Tag: worst

  • 2022 Year in Review

    2022 Year in Review

     

    I’ve been dreading writing this blog. I knew it was coming. Last years’ Bests and Worsts of 2021 was one of my more popular articles. But this year, I’ve been filled with dread.

    I’ve literally done the trick where I cleaned the toilet RATHER than write and get this blog published.

    But time left in 2022 is very short and regardless of the fact that I’m SURE I’m going to hurt some folks’ feelings, it’s time to leave the 2022 cards on the table and walk away from the year.

    So as I write this, I feel like Rocky Balboa sitting in the corner after a punishing round. I’m bleeding. I’m panting. And I can’t believe what just happened.  But I know the next round is coming.

    As per my tradition, I’m going to let a hell of lot more fly here on my blog than it the corresponding LinkedIn edition, if I do one there at all. [Editing note: I’ve decided NOT to post this to LinkedIn] But let’s get into it.

    2022 – The Year of Silencing Women

    Dictionary.com selected “woman” as the word of the year based on the phenomena of the definition changing. I’ve got many problems with THAT but still, I agree that women, globally, took a beating in 2022.

    The year started with me already 2 months into fighting to organize a live, first-of-its-kind panel for the TC-ILE organization. In November 2021, a bunch of charter members volunteered towards an event for Education Week in April 2022. But right after that volunteering, someone needed to take lead.

    Not a single volunteer stepped forward to lead the event: organizing, pulling together what the panel would cover, social media assets (and later, writing up and publishing the video and summary).

    So as the first 4 months of 2022 passed by, I had *reluctantly* stepped forward to volunteer to lead.

    Why?

    Well, first, despite what some falsely believe, there is such a thing as a “born leader”, meaning someone who steps up to take a lead in a act of servant hood.

    Second, I was familiar with nearly everyone on the panel.

    But what I didn’t expect (and I probably should have) was that I would go through a total of 6 months of agony with this panel with:

    • unanswered emails
    • refusals to give information
    • constant “I’m holier than thou” attitudes about the entire event.

    Yet, once the event was upon us, lo and behold! Suddenly, they are very happy and shooting out social media (that I created) like madmen.

    But it never escaped me once—- and here I get to the core of the issue —that by giving up my space on the panel as a speaker, I gave up my voice.  Remember, no one else would become the moderator.

    To be more specific, I FELT SILENCED.

    May 2022

    I was approached to serve on a panel for the WebXR Education Summit. Given how beat up I felt from the April event, I was relieved to think “Now, this time I’ll get a chance to speak!” I was promised that instructional design would be part of the topic. Yay! That would be great, since the last Education Summit’s instructional design session stank.

    June 24, 2022

    Roe v. Wade decision overturned by the Supreme Court. It rocked the planet. Regardless of anyone’s feelings about abortion, the faith that the US had in our Supreme Court justices was rocked because several of them went back on their word. These are LEGAL EXPERTS, people. If we had trusted that the Supreme Court was where final consideration and justice live, no more. 

    But I nearly wanted to weep for the world that my grand niece will grow up into. A world where her body will not be her own to control.

    I don’t think we’ve yet lived out the consequences from this turning point.

    Fast forward to July 2022.

    Heather, we need to ask you to serve as the Moderator for your Education Summit session.

    Here we go again. I FELT SILENCED.

    I carried on and really did a good job since that moment during the day, the conference was sorta melting down behind the scenes and I just carried on as if conversations with professionals is something I do all the time. (’cause, I do.)

    September 2022

    An opportunity came up to talk about the metaverse at an entrepreneurial conference and I was available and local (both, relatively speaking. Actually renting a car and doing the drive for two days was a hassle, but I digress). I want to put the best face on this because I am a guest.

    Now I did ask about the representation of women at this conference. I was told “with your yes, it will be 41%.”  Not too bad and being there, I can say that I saw plenty of women. Business women, but women.

    But in the panel was I on, there were 2 men and 2 women. The other woman was asked to moderate.

    So…she lost her voice.

    I actually talked with her about how that made her feel and if there was anything she and I could do together to mitigate that. She fed me the standard line of “Oh but as Moderator, I can control what questions are asked.”

    Uh. OK. But truly, that’s NOT the same as answering those questions.  I mean, with answers, I can swing a crowd around in any direction, I have influence. Her answer was like claiming that being wait staff at a restaurant is as good as eating there as a guest. It’s really not. It hurts me when I see women eating the shit they’ve been shoveled.

    At least I’ll claim that 3rd times a charm because I was not demoted myself to Moderator.

    But after all was said and done, I noticed how LITTLE people with visible disabilities were at this conference. That means that those with invisible disabilities were keeping them invisible. I remarked about that and got some weird “let me wrap my arms around you in a hug” statements about how I had rose above my disability (that I only alluded to, I did not disclose) by going outside my shell to serve on the panel.

    They didn’t mean it poorly.

    But I steamed in anger. STEAMED.

    Blind people cannot just apply themselves harder to see.

