Girls In Tech

Finally, something exciting to blog about: The months of September and October have been great months for the advancement of information technology in Greece. (If Athens residents read this before October 11th is over, they just may have time to attend Athens’ 1st Annual e-learning Expo behind Lallabai in the Aegli Zappio.)

According to Business Development Manager, Nikos Panagiotidis of Intel Hellas, the five pillars of creating a technologically literate society include the access to devices, training of the trainer, training of the users, broadband, and content. For starters, Greece is on the right foot.

Devices: In September, Greece initiated a grass-roots tech project for which all public school 7th grade students received laptops. The concept is very similar to the commencement of the 2003 Maine Learning Technology Initiative (MLTI) in which 17,000 seventh graders received laptops—unprecedented until that time.

Training: Greece’s national initiative is intended to facilitate the huge acquisition of tech skills needed to jumpstart the nation’s future economic mobility in the technology sector. Equipping and training the first cohort of 7th graders with computers necessitates the training of educators as well. Greek students, girls and boys alike, will now have an opportunity to compete in the innovative thinking that spurred the growth of places like the Silicon Valley and Pudong—and maybe make Athens interesting enough to draw the attention of Geeks-on-a-Plane ten years from now when they make their rounds to Europe’s emerging tech cities.

Broadband: With the aforementioned national initiative, the demand for broadband usage is bound to grow.

Content: C-Media (which has already staked a claim in the virtual world of learning via Second Life), Intel, Ote, and many other educational companies, sponsored Athen’s first ever e-learning expo this weekend. The event served as an opportunity for e-learning companies to connect and create on-going business partnerships that are productive for all parties as noted by presenter Dr. Mike Jackson.

As far as educational content is concerned, it was Intel’s freeware launch, Skoool™, that caught my attention. The academic content was first developed by innovators in Ireland. Initially, it focused only on the internationally understood subjects of math and science. It has since grown to incorporate many more learning modules. Greek children will now have over 200 learning modules from which to choose.

So, with all the right things in place: computers, training, broadband and a flurry of new content, this 7th grade national initiative is on its way to closing the digital divide that exists between Greece and its northern EU partners. Furthermore, GIT will be on the scene to cheer on Greece!

Tags: 7th graders, C-Media, free computers, GIT, Greece, Hellas, Intel, Second Life, Skoool
Posted in Athens Greece | 1 Comment »

In reading all of the blogs that have been posted about women’s meager presence at the top of corporate organizations, I was compelled to follow through with a conversation my daughter and I had: The deterioration of the traditional communal Greek society as so many American self-centric views permeate the television channels here.

Though I am currently living in Greece, about fifteen years ago I moved to Cyprus for two years. There, I observed the ironic strength that women had in a segregated society:

1. Women sitting in the back of the church—economic class did not matter
2. Women being relegated to the kitchen after dinner so the men could sit back and relax
3. Women being required to hang the clothes out

Things that seemed awful from a capitalist woman’s perspective became an eye-opener as to why we American women lack so much power in the present structure of corporate organizations. We have been taught to go it alone. The suburban mentality prevails. The female collective has been discouraged and looked down upon in many instances. We compete with our female counterparts as capitalism dictates, but in doing so we have lost our golden rod. Whereas the Greek Cypriot women, as a collective, helped each other hang out their clothes, their underwear; they chatted in the kitchen about great ideas, recipes and best practice cooking techniques. They finished their work as a collective and had time for their children. That was power. That was their golden rod, because they controlled the food quality, health and hygiene quality and believe it or not, at the back of the church, they were the observers of everything—which speaks to the issue of minimizing community crime—they learned behaviors and kept the community in check. Upon leaving Cyprus, I never felt sorry for women of tradition again. I, instead, learned to respect their often silent, but collective power.

Fast forward, and all I can say is that online organizations like GIT seem to have arisen out of our need to bond, and like the traditional kitchen, our chatting place can become a place that creates recipes of change that can wield power. Then, we might actually see the presence of more women at the top of F500 companies—that are founded by women!

Tags: Cyprus, F500, GIT, Greece, women
Posted in Athens Greece | 2 Comments »

Hello everyone,

It’s great to have come on board here in Athens. I am excited to join the GIT blogging community as well. Just a heads up: I come to you with a background in International Relations and Education; so, I tend to look at the social impacts of technology on societies. Nonetheless, that is quite appropriate here in Athens as technology and computer usage in schools is about ten years behind the US. Additionally, I have an interesting spin on improving the learning process in education. Ultimately, I believe that learning could be advanced through the incorporation of advertising and marketing techniques as pointed out in my first blog entry below.

Balancing Social Marketing Techniques and Education
School leaders often espouse their desires to become 21st Century learning centers; however, given the rigid infrastructures that have existed in education for more than a century, overcoming the past is often more difficult to achieve than they imagined. One way to circumvent this engrained tradition is to use the rapidly morphing avenues of social networking that are at hand—primarily meeting places like Facebook, MySpace and Hi5. However, the key to successfully marketing education in those forums is balance, balance, balance—particularly of content.

Unfortunately, the field of education is chock-full of content, content, content. Therein lies much of the problem with creating “educational” scaffolding tools that are designed for modernity and not tradition. In developing learning content, educators often maintain the same sterile “keep-safe” mindset, resulting in traditional education simply being repackaged instead of redesigned.
As a middle and high school educator, I decided to use some of the same techniques for teaching that are employed when designing an effective social marketing initiative. I have shared them below.
21st Century Teaching Initiative:

1. Meet your clients (students) where they socialize—here in Greece, it’s Facebook. Facebook allows for postings to be presented in a laid-back setting. It is a place where the clients are comfortable and connected.

2. Be interpersonal, humorous, entertaining and fun—relate to your clients, but avoid judging their posts too harshly. Let them know that you have a life too. Students can learn from normal and positive adult interaction, show them that you have friends too. The goal is to build a learning community without them having to trade their lifestyles to learn.

3. That said, combine business and classroom ethics. In essence, be professional and use common sense etiquette. You would not invite your students or business clients to your most personal aspects of life…so keep your profile just above the line and clean, but not so prudish that you fail to achieve your goal of successfully marketing educational content.

4. Provide quality content. There are very good content-driven videos from sites like TED, BNET, Howstuffworks, and of course YouTube. But, Balance, balance, balance! After almost 20 years in education, I can truly say that part of the problem with many of our schools’ teaching practices is that we educators are in content-overdrive!

5. And finally, take from the marketing principles of the recent past. Remember that marketing is often about the experience. So make sure your students can have a great and memorable experience around the content that you provide…it will make the technological shift in branding education much easier.

Thus, in moving towards the creation of 21st Century classrooms and schools, think of social marketing, balancing content, the experience and learning; because, to effectively move the next generation forward in education, our focus as women, mothers, and educators should be on the end receiver—the student—not the institutions.

Tags: Athens, balance, content, education, GIT, Greece, learning, social marketing
Posted in Athens Greece | 1 Comment »