This transcript is from a PodTech.net podcast at:
http://www.podtech.net/home/technology/1573/meet-the-social-software-associate-professor-liz-lawley

Guest: Liz Lawley - Social Software
Host: Maryam Scoble - ScobleShow

Maryam Scoble - ScobleShow
Maryam Scoble and you are watching the ScobleShow. Today, we are at the Bell Harbor Conference Center, we just finished the fabulous conference Blog Business Summit and there last keynote of the day was given by Liz Lawley, a good friend of mine, and Matt Mullenweg.

Liz Lawley has been an inspiration to me ever since I have known her for the last year. She is a mentor in the technical sense and also as a woman, I inspire to be one day just like Liz. So, she teaches at the Rochester Institute of Technology, but I got to know her while she was working at Microsoft Research in her sabbatical. Without further ado let me just turn to Liz and let her tell you a little bit about herself. Hello, Liz!

Liz Lawley - Social Software
Hello Maryam and you got to be careful what you wish work because sometimes it comes true and it can be a challenge to try to balance all of the conference stuff and working stuff and this and that. So, it's not always wonderful but today it's wonderful because that was really fun to be here and to talk about stuff that I really care about and audience was interested.

Maryam Scoble - ScobleShow
Tell us a little bit about what you did at Microsoft Research when I got to know you.

Liz Lawley - Social Software
So, I got brought into Microsoft Research by the Head of the Social Computing Research Group there, who three weeks before I arrived, left Microsoft Research to run User Experience for Vista, which left me in a really interesting kind of free radical position within the organization because when you come in and the person who hired you has already gone, nobody really knows what to do with you and that can be a problem, if you really need people to tell you what to do or it can be an opportunity if you really want the chance to define your own role. So, I had a lot of fun with it and that I split my time between Microsoft Research and the Community Technologies Group there and MSN, which wasn't Windows Live yet, so, I could say MSN because it covered all the things and particularly looking at social things on both sides; looking at Weblogs, looking at social networks, looking at social bookmarking, looking at the way people did collaborative information sharing and I got to be sort of -- I used to describe myself in my role there as being a catalyst rather than a creator that I'm much better at connecting people and ideas and sparking people to go on a particular direction than I am at necessarily building or creating things from scratch. And, in the world of research that's not always valued, the idea in research is often that you're supposed to create things, that you're supposed to do basic research and build new things, and one of things that was wonderful for me at MSR was that they really valued that connector role that I played, that they really welcomed my coming in and being a little different than what the typical researcher there was. So, I spent a lot of times sort of looking for patterns, looking for interesting ideas, trying to get people to think differently about the things that we're working on.

Maryam Scoble - ScobleShow
Was there a specific project that you were working on? You mentioned something about Social Computing.

Liz Lawley - Social Software
The thing that I focused most of my time on and that I'm actually still working on because Microsoft gave me some funding to bring this back to RIT as a project that we're calling 'PULP' for a Personal Ubiquitous Library Project. And the idea behind that is that we wanted to take Microsoft's Aura Project. So, the AURA Project...

Maryam Scoble - ScobleShow
Oh very cool, you can't demo it.

Liz Lawley - Social Software
Well, I can't demo because I don't have the little lens that goes on here, but the lens that I had on my old phone allowed this lens to change its focal length and take a picture of a barcode. And so the idea behind Aura is that people don't tend to carry their computers everywhere they go but they frequently have their phone and if your camera phone could take a picture of a barcode and could decode that barcode on the fly, what could you do with that information; how could you take that and give the end user more access to distributed information? So, it might be sure a comparative shopping but more importantly could you have collaborative annotation. Could I know what Maryam said about that particular bottle of wine, could I know what my favorite professor said about that book when I take a picture of it? So, could I leverage my social network without having to pick up the phone and call everybody, "I know have you ever tried this wine," but that information would be centrally available.

Maryam Scoble - ScobleShow
And stored.

