[music]
I'm going to talk a little bit about why girls
need to be part of our future - and technology future -
and I'm also going to tell you a little
bit about my story, so I hope you find that interesting,
and I'll be very interested to
hear your questions as well.
But what I wanted to do was to start off with
a fact that you may or may not know:
there was somebody called Ada Lovelace, and you can see she is a woman, and she's considered to be the first
computer programmer, and she worked with Charles Babbage - you might have heard of Charles Babbage -
and he was an early mechanical, general purpose computer, involved with the analytical engine.
But what they found was that Ada's notes
on the engine, what she did is she was the
one that had the first algorithm that was intended to be carried out by a machine, so she was a very smart lady.
But certainly back
in the 1800s, women were more support-type
people and weren't necessarily recognized
for their work.
So, if you have a look at this slide here - you
see the bottom here I've got a link to Wikipedia,
so you can go and have a look at her very
interesting life story - but what she talked
about is she had poetical science ideas, so that
led her to ask lots of questions about what
was called the "analytical engine," or the early
computer, and examining how individuals and
society relate to technology, so she wasn't just
interested in the technology or computers themselves,
she was interested in how people
interact with technology, and that's something
that I've always been very interested in.
So, I think it's really important to understand
that girls - women - have underpinned a lot
of programming and a lot of computer 
technology over the years.
So, why do we need to be interested in technology and information systems?
So, on this slide, I have some recent technology trends;
have you all heard about the driverless
cars? Is that yes? Yes. Driverless cars, so Google, Volvo,
are all involved in the driverless
cars, so maybe - I'm not sure if you're thinking
about getting your Ls very soon or not - but maybe ten years down the track, you won't need to do that.
Certainly robotics - robots - are a trend; 3D printers, I'm sure you've heard of those;
the internet of things; big
data is a term that's been around for a while;
Broadband that allows us to download
and upload videos wherever we are, almost anywhere -
and I imagine you've all got smartphones
and technology that you do that;
apps that monitor our fitness, our health, our sleep,
everything; wearable technologies - I wear
a sports watch to monitor my runs and when
I swim and do those sorts of things;
and of course, social media, and I imagine you've
all got some sort of social media account,
I know my 15 year old son certainly does,
and I'm not sure what he does on it, but he
is very involved with social media, that's
how you interact with your friends.
So, our world, the way we work, the way we live,
the way we play, the way we interact with our friends,
the way we communicate is all
driven by technology, so it's something that
we want to be part of in terms of the decisions
that we make about technology.
And you need to be part of that,
I need to be part of that.
So, there's lots and lots of opportunities, of
course, with technology: more flexible work, and, so,
for example, in my job, I can work
from home some days a week, which means that
I can go to school functions, I can get my
son to basketball, I can have a good work-life balance,
it gives us some diversity in the
sort of jobs that we can do.
Another really important opportunity, of course, is sustainable cities, so smart transport infrastructure,
waste management, reducing energy, all of those sorts of things, they're all going to help us in the future.
And a very big area that's increasingly going to be (certainly in the next 10, 20, 30 years)
is better health care;
so as we have an ageing population,
and as we have more issues around health and monitoring health conditions and keeping people in their
homes when they age, having technology that
monitors people in their homes, being able
to have equitable access to health care is
really important because in a lot of regional
and remote areas in Australia, for example,
people don't necessarily have access to the
sort of health care that we might get when
you live in a city like Sydney, where we are.
So, keeping people at home rather than in a hospital,
keeping people out of hospitals,
because, often when you go to hospital, you get sicker.
And, of course, another major opportunity is access to education - you can access education wherever you are;
so we have these massive, open
online courses now, we're you can talk to
anybody anywhere, and I'll talk more about
that in a moment.
So, we have lots of opportunities,
so technology is good.
However, technology can be bad,
so we need to manage it and I've got a little board
that was outside a coffee shop, a cafe, that says:
"No Wi-Fi here. We don't have Wi-Fi! Talk to each other." So are we losing the ability to communicate and chat?