    Deaf people cannot just come out of their shell to hear.

    Rinse and repeat: mobility and cognitive issues.

    The blatant lack of respect for the population that needs accessible options is staggering.

    Bests

    OK, where are the bright spots, if there are any?

    Working on launching a virtual campus for a tech-forward college was a very good exercise. I learned a great deal and my favorite part (hands-down!) was the students. We only had a few “groupie” students that stuck in with the beta test, but they gave me, personally, GREAT feedback as to what they wanted, liked, and enjoyed.  Kudos to those students! I definitely have plans to use their feedback to make better future experiences.

    The Mozilla Hubs community welcomed me as a semi-regular visitor. That was nice. Even though they are befuddled why I visit when I’m not a developer.

    Also, warm regards for the panelists with me for the Education Summit. I truly believe that we worked well together, all had very valuable contributions to make, and it is a shame we only had 30 minutes to chat. All of them are fabulous in their respective careers. They get a big approval from me!

    The IEEE 2nd International Conference on Intelligent Reality (ICIR 2022) turned out to be a small gem. I was a reviewer and attendee (thanks to the free admission for being a reviewer….THANK YOU!!). Sessions covered a nice wide variety of topics and yet it felt like the presenters were A. nice people and B. felt connected to the theme of “connecting XR to reality”.  After some bitterness with other conferences (ahem, yes, by now I’m starting to officially say that I am not associated nor do I support the iLRN organization or conference), it was nice to work with a small but heartfelt group of researchers. This would be a little conference to keep your eyes on.

    Ending the year

    I continue to fight the good fight against truly poor statements about how VR/XR can be used in learning.

    My weeks of work on analyzing The Bible Project (oops, they are now known as BibleProject) courses has led to me being part of their UX test group. I get to see some early designs and give feedback. And that reminds me, I’m behind on 2 reviews that are due today.

    Off to 2023!

  • 2021 Bests and Worsts

    2021 Bests and Worsts

     

    I drew up my list of Best and Worst for 2021 and to make it balanced, it has 3 on each side. Here we go:

    Best

    1. Meeting Sriya Chintalapalli.

    I count meeting Sriya as a golden moment of 2021.  I actually haven’t had long chats with her. But I was given a small heads-up for a student XR conference that I was supporting that a speaker was coming that was going to be amazing. I think the ‘knock socks off‘ phrase might have been used. I was under FERPA regulations to know that she needed extra protection at the conference and I volunteered to give it. That means I stood on the virtual stage with her, playing the role of direct tech support but also crowd control if necessary.

    But what did happen meant something much more to me.

    Sriya gave her presentation. It was a great topic and very forward looking. Then, she took questions from the audience. Because the topic was on brain-computer interfaces (BCI), it didn’t take long before questions of invasion of privacy questions came from what were obviously professors in the audience.  

    I’ve seen these verbal examinations before. I’ve seen them break college seniors and Master’s Degree students. It’s just enough questioning to find where the student does not know the answer. That’s the push point. Several men in the audience were going right for her, directly and academically.

    Standing on stage with her, without her knowing it, I would have thrown up a shield if she needed it and blocked those men from getting to her/embarrass her/humiliate her by making some excuse that we’d run out of time, audio wasn’t working, etc.

    But, she held the stage. She held her ground. More than once she said “The data doesn’t say.”  

    Good line! Don’t let them pin you where you have not staked a claim.  She’d been trained well to enter an academic fight.

    When she was done, I let out my breath.

    Were those men plants in the audience? Not sure. Maybe. Either way, my hackles were real.

    And the lesson for me that day was: if I can do anything to help women like Sriya…even if it is only shouting “Make a path!“, I will.  It’s very hard to be a woman in the technological sciences. The road ahead will shape her in ways I’m sorry to contemplate. May she always find a woman like me standing by, ready to help.  

    Please follow her. Great things are ahead.

    2. A small unheralded research paper, HMD Type and Spatial Ability: Effects on the Experiences and Learning
    of Students in Immersive Virtual Field Trips.

    I was able to meet the first author, Pejman Sajjadi, at the IEEE VR conference in March/April 2021 in avatar form here. This small piece of research stayed in my mind all year as a great example of the piecemeal way that scientific research works its way slowly towards practitioners and teachers.
     

    The write up of this study is pay walled behind IEEE, I believe, and Pejman would be the first to point out the small sample size. Therefore, there was no fanfare and no social media on this paper. If you look at his research background, what you see is this paper is just one of several papers generated from one research event, so it’s pretty generic par-for-the-course research.
     
    Taking into account all those discount factors, this tiny study investigated something that teachers do really want to know:   
     
    Are expensive VR headsets worth it?
     
    The answer is no.
     
    There is much more to the no, of course, related to content, learning objectives, scalability, etc. But more so than ever in 2021, educators turned to VR as a more realistic mainstream learning choice. The price drop of the Oculus Quest 2 to $299 and further, the Facebook push for the work use of Workrooms to bring VR use directly into the workplace show that we are going to have to get more and more comfortable with VR headsets and quality will be a question.
     

