings like “STEM mentoring” and “mentor training” returned a number of websites that had great information on the types of mentoring, what makes a great mentor etc, and also how to design, create, operate and evaluate a successful mentoring program.  I found http://www.mentoring.org/ to be a very useful resource that I can draw on even after I complete this course.

Gendered marketing

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This week’s reading about looking at LEGO through gendered lens provided positive reinforcement for the choices I have been making with my daughters. I’ve rejected the idea of gendered products, avoided pink and purple like the plague, and actively promoted gender-neutral toys and activities, and TV shows and movies that portray strong female characters. I was also happy to learn that research has shown that boys and girls are far more alike than different in their cognitive abilities, and the differences that do exist are trivial. To me, it says that nurture, rather than nature, plays a stronger role in developing my daughters’ visual-spatial abilities. As Caryl Rivers and Rosalind Barnett say in The Truth About Girls and Boys: Challenging Toxic Stereotypes About Our Children, I can provide the counterbalance to the overwhelming barrage of gender stereotype messages from media and marketing, by simple actions like choosing to play baseball with my daughters instead of playing with a cooking set.

Creating the Financial Analysis

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The past 2 weeks were focused on creating a budget for the Activism plan. I was not too surprised to see how drastically the financial requirements changed between the very rudimentary budget outlined as part of the Activism Plan write up and the detailed financial analysis. I was, however, pleasantly surprised to see the number of options for funding that were available. I certainly did not expect to see small grants that were in the order of a few thousands of dollars, but I found that there were plenty of those. Most of the small grants were intended to help schools purchase classroom supplies or enrichment material. Another piece of learning from Weeks 5 & 6 was how to write a grant application. There were plenty of examples online on what made a good grant application.

I also expanded the STEMLinks project a little to include monthly BlogTalkRadio shows – interviews with women in STEM careers focused on career advice, with live Q&A, so students can call in and get their questions answered by an expert.