Liz Lawley - Social Software
And stored. So, I got to think it's a big project but a little piece of it that I was interested in is specifically books, which is there are lot of new tools now that let you organize your own bookshelf. But I'm not really interested in organizing my own bookshelf because I can do that on the shelf. I don't need to do it on the screen; I want to look at your bookshelf. I want to look at the bookshelf of the conference speaker that I just listen to, I want to know what stuff they have.

Maryam Scoble - ScobleShow
Right.

Liz Lawley - Social Software
And on top of that I want information about books -- the places I most likely to encounter them. And don't tend to encounter them when I'm sitting in front of my computer. I walk into a book store and I see books I'm interested in, I go into the library, I go to a friend's house and they have a book out, I go to a conference and they've got books out. I want to be able to grab a picture of that barcode and say, "I want that book." And I also wanted to tell me, "Hey, who else has that book that you know? Hey, did you know that your colleague down the hall already has a copy of that book? so that I could go look at it." So, we wanted to play with that. We also wanted to play with the idea of selectively sharing this information. So, one of the problems I ran into when I was at Microsoft is that because I was privy to projects that weren't yet public. I stopped being able to use social bookmarking tools like Del.icio.us because they left too much of a public trail as to what I was interested in. So, I was there, for example, working on with them on the Q&A tool that got released recently.

Maryam Scoble - ScobleShow
We just talked to Betsy Aoki this morning about that.

Liz Lawley - Social Software
Right, but when I was there it hadn't been released and they weren't talking about the fact that they were doing it. So, if I had left a whole trail of bookmarks about question/answer systems, collaborative rating of these, all of the people who I know at places like Yahoo! or Google or Amazon could it been able to tell fairly easily what it was that I was consulting on internally and I thought we need a tool like this that allows me to say, "I only want to share these links with people at RIT. I only want to share these links with people at Microsoft, could be able to selectively share the information and also to house it locally." So, the idea is to build a server that the organization runs as opposed to a commercial provider because do I really want to put all of my private bookmarks about Microsoft staff on a Yahoo! Hosted Service, probably not.

Maryam Scoble - ScobleShow
Not very smart.

Liz Lawley - Social Software
And likewise, if Yahoo! going want to do that with the Microsoft Hosted Service and so those are the kinds of things that I was looking at, and we're actually still working on, building out some pieces of that now that I've left.

Maryam Scoble - ScobleShow
So, now you said you've left and you're teaching at Rochester. Tell me a little bit about Academia and what you're teaching but also in speaking with Betsy this morning we talked about, why women are not interested or not getting into the field of Technology, and I thought the best person to ask would be someone who teaches Technology, I mean you do this for living, so tell us.

Liz Lawley - Social Software
Well, not only do I do it for living but it's been a huge frustration to me for years that so few of the students in my classes are women and that not only do we attract very few women into the IT program, we lose a lot of them in terms of retention and so I actually got an NSF funded grant several years ago to look at retention of women in Information Technology Education. There are number of factors that come into it, I mean one piece of it is that they are just not coming in to the college programs to begin with and that's a problem that happens we think very much at the middle school and high school levels. And some of it you can place on the educational institutions, you can say, student shouldn't have to choose between AP English and AP programming, for example, and often they do and so the girls are more likely to take the AP English and the boys are more likely to take the programming and then they feel more comfortable going in. But there are lot of other things that I think are more important; some of it is just the media messages, and I think that's a much bigger part of it than most people credit. So, how many images do we have in movies or in television shows of accomplished female technical people. The female geek is almost always portrayed as a misfit; as the ugly duckling, as the one that just doesn't fit in, if she is portrayed at all. And most of the time she is the helper; she is the friend of the geeks as opposed to one of the geek. We don't have a lot of strong role models in the media and we don't see a lot of images of women in technical positions and so there's not a whole lot of a positive image that young women develop about these fields. So, they tend to think, oh well, I don't want to be a programmer because I'm going to be sitting in front of the computer all day and I want to interact with people, and what they don't see is the whole social side of technical development that if you actually go into an environment like Microsoft or like Yahoo! you don't find people all sitting in their offices in front of their screens never coming out. You see conversations, you see discussions, you see connections, you see people really looking at the way their users work with tools and then coming back and feeding them into the process, but we've done such a bad job of putting that image out there. So, young women, when they're thinking about, what do I want to be? Don't see that as something that's going to be fun, that something that's going to be engaging, in human, in the way that it works. Then think if we can change some of the visibility; if we can show the people are having fun doing this, that it's not just writing endless lines of code then that's going to be the most important thing we can do.

