As I approach the end of my two year long master’s program, I can’t help but return to the first reflection paper I created, where I ruminated on the what I was doing and where I was going. I thank the higher powers above that I created this reflection because after 2 continuous years of education, my path has taken me all over the place and it can be difficult to place myself back in 2015 as I looked at my future and motivations. Throughout the course of this program, I’ve developed many forms of media, dove deeply into the Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning, and, most importantly, I’ve wrestled with ethical issues surrounding the integration of technology into education. Our Educational Technology master’s program has seamlessly integrated theory with practice, and I leave the doors of St. Ignatius cathedral with a strong sense of purpose, motivation, and confidence. With this in mind, please read on for more context of who I was 2 years ago and where I see myself going in the future (which remains unchanged).

from September 9, 2015

I am fortunate to be enrolled in the Digital Technologies for Teaching and Learning master’s program at the University of San Francisco. I am also fortunate to have such fantastic colleagues in my online courses, one of who shared a link to this article.

As I read this, I had about 10 different aha! moments. Almost instantly, I was shot backwards in a time tunnel to a younger version of me, in San Francisco, when I was about 8 years old. This was very truly the song that was stuck in my head for months: Here’s a few things to note about this video, now that I see it again about 30 years later. The horrible beats, the out-of-tune “rapping, the fun is back! oh, and … the lack of girls playing games. This was one of the few toys that I remember begging my parents for. Luckily my begging must have happened around Christmas time because it was sitting under the tree for me, and I was so extremely excited.

I fell in love with the games immediately. Somehow I seemed to have more of the second-tier games like Pitfall or Enduro Racer, but I didn’t care. And somehow, subconsciously, I knew that wanting the Atari was something a boy should want, but I didn’t care. Most of the time, I stuck with games traditionally associated with girls, but somehow let the social norms run wild with the Atari. I would spend many hours playing games and loved trying to “solve” whatever master puzzle the game makers intended (even if most of the games ultimately went nowhere). But this interest never equated into joining the games club at school (which I would have loved), or even showing off when I knew answers about velocity in physics class (thanks, car racing game!). I left those jobs to the boys, where I thought they belonged.

This statement in particular stood out for me from the NPR article: “This idea that computers are for boys became a narrative. It became the story we told ourselves about the computing revolution. It helped define who geeks were, and it created techie culture.” I have always been a technologically savvy person, and the Atari was the first iteration of this part of myself. I kept a blind eye to the interest in tech I was displaying with every chat room I created, new program I learned, new skills I taught friends, new questions I answered, and new solutions I developed. But I was never able to see this as a true part of myself until I got over the fear that I was taking space away from the “boys”.

Through many different changes of course and reworking of my life’s purpose, I find myself here, in a master’s program, at the university in which I also work, wondering what it is I’m actually doing here. In my working life, I have always held positions in the field of education, working for private, non-profit, public, and federal/grant funded programs. In some ways, I feel like I’ve seen it all. And so I am here, exploring these two deeply personal sides of myself, wondering where they intersect.

I fought the first wave of tech that swept over my city as I graduated college. I knew I wanted to return home to San Francisco after graduation, and knew I wanted nothing to do with “dot-com’s”. To give a sense of the sentiment many people felt towards dot-com’s (isn’t tech such a wonderfully re-marketed term for dot-com’s!), take a look at a clip from [this documentary]( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FfOHVu_noY) originally distributed in 2001. I dare you to watch the first 5 minutes and not find at least 7 similarities with the filmmaker’s view of San Francisco in 2000 and what we are again experiencing right this minute in 2015. To put it mildly, I wanted nothing to do with this industry as a whole, the male-centered, hedonistic, money-centric capitalists that were ruining the city I loved and making it impossible for me to live a normal, happy life there. I ran from these job opportunities and ran straight towards my $7/hour job working in preschools in San Francisco with an AmeriCorps program. I have never made a better decision in my life, as my two years with AmeriCorps fundamentally altered the way I view the world, the opportunities I was presented with, and the friends that I made.

As I see the tech world evolve, I am excited and scared to take a leap into this strange nest of educational technology. Watters (2014) points to this startling statistic from 2014 reports from EEO (Equal Employment Opportunity) data: "70% of Twitter’s employees are male. 59% are white and 29% are Asian. 90% of Twitter's ‘technical' employees are male.” Other companies essentially mirroring these statistics are Google, Apple, and Facebook. She goes on to ask: “And I wonder too: what do these demographics look like for education technology companies? What percentage of those building ed-tech software are men? What percentage is white? What percentage of ed-tech companies’ engineers are men? How do these bodies shape what gets built? How do privileges, ideologies, expectations, values get hard-coded into ed-tech?”(3) While the education field is predominately led by women, I would be surprised if EEO data mirrored this female leadership in the ed tech field. And if these female voices are being excluded, who is guiding our vision for the future of education in America? What are we “hard-coding” into the next generation?

When I think about the most important issues of digital equity, women’s role in the creation and sustenance of technology, especially in the field of education, is high on my list (a list which is about a mile long). As I explore my role in the ed tech field, I feel incredibly lucky to be here, in the eye of a storm brewing around me. Here’s to hoping I can find my way back home.