Pixeled Multimedia Teachers Association

I was at the recent Go Girl Go for IT conference held at Deakin University earlier this week. The aim of the conference was to give girls an insight into the IT industry and diffuse the myth that only geeks love computer careers. For this reason a collection of mainly female speakers were called upon to talk about their careers and to encourage girls to pursue IT.

As usual there was a mixed bag of speakers - which really just reinforces the notion that public speaking is a skill that few people have - who did their best to make their work sound glamorous and exciting. Sure a few of the speakers were inspiring, one woman called Pia, a self confessed Linux freak, said she wanted to save the world with Linux and her computer skills. She seemed to be doing a good job by the look of it, working in places like Mongolia and with Indiginous communities. Her passion and energy was a real inspiration and a great role model for either gender.


Another speaker was from the media industry who called herself an IT girl (it as in Paris Hilton type of IT girl) with the pun being Information Technology IT rather than party girl it. Anyway, she fired up the girls with her stories of how you can make online documentaries and network through myspace and assorted chat facilities. She was enthusiastic and fun and the girls responded well to her talk.


Unfortunately though there were quite a few dreary speakers who spent the first 15 minutes talking about their lives and how they got into IT when really they weren't all that interesting. Whenever I heard a speaker say that they wanted to explain how they got into IT, I felt like screaming "you're really not that interesting, I don't want to hear your life story." However, it goes to show that most people think they are more interesting than they really are, including me.

There was a fashion show for the girls at lunchtime and the loudest live band in Melbourne entertaining the girls as well. The two day conference was well organised with the general consensus from organisers that the Tuesday was better than the Wednesday. Unfortunately, I was there on the Wednesday in the blue stream when the red stream was meant to be the go!


I believe overall though that many of the girls, from all sorts of schools and from all over the State, will at least go away from the conference, with a more positive attitude to IT.