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Raleigh, NC
Ruth Suehle is the community leadership manager for Red Hat's Open Source and Standards team. She's co-author of Raspberry Pi Hacks (O'Reilly, December 2013) and a senior editor at GeekMom, a site for those who find their joy in both geekery and parenting. She's a maker at heart who is often behind a sewing machine creating costumes, rolling fondant for an excessively large cake, or looking for the next great DIY project.
Authored Comments
Not between "girly" toys and STEM, but between the creative building play that happens with Legos, espcially the robotics like Mindstorms, and STEM. IMO, girls who are interested in building robots when they're 10 are exactly the girls we should be encouraging into innovative science careers. I never said that the girls who only play with Barbies and My Little Pony will fail to enter STEM careers. (This is where I point to the Computer Engineer Barbie on my desk, who has a penguin on her desk!)
And it's not thirdhand--I linked directly to people who called. All you have to do is read the comments on any of Impeus posts to see more things from people who called themselves. You can also easily follow a direct timeline of changing stories from Lego, from the first call Impeus made through the next few days as the story changed to something more like, "No, no, girls are great! We'll post pictures of them everywhere!"
I don't think you /do/ appreciate the functional differences between a blog and a newspaper. But my journalism degree (which I do have) and I won't take offense. A newspaper story is a thing of research because its responsibility is built on the knowledge that that may be the only information you get on the subject, because historically, it probably was.
Here in the future, with blogs and communities and forums, sometimes we do deeply researched stories. But sometimes we just point to another place on the web to say, "Someone over here is saying something interesting, and here's what I think about it." That doesn't make it "hearsay." That makes it a link. And gives you the ability to discuss it here and there, and anywhere else you want--because you too can link to all the different discussions and add your own! It's the magic of the medium. And it's why traditional media, like say, The New York Times, have blogs now too. If there weren't value in both, they'd stick with a web version of the old print stories. But that's not what the future demands.
I also think you're incredibly wrong that blogs posts are viewed with skepticism. That's a very circa-2000 kind of attitude. Repeatedly, blogs and now social media have scooped traditional journalism and even corrected their errors. Coverage and awareness of things like the early days of Occupy Wall Street and SOPA were clearly the domain of bloggers, not traditional media. Blog coverage of Trent Lott's comments about Strom Thurmond's presidential campaign back in the 40s led to /Lott stepping down/. Here in 2012, bloggers have plenty of credibility--and effectiveness.