Maryam Scoble - ScobleShow
Very cool. So, what are you teaching at Rochester right now?

Liz Lawley - Social Software
Well, this fall, I am back to teaching what I love the most, which is the Freshman introductory class on really the basics of what you need to work with the Internet and multimedia. So, my students learn everything from basic UNIX permissions to how to create Web Graphics, and how to publish things online. What's happening behind the e-mail messages in Servers that they use and then the protocols. For me the best part of that is not so much having in this freshman, but watching them four or five years later when they walk across the stage and I see them successful and moving on and all grown up. I just got back from a conference in Monterey where on Wednesday night, I had dinner with a former student of mine; a young women who'd taken that Freshman class with me, and come to me in tears, during the quarter saying that she was sure this was not the right field for her, that she just -- the programming was too hard, it was too frustrating. She wanted to switch and I convinced her to stay and I eventually convinced her to even enter the Honors Program when she was invited, and she is now in Postgraduate School that the Navy is paying for in Monterey, and she has blossomed and these are the things, I almost cheer up when I talk about it or when I write about it because I think, these are the successes that you get as a teacher that you never get as a Software Developer. The lives that you get to change on a day-to-day basis, the people who come back and say, "I am doing this because of you. I am successful in my job because of what you taught me. I stuck with this because of the encouragement you gave me," it's all of the best parts of being a parent with none of us staying up late.

Maryam Scoble - ScobleShow
Speaking of being a parent, I watch you do a rocking term of Dance Dance Revolution, that was very funny and very cool. I know you have two young sons and that you play with them the World of what -- Is it the World...?

Liz Lawley - Social Software
World of Warcraft.

Maryam Scoble - ScobleShow
Tell me how much I know about gaming, I just play Zuma. But, tell me little bit about your interaction with your sons in gaming and what you feel about the world of gaming.

Liz Lawley - Social Software
Well, right now I'm feeling about gaming a lot like I felt about blogging four years ago and I actually just gave the keynote on this where I said the people, four years ago I got up and I said to a group very much like this one, "pay attention to blogging, because it's really going to matter," and they thought I was crazy, because at the time it didn't look like something that was going to matter, and right now I think what's happening with multiplayer gaming and virtual world is just as important as what I was saying four years ago. So, I'm doing a lot of evangelism in that regard. I started playing some of these multiuser games in part because people that I knew in the real world said, "This is really cool, you should try it." I think the best experiences come when people that you know and trust say, "This is really good you should try it," I mean that's the whole -- we already know this, viral marketing works, all right. If you hear from someone you trust, yeah, it's more effective than watching a commercial on Television, and I got hooked on World of Warcraft, which is a really, really compelling environment. But I got hooked also on some of the things that it did differently from what I was used to. So, for example, so much what we do in technology right now is all about this, what Linda Stone calls Continues Partial Attention; you've got blogs and news, you've got IM and e-mail, you've got all of the stuff going on at once and you're splitting your focus among them. And World of Warcraft comes in and says, "ah... I'm taking over your screen; there will be no interruptions, while you are playing this game? You will be immersed," and this idea of an immersive environment is really very interesting, that it's very different from what we're doing in other kinds of technology and it really requires an entirely different kind of focus. But then I started watching the way my kids are playing the game, and that to me was really an eye-opener because there is so much informal learning that takes place in this, my kids hate those Educational Software games that are basically doesn't drill in practice, they're not fooled for a minute, they know that it is not any different than the little photocopy cheats that they get in the classroom. But I had this conversation with my 12-year-old one day where he said, "Well, I figured out that if I buy the eggs from new players who don't know about the Auction House and I give them more than they would get from a vendor and then I take them to the Auction House and I sell them to players who don't want to have to go out into the low level areas to find them but need them for something else. Then I can sell them for like ten times as much. Wow! that's a pretty significant macroeconomic theory that he just managed to deduce from -- (Voice Overlap) but what it did is accost us to have a full conversation about middlemen, about markets, about supply and demand, about First World and Third World Economies, about the ethics of are you taking advantage of someone and I thought all of this from a game. He's learned more from this little interaction, this little exposure to an encapsulated economic world then he could possibly have learned in a year's worth of social studies classes on the topic. And I think that's really interesting, the kinds of teamwork and collaboration, that my kids learned from this, the ways with interacting with other people, the interdependence on other players with different skills to be able to accomplish a task. These are huge lessons that I think we absolutely can't talk enough about in terms of their value, in terms of shaping kids. So, when I look at my kids playing these games, to me that is not time lost, they're not isolating themselves. And they're not really shutting themselves off from important learning instead they're using this as a new space for learning and exploring.