Okay. So, for example,
my 15 year old son, what I do at night-time
is I turn the Wi-Fi off and you know what
upsets him more than anything, is he can't
talk to his friends after about 9:30 at night -
which is tragic, I know, I'm a bad mother, not good -
but when I say, "Well, what are
you doing?" He says, "I'm talking to my friends."
and I can't hear any talking going on at all.
It's all messaging.
So that leads me to this issue about technology addiction: one of the rules I have in my house is that all
the technology has to be out of his bedroom a night-time - my bedroom as well,
I don't have my phone in my bedroom.
So, there's issues with problems with sleep, and problems
with being able to switch off and having good
quality sleep.
The next one you might be familiar with:  fear
of missing out; so if everybody's sort of chatting
and involved in a conversation, or involved
in doing something on social media,
and then you don't have access to that, you can feel
like you're missing out - and there's a bit
of research going on in that area and that's
something we have to be aware of -
and being connected 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and that can't be good, that can't be healthy.
Another major issue or a consequence of technology
being available all the time is managing distractions;
So, for example - I'll give you another example,
in your context - is that studying;
so if you're studying for your end of year exams, for example, at the same time, you can be playing
video games, or chatting to your friends, or listening
to music, and having all those different distractions
rather than focusing on studying, is a very
difficult thing to do.
The next issue is connections with each other - we're not in the moment. So, I don't know if you've noticed this,
but if I'm walking around at a shopping centre, I'm walking around here at Macquarie University,
often people run
into me because they're not looking up watching
where they're going, they're doing this - looking
at their phones; and that is a big issue as well,
is not being in the moment; people
having dinner, and rather than having dinner
and having a conversation around a dinner
table, everybody's looking at their phones.
So connecting with each other, comparing ourselves
with other people, for example, if we look
at social media and we see other people doing
fun things, or doing stuff that we're not doing,
or they look better than us, or whatever
it is, we can feel a little bit left out.
Another major issue, I think, is privacy:
often we share too much, okay? [chuckles].
People share everything and maybe we need
to reconsider that because as we move into the world,
and you go for job interviews,
for example, the first thing your potential
employer will do is look at your social media,
and it's very easy for them to be able to
do that and see what you've been up to.
Now, this is the ugly part of technology.
These are some issues that we need solving,
and they're issues that you can be part of
the solution.
I think that these issues we can solve together.
So, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australians are amongst the highest users of technology.
And as I said earlier, that can be a good thing, but it can be a bad thing, so we have to be able to manage that.
A major, major issue around the world is e-waste; it's harming the environment and, of course, people's health;
so, hazardous substances that
leach into soil or water, land-fill,
renewable resources not used properly, those sorts of things.
And, so ,what happens is what we want often
- because it's marketed to us -
is we want the newest version of whatever it is; so the Apple iPhone 6s is a pretty good phone, right?
Or as I understand it, I don't have one, but
that is apparently a really good phone.
So what people want to do, even if their current technology works perfectly adequately,
they want to have the next version. So, what happens to your old technology? What's happening to that?
Where is it going and who is it harming? Are we able to recycle it? What can we do with that?
I think that that is a major issue as technology -
and you can see a picture I've got on that slide there,
people trying to go through some
of this e-waste.
Another major issue, of course, is cyber security -
and you probably would have heard some of
this in recent news stories - so the majority of people in a survey - I've got a link here to a global survey -
found that the majority
of respondents believe that cyber security
is among the top three threats facing businesses today.
So, if we go back to some of those major trends,
you look at the driverless car, for example.
Now, if the security is not there - and this
has happened - and somebody can hack into that car
and control it, then that could have
all sorts of implications, couldn't it?
So that is an example of cyber security
and where we have to manage this.
So you can see that some of these issues need
resolution and I think they can be solved,
but we all need to work together in order to solve them. They're not going to go away by themselves.
All right, so now, I'm going to tell you a bit
about my story: this is me in Year 10 in 1979 -
ancient, ancient history for you, I know,
but not such ancient history for me -
and I've put a circle around who I am- because I know
you wouldn't be able to figure it out -
and you can see I came from a very small country
town. This is the whole of my Year 10 class.
And a lot of those people I haven't kept in
contact with. And that was our maths teacher. [chuckles]
He was a very good maths teacher too. I liked him a lot.
Year 10, a long time ago.