     (Image source: https://about.fb.com/news/2021/08/introducing-horizon-workrooms-remote-collaboration-reimagined/)

    Quietly researched, small sample size, no social media presence.  
     
    But bit by bit, researchers are answering these questions. I hope teachers are listening to the work of Pejman.

    P. Sajjadi, J. Zhao, J. O. Wallgrün, P. C. La Femina and A. Klippel,
    “HMD Type and Spatial Ability: Effects on the Experiences and Learning
    of Students in Immersive Virtual Field Trips,” 2021 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW), 2021, pp. 546-547, doi: 10.1109/VRW52623.2021.00155. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9419337

     

    3. Equal Entry and XR Women 

    It’s a tie! Both organizations work for similar goals: 
    • Equal Entry has a strong drive for accessibility and has a section of work dedicated just for VR, AR, and XR.
    • XR Women‘s mission is dedicated to getting women’s voices up on stage as part of the narrative about the ongoing and future directions of XR.  
    • Both organizations stay focused on their task and welcome listeners, newcomers, and allies.
    Both groups alike are working on accessibility into the coming metaverse for all.  I applaud their efforts.
    Now time for the worsts.  Is worsts a word?  You will notice a theme from the Bests that carries through.  Here it comes…

    Worst

    1. Not necessarily restricted to 2021 sadly, say the phrase “Women in XR” and you will likely get this image:

    Or this one.  That’s not even a woman on the right. #dehumanizing means you treat women like animals.

    Actually, as I prepped for this article, I went to find one screen capture of a woman in a short skirt playing Beat Saber so that I could use it as a example of a poor behavior.  I thought finding one image of a woman in a skirt would be hard. I had remembered seeing one.  
     
    Much to my shock and horror, it turns out….it was drop dead easy.  So easy, nearly EVERY image on YouTube for playing Beat Saber is of a young female scantily dressed.  Check it out:

    I counted ~9 images of women playing with either bare legs, bare midriffs, sports bras, etcs, for every 1 man.
    Think that’s a coincidence?  Oh no. It’s BY REQUEST.  Look video info at the bottom of this image I just posted above again.
     
     
    It says:
     
    “Song + Outfit per George T’s request! To request songs & outfits/costumes become a Patron at…”

    This woman is taking money to have herself videoed/green screened playing Beat Saber in a short skirt.  Don’t tell me that the Patron isn’t begging for that skirt to fly up at some point. I know what you can see through that black skirt by outline.  In these videos, women have not only lost body space control, they are selling it.

     
    It’s disgusting. And this is ALL OVER YouTube.  There’s a research project in there to count the views of Beat Saber videos without skirts versus those with.
    Remember that the Quest 2 was a major Christmas gift for 2021 and your daughters are now –January 2022– watching YouTube videos to learn how to get better at Beat Saber.  Is getting better at the game the only thing they are learning?
    Think that this is just about fun, though?  Really? Did you read what happened at late 2021 a technical conference ad?  Reminder: Major “Game” conference, no women speakers on the ad, and a sexbot prominently featured. This is what women in tech are facing when we “go to work.”

    Women have been getting groped at tech conferences during large standing-room only keynotes. It’s real that women feel less comfortable in HMDs because they give up body space control. 
     
    At any conference right now, by putting on a headset, women take a risk that men do not.

    2. Major immersive learning researcher responds to an accessibility question with “I don’t know why a blind person would ever use VR.”

    I was running tech support. I was on mute. I sputtered.  But the researcher’s mic was hot. The video caught that…I think. It’s out there.  
     
    But what does that matter if it’s on video or not, if the researcher truly thought that?
     
    I don’t even know what to do with that.
     
    Major. US. Immersive Learning Researcher.  
     
    😔
     
    By the way, for you, reader,  in answer to the question, contemplate this:

    Screenreader Experience of a Virtual Reality Conference by Rhea Althea Guntalili

    and  

    Virtual Reality in the Dark: VR Development for People Who Are Blind | Accessibility VR Meetup Recap by Aaron Gluck (YouTube link and transcript available at this link)

    3.  Microaggressions against women in the XR industry
     

    I left 3 organizations in 2021 and am no longer associated with them. It’s apparent now that I could not stand up for the rights of women and for accessibility in XR without being targeted myself.
     
    “A microaggression is a subtle behavior – verbal or non-verbal, conscious
    or unconscious – directed at a member of a marginalized group that has a
    derogatory, harmful effect. Chester Pierce, a psychiatrist at Harvard
    University, first introduced the term microaggression in the 1970s. ” https://www.thoughtco.com/microaggression-definition-examples-4171853
     

    The last organization I left questioned if I was a dues-paying member, so they used an institutional rule to execute an exclusionary move.

    We’ve heard about headset straps that do not adjust for varying hair styles. Women and people with disabilities that are not recruited into research studies so that research results are invalidated when applied to major populations, conferences that not only host but advertise manels with sexbots, and the list keeps going already 7 days in 2022…
    😔