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NCWIT Pacesetters UCIrvine - Debra Richardson
Debra Richardson: I'm Debra Richardson, Professor of Informatics and founding dean of
the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, at the
University of California, Irvine. At UC, Irvine, we have worked
hard over the years to increase the number of women in computing,
both before and during our participation in NCWIT. Today, I just
want to talk about one aspect of that that we have been doing as a
part of our Pacesetters effort where we are reaching out to women
who are already on campus.
We started a conversation across the campus about the need for all
students to be computationally fluent in the 21st century,
regardless of their major. We hope that some day every student will
have to take a course in computing, that prepares them with
computational thinking skills to enable them to better use today's
technology, but also to contribute their own insight to tomorrow’s
technology. Unfortunately, given all the stakeholders at the
university, that will be a long conversation.
In the meantime, as part of our Pacesetters effort, we’ve
introduced a number of general education courses, such as
Environmental Issues in IT, Human Factors for the Web, Social
Impacts of Internet Technologies. These are all targeted towards
individual students who wouldn't normally come to computing, who
wouldn't have an interest in computing, and especially towards
women.
We have also packaged these courses together as a minor, called
Digital Information Systems, that enables a student who might not
want to become a programmer, to actually become familiar and fluent
with computation and information systems.
We can't track the number of women who have an interest in pursuing
the minor, but we do know that over half, actually 61 percent, of
the students, in those courses I talked about, are women. Now
that's net new women. Another factor at UC, Irvine, is that over 30
percent of the computing faculty are women. These women take a
genuine interest in serving as role models for young women who are
exploring the option of computer science. We hope, we expect, that
that will enable us to contribute even more net new women to the
picture.
My Story...
In October 2011, I sat in the red chair share progress towards our goal. At UCI, we’ve introduced a set of non-major courses, covering topics such as the social impact of Internet technologies, human factors for the web, end environmental issues in information technology, and others. These courses are targeted to students who might not otherwise consider a course in computing, especially women We’ve also developed a minor in Digital Information Systems that packages these courses together with upper division courses for students who want to learn about information systems, computation, and digital communication without preparing to be computer programmers. Although we can’t tell how many women might be pursuing the minor, we do know that over half of the students enrolled in these courses are women. Now that’s an achievement!