So what's happened since then?
So I came from this small country town,
and the town is called Bowraville,
it's up in between Coffs Harbour and Kempsey.
And you can see there's
a picture there of the school.
There's a picture of the town, and there's a picture there of the Post Office, and that Post Office is where
I lived with my family; so my father was a Post
Master - that's what we called them then -
my mother worked there, and there was a door
that went from the Post Office into the house.
That's where we lived for a long time.
I've got a few facts about Bowraville up on the slide,
I don't need to read them to you, but
in 2011, there were 1,208 people living in Bowraville,
and there is a number of indigenous people.
So when I went to school - when I went
to Bowraville High School - it only went to
Year 10 and my class mates in High School,
I had a number of indigenous friends, and some lived outside of town and some lived inside the town.
So that's where I came from
and that's where I mostly grew up.
So, why have I ended up here? So, this is a little
bit about my journey. So the school I went to -
Bowraville Central School - went up to Year 10, so I had to change schools to go to Year 11,
and I didn't finish Year 12.
So that's a big tragic isn't it? [chuckles]
But I realised that that was a bit of a mistake, so I went
to TAFE; I came to Sydney, I got a job, I went to TAFE
and I did a typing course to begin with because I felt that with computers that I needed to touch type.
So that's the first thing I did.
Then I did my HSC at TAFE to try and get into
a university course, and I tried to get into Macquarie University as a mature aged student, but they rejected me.
So that was pretty tragic, I was pretty upset about that.
However, I picked myself up, and
I dusted myself off, and I applied at Charles
Sturt University at Bathurst, so I did that externally,
so I did that by distance education.
So I did a Bachelor of Business Computing in
Management Information Systems, but as you
can see here, I was very bad at programming.
In fact, I had to repeat the programming unit
because I was so bad at it, but I perservered and I tried to do it and in those days when I did this,
the way you had to code was you had to sort of write it down on paper and send it in, I couldn't even do it online.
However, I got through that and I graduated.
Then I did an MBA Professional Accounting
and then I did a PhD in Information Systems.
So the way that I did that and I did that while I was working full-time -
I worked in the banking sector and I worked in IT - and I did all of that while I was working full-time.
So, it was the hard way to do it.
However, it was really important that I had support from my husband; so he was really supportive,
and when I needed to study on weekends and those sorts of things, he was very supportive.
And even while I was doing these other qualifications, I used to spend a lot of time
at Macquarie University in the library. Even though I wasn't accepted here as a student, that's what I did.
So that took a number of years, as you can imagine.
So, these are my degrees here. So I took photos of
them:  So there's a Bachelor of Business Computing
and Management Information Systems, and the
Master of Business Administration and my PhD.
So I'm very proud of those because it took me
so long to get them.
So what am I doing now? Okay, so let me tell you a bit
about what's happening now. So I now am a lecturer
and unit convenor - I'm a senior lecturer
now - and I lecture and unit convenor for
post-graduate and undergraduate management
information systems units, so what I do is I
teach information systems in business, and
that's really important because the focus
is not on the technology per se, but how we
use technology.
he students that I teach are the ones that are going to be the decision-makers about technology
in their organisations, so I think this is a very important area for students to be aware of.
I'm a researcher and author, so I've done research and published in journals, conference papers, book chapters.
I've been an author on a text book, and I've also been
invited to submit industry publications.
And I've also been in the media, so I've been on the television, and I've been in newspapers and on the radio.
So that's really good, isn't it? It means that
what I'm researching and interested in is
getting out there and people are interested in it.
You see a picture up there - this is my son
and my husband and our tour guide -
we went on a bicycle ride in Cambodia, and it was fantastic,
and there's another photo there of my son and
I in Hawaii at the beginning of the year where
I went to a conference. That was very interesting.
I also like to run, so that's me running in
the [chuckles] Blackmore's running festival.
I did the 9 ks and I got third in my age group,
so I'm trying to get faster.
I was going to do the half marathon, but I was injured, so I had to do the shorter distance.
So I do a lot of running, and I'm into fitness and those
sorts of things.
Another passion of mine, I suppose, is Zonta.
