Over the course of this term, I’ve learned some valuable skills with keyboard shortcuts, working with a blog, researching and posting information on specific topics and most of all a lot about gender in society. There were so many things that never would’ve crossed my mind (maybe not never, but hadn’t up until this point), and has led me to be more aware of these things in the news and daily life. I think it’s easy not to pay attention to something unless you’re being directly and/or adversely affected but after learning about these things, I realize I am affected, I just haven’t been aware of it.

One thing that stuck with me was how women are treated in other countries, like in Africa where many young girls are persecuted for becoming pregnant and kicked out of school. It’s also amazing to me (not in a good way) that a good percentage of the world still views women in the housewife role even though more women have a higher education these days. I have begun to have conversations with others on these topics and find that a lot of people I know are paying attention and want to do something to further the progression of an equal society.

I will most likely not be using this website in the future but then again, I love to write, so maybe I’ll find an outlet in it. I’m a fairly busy person (and by fairly, I mean extremely), so finding time to write is difficult. I’ve started 3 novels, I write children’s books and I’m a full time student which is also a lot of writing, but who knows, maybe with the added knowledge of this site, I can find some time to utilize this new platform. I use screenshots and pdf files regularly in my work and school but now I also understand how to hyperlink and embed media and I think I will continue to use those tools. I do not like to use the listening tools, but I’m glad I know how to if I so need.

I have found that using this site to write has become consistently easier as the process continues, so that’s all good and well. The challenges I’m coming across in writing this research project all lie in the information available to me about my particular topic person. I have found that there is very little personal information available on her; her childhood, religion, family, early education, etc., so far, I haven’t been able to find any of it. There is an abundance of information on her higher education, work and research, which helps make up for about 80% of the project. In Pages itself, I find the layout easy to manage, hyperlinks simple to add, lists and citations all easy to customize.

I am currently using Zotero as my bibliographic tool and while I think I’ve mostly got it figured out now, I do come across some issues here and there but so far, I haven’t run into anything that couldn’t be answered yet.

I have experience working in JSTOR and EBSCO, so naturally I was drawn to use them in my research on this project. However, even using these search tools that I am familiar with, I am having some difficulty finding specific information on my topic person (Rupal Patel) and so I emailed the e-campus librarian for potential help in this area.

I emailed the e-campus librarian, as mentioned above, and I am currently waiting for a response. I will update this blog when a response is received and whether or not it was helpful.

Dr. Rupal Patel, PhD., is the founder of VocaliD, a company which works to give the feeling of “self” back to those who have lost the ability to speak for themselves by creating a system that takes donor voices and matches them to the “residual voice” of a non-speaker. Rupal is originally from Zambia but moved to Canada as a child, where she initially found her passion for speech and language as people had a hard time with her British accent. Through the years, her knowledge and work in speech/language led her to be a tenured professor at Northeastern University and to start up her own company as mentioned above. Her work has helped many people regain the ability to sound relatively like themselves and not just a computerized monotone voice, tending to the needs of gender, age, culture, etc. Since Rupal is currently living and continuing her work, the possibility of interviewing her is not out of the question. It would be a fascinating look into the mind of such a strong leader in medical technology and somewhat surreal just to hear her take on how she got to where she is now and her current struggles with continuing to succeed in the industry.

The TED blog, The inventors, trailblazers and performers of TEDWomen 2013, “Invented Here, led me to discovering Rupal’s work and also had the most women listed that I was also interested in researching their works. The site made it easy to select people within fields I am more interested in.

Looking at the past examples provided, I was surprised at the amount of writing required, being less than I originally expected. It seems that they all follow the format of origin, background and technology or contribution. I found Hedy Lamarr to be an interesting read as her struggles of being a woman so negatively impacted her being taken seriously by others, even with an incredible technological discovery such as one that could be used in war tactics back then and that has led to modern uses of things like bluetooth and wifi. Her journey from actress to inventor is truly interesting..

So far, the process isn’t taking too long and has been somewhat easy to follow. The only thing I have not been able to do is set up the theme to Penscratch 2. Other than that, I don’t know how I feel about the ways in which to navigate through this site yet as I sometimes find it difficult to get back to a certain setting I was working on, such as the initial set up checklist since there’s no button for it specifically that I’ve found but all of the settings seem to be easy to access elsewhere anyway. I’m sure it will become easier; it’s just new.

As I continued the process of this project with adding pages and such, I felt increasingly more comfortable with this site. I did take a few minutes to go back and read instructions while adding subheadlines and also when updating the primary menu to reflect child pages as well as parent pages.