Maryam Scoble - ScobleShow
Wow! That's certainly a refreshing point of view because there's a lot of media and parental backlash about gaming and how it isolates kids and how it's responsible for violence in our schools. But you're saying that it could actually be looked at and used as a information or educational way. I do agree with that. I agree with that because I play with Patrick and I watch him play and then I know that he's learning and he's enjoying himself and what's wrong with that. And I'm sure that he understands that difference between good and bad even if it's a game and I think that we need to give our kids that much respect and responsibility.

Liz Lawley - Social Software
But you said something important, there what you said you play with Patrick. and I play with my kids and I think that's a big piece of it, is that unless we're playing games with them, unless we use that as a space in which to engage then we lose a lot of the opportunity for learning. For my kids who have done what they did in the Auction House, there's learning there, but the conversation that we had about it took that learning to another level. And if I don't understand the spaces in which they're playing then I can't help them learn appropriate behavior, I can't help them get larger lessons out of it. I actually wrote a post a couple of weeks ago for Terra Nova called "It Takes a Guild to Raise a Child," where I talked about how important it is for there to be these communities. Where kids can learn from each other's behavior but not just from other kids but also from adults, because when my son plays a game with people like Joe Ito (ph) or Ross Mayfield (ph) as his co-players. He's learning in a way that he's not going to learn if the only people he plays with the other 12-year-olds. It's a whole different level of learning and it really is this kind of community, then in many ways what's the ideal of what the Internet was going to be, right. That we would have this cross-generational cross-border kind of thing and I had this moment at one point where I'm getting an IM at work from a Japanese Venture Capitalist telling me that my son is ninja in (ph) loot in an incidence in World of Warcraft. And on the one hand, I'm upset because I don't want to be bothered working on the other hand, I'm thinking, it's like a Global Neighborhood Watch, right that these adults who I trust are looking out for my kid and letting me know when he's making poor choices, and in that to me is the future of where all of this goes. That to me is the value of it, it's that I get this distributed community of people and because we're playing together rather than segregating kids and saying that they should go off here and play with these toy things, I think we've got huge potential for learning in that.

Maryam Scoble - ScobleShow
I fully agree, Liz it's been such a great pleasure to talk to you. Is there any last-minute tips or tricks, or anything you want to share with the PodTech viewers?

Liz Lawley - Social Software
I will share my secrets for success, which I blogged about not that long ago, which is always take on more than you think you could do, that every single successful job that I've ever had I took before I knew how to do it, and I took it, convinced, they were going to find out that I was a total fraud. But it pushed me to do more and it gave me opportunities I wouldn't otherwise have had, and I especially say to women who so often suffer from what we talk about is the Impostor Syndrome, this idea that they're going to find out that I'm not really good at this, that I don't really know what I'm doing. To recognize that everybody feels that way and that if you can push yourself past that initial fear that there's so much that you can do if you're willing to take those chances.

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