So Zonta International is an organisation
that is about supporting women and I was the President
for a couple of years in the Zonta Club of
the Northern Beaches here in Sydney, and I'm
the Status of Women Chair now,
but what we do - and I think that this is very relevant -
is we provide study grants;
So, for women in financial difficulty, we provide study grants for women that are doing university courses,
and we support women from the refuge - so people
that have experienced domestic violence and
they need to get a job - so we help them with
TAFE courses, for example.
The other thing that we do is the girls that are at school
in the northern beaches, going into Years 11 and 12,
if they need help for their art work or some other financial support to try keep them in school,
we also help them as well.
So, as you can see, I have quite a lot of things that I do.
So, let me sum up before we have some questions.
Technology is a disruptor and it's here to stay.
Okay, that is a fact. So we've got technology,
we're all using it, we're all part of it.
There are issues with technology that we should
be aware of, but we're all part of the solution as well,
I think that that's really important.
And the reason why girls, in particular, should
understand technology is because we need to
be making informed decisions about technology
and what it can do and what the limitations
of technology might be.
We've had predictions over many years about what technology can do, and a lot of those predictions
have been inaccurate, but of course, some are not, and we know that technology's changing the way we work,
live, play, study. We know that. Okay?
And you're part of the solution, just like we are.
At the bottom of the slide here, did you see that Essena O'Neill decided that she was going to disconnect
from social media a couple of weeks ago and she said that she had half a million Instagram followers,
more than 250,000 YouTube subscribers, and her Snap Chats were watched by more than 60,000,
and she signed off social media
for good at the end of October,
because she said that social media's not real,
and she was explaining that social media sets
up really false expectations for people because
the types of photos that she put up took her
a long time to style them, to get her make-up right and to style the photos and those sorts of things,
and a lot of the fashion that she would
wear, she was paid to do that, and that's not disclosed.
So the social media not real article,
I think, is very interesting and that links
back to what I said about the fear of missing out.
So when we look at social media and we think
people are having these fantastic lives and
doing things that we would like to do, it's fake -
a lot of it is fake - it's made up
and people are paid to do it.
So we have to be realistic about what social media can and can't do in terms of connecting us and providing
opportunities for collaboration, and those
sorts of things are very important, but if you believe
everything that's on social media, you will end up comparing yourself to something that is not real.
And the other little item I've got up there is
an organisation, of course, that's very involved
in ethical clothing, and I think that that
might be worth a look, if you're interested as well.
So really thinking about technology and how technology can actually make a difference,
and what the benefits might be, what the issues are that we can manage in our day-to-day lives,
and also what some of the bigger issues might
be that we can be part of the solution.
And finally, what I wanted to say is that there's
lots and lots of jobs out there,
lots of jobs that aren't necessarily programming, and I've already explained that I'm just terrible at programming.
[chuckles] But I've done a lot of jobs that involve technology and information systems.
So here are some possible jobs here:
So user interface designers - so the way we interact
with technology and design apps - thinking
about how a website should look and working
with programmers is an interesting job; 
content strategy where you work on blogs, social media
to share information with customers. All organisations need people like that in order to help them manage that;
web analytics and big data; project
management; business analyst; change management.
So there's a whole lot of roles and jobs that
exist today and jobs that will exist in the
future that we don't even know about that need some level of technology understanding and proficiency.
So I have a little saying up here: "Education
should prepare young people for jobs that
do not yet exist, using technologies that
have not yet been invented, to solve problems
of which we are not yet aware," and I thought
that really summed up what I've been trying
to say today is that really we don't know
where we're going to be in 10 years, 20 years, 30 years,
but if we have some understanding
of technology and even though we use technology
- we're all using social media, we have our
smartphones - having a deeper understanding
of not just how technology works, but what
the issues are, is really fundamental for
being able to take opportunities of what roles
might be possible in the future. Thank you.
[music]
What is a Doctor of Philosophy? So what a Doctor
of Philosophy does - what a PhD is -
so what happens is you do your undergraduate degree,
which is usually three years, sometimes four years,
and you take particular subjects and
you have an exam - or not always an exam -
but you have certain assessment tasks and those
sorts of things at the end of each semester
and then, at the end, you graduate with your
undergraduate degree.
