Catherine Stevens

Ed-tech enthusiast, baker, bike polo player

[catherinestevens-blog]

This is what the “Silicon Valley bubble” means

Yesterday while browsing through Facebook, I saw this post:

This was from someone who goes to school in the heart of Silicon Valley, has used Google Glass more than once, has programmed with Google Glass, etc., and (obviously) had access to the iOS 7 beta for developers. Given where he was coming from, his sentiment made complete sense. However, my initial reaction was “wow, this person is on a completely different level than the rest of the world.” I’ll explain what I mean, but first, a bit of background: I lived in the heart of Silicon Valley (Palo Alto, California) my entire life until a month ago when I moved to Corvallis, Oregon, a college town south of Portland. Prior to leaving, I had spent 7 months surrounded by the latest technology and startups, living, working and hanging out with founders and tech people.

Since moving, my life has been completely different. I remember the first time I realized that Silicon Valley and Corvallis’s definition of “entrepreneur”, “startup”, “innovation”, etc. were polar opposites. I remember feeling immense frustration at the fact that I couldn’t just hire a TaskRabbit to deliver furniture or clean my house, or call a last-minute Lyft if I got stuck somewhere because, oh yeah, I now live 250 miles from the nearest city with either of those (or for that matter, any other service you come to expect and rely on in Silicon Valley). Instead I had to actually clean my house and buy furniture and take the bus at midnight. I detested having to use buggy, non-gorgeous sites. I deserved to have a quick, easy-to-use, intuitive, beautifully-designed mobile-optimized experience god damnit!

It took me a few weeks to get used to people’s initial reaction when I told them about Airbnb: “You stay in strangers’ houses? But isn’t that dangerous?!” Even though I knew it shouldn’t be shocking, I was still shocked that people didn’t know what Meetup is, what MOOCs are, what an IPO is, what the difference between front-end and back-end development is and what the sharing economy is. The most hilarious one was explaining to someone that contrary to popular belief, hackers aren’t the bad guys.

Although there are obviously things I miss about Silicon Valley, I’m in no way trying to say that I regret moving. In retrospect, it was one of the best decisions I ever made: it forced me to get out of my comfort zone, think about what I want out of life, and just question myself and what I know in general. Indeed, had I read this before I moved, I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, and even now I am in no way bashing what the status says. However, my views on the Silicon Valley tech mentality have changed dramatically since moving and this was simply the first time (and I don’t think the last either) that someone from back home said something that felt a little off to me. A few things that struck me:

The fact that he likened the experience of using iOS 7 for the first time to the wonder of seeing or hearing for the first time meant that getting a mobile software update ranked up there with gaining the ability to see or hear. On the scale of possible life-changing, life-improving events, for 99.99999% of humanity, getting a mobile software update doesn’t even rank.

The whole status indicates that he has forgotten what it was like to not have iOS 7. What?! It’s only been 3 months!

Comparing it to something as fundamental as sight or hearing implies that everyone needs to have it in order to function, which just isn’t the case for the vast majority of people.

This status illustrates, albeit incredibly bluntly, part of what, in my opinion, the “Silicon Valley bubble” means: that you’ve forgotten (or never knew) what it was like to not have access to the latest technology (startups, innovation, ideas, etc.)

Growing up, everyone always talked about how lucky I was to live in Palo Alto, but since it was all I knew, I always brushed it aside: Palo Alto wasn’t the tech mecca everyone said it was; it was simply where I was born, went through teenage angst and embarrassment, fell too hard for boys, fought with my parents, and did everything else everyone goes through.

It was only when I moved away that I finally understood what “the bubble” really means and how lucky I am to have grown up there. And yet it only took seeing a few cities outside of it to finally *get it*.

I’m not saying it’s bad that the bubble exists; I would most certainly rather have mass innovation only in certain places than nowhere at all. I just found it surprising that such a short amount of time away from Silicon Valley could change my mindset so much. It turns out it’s true what they say: you never truly understand or appreciate your hometown until you leave it.

This was originally published on Medium here.

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Experiencing snow for the first time

A few weeks ago, I experienced snow (9 inches!) for the first time. I didn’t know it at the time, but after talking to friends and family about how shocked I was by the texture, sound, etc. of it, I realized that I had a very different first encounter with it than most of the people I know (who had first experienced it either at some point while growing up or during college). Because of that, I thought I’d share my initial reactions and observations. (These are from an email I wrote to my mother at the end of that day).

Snow makes no noise, so when I woke up I didn’t immediately realize it was snowing. (But I had checked the weather the night before and knew it was scheduled to snow starting in the early AM). Nonetheless, I was surprised it had snowed so much (a few inches by 6 AM).

This snow was light and fluffy, which meant it was hard to pack it into a snowball. I would have expected it to be more dense and hard.

I had never given much thought to what snow and snowflakes looked like but for some reason I had it in my head that snow came down in baseball-sized pieces (like this and this) and snowflakes were as big as the paper ones you make in elementary school (even though I know that’s implausible). I think I do remember seeing “real” snow in movies before today, but somehow I didn’t really internalize it. (Probably because I had no need to).

I hadn’t realized how much the entire city transforms when it’s covered in snow. I couldn’t find my way around downtown because I couldn’t use the buildings as landmarks.

I saw many people’s cars get stuck in the road in the snow, but they all got unstuck just fine.

I had never thought about what tire chains must look like, but they were not what I expected them to look like.

I finally understand why people say a “blanket” of