Then you have masters, which is 
often coursework, a similar thing
sometimes there might be a bit of research.
But with a PhD, a PhD is an independent piece
of research; so what you do is you have a particular
research problem and research questions, and
then what you have to do is you have to find
out what research has been done in the past,
where there might be a gap, and then what
you do is you find a way to answer that research
question, and it has to be a contribution to knowledge.
So what I did in my PhD is I looked at e-commerce
and the implications for human resource management
in the banking sector, okay? So, what did that mean in terms of managing people? So A PhD can take -
it took me nearly seven years to do that. Well, I had a baby as well at the same time. [chuckles]
[music]
No, what we have to understand is when it's
appropriate to connect using technology,
and when it's appropriate to connect face-to-face.
So, it's having the ability to understand the difference.
So in some organisations - for example, Yahoo - they don't allow people to work from home at all for example,
because they believe
that everybody needs to be in the office in
order to collaborate and work together. Whereas
some other organisations are happy for people
to work from anywhere - work from home, work
from co-working centres.
So, it's about understanding when it's appropriate to be able to connect via technology and when that might not
be an appropriate thing to do; so if you were dealing
with particularly complex issues, for example,
the human-to-human connection is still really
important.
[music]
I'm learning stuff all the time. One of the
most interesting things [chuckles] I did was
- what's today? - last week, last Friday,
I did a webinar to the Canadian Government
on flexible work and it was really interesting
because it means that being able to connect
to people all around the world is fantastic,
and the technology that we used was called Zoom,
and the week before that I had been
in Brisbane at a conference and the key note
speaker came in from London on Zoom technology, and it was in a big conference hall and it worked beautifully.
So, I think that's what I find really interesting, being involved in new technology,
and my research is around
flexibility of work and working anywhere,
and I think that being able to go and talk
to people about that and being involved with
the technology is really interesting.
[music]
I've got one son, that's it [chuckles], and
as I said, he's 15, he's doing IST as his elective,
he's just finishing Year 9.
What he would like to do when he finishes school
is he wants to be a personal trainer and a
games designer. However, in recent days -
and this is just days - he's thinking about maybe
he'll be involved in technology hardware and
fixing that because a couple of days [chuckles]--
Monday night I was out, I came home and he
clicked on a link he shouldn't have which
infected his computer with a trojan,
and I had to call - I couldn't fix it - so I called
Geeks To You - I don't know if you've heard
of this organisation, very good - I was working
from home yesterday, so I was able to get
the guy to come in and fix it, but what Nicholas
had done - my son - is he'd saved up all his
money to buy all the computer parts and he
built the computer himself, from scratch,
and then he bought the case and put the case there.
So when I was organising this service call -
I deliberately made a phone call, rather than do it via the web - to explain that it was a built computer.
So he's really interested in
all of those sorts of things.
[music]
Well, there's lot of technology that's used in
architecture, but there is software that architects
use in order to design buildings and do all
sorts of things - I would have to look all of that up -
But, yes, definitely in architecture,
technology's used quite a lot in order to
build 3D designs and those sorts of things, yes.
[music]
Well wouldn't it be fantastic to have a crystal
ball to be able to answer that one.
I think, the trends - that slide that I put up in terms of the trends with 3D printing - certainly robotics is very big -
artificial intelligence and robotics is going to be part of the future, not just in manufacturing,
but in service industries, so what's going to happen is we're going to have more people -
for example, in aged care. We're
not going to have enough people to be able to
do all the things that need to be done in aged care, so robots are going to be very important for that.
I think that robotics is certainly
something that, if you're interested in that,
I would definitely go down that path.
3D printing, driverless cars, all of that is coming.
So I don't know what else. Wearable
technology is a very big trend right now -
I'm sure you've seen all the ads on the television
about having Fitbits to monitor how many steps
a day and how much sleep you have and all
those sorts of things - but that also introduces issues,
doesn't it, about where that data is stored and who has access to it, so I think that's interesting as well.
But who knows? In five years from now, ten years from now, it's going to be interesting.
So the more we understand now - so rather than being scared of technology or worried about technology -
we should learn about it, so we can make informed decisions.
[applause]
Thank you.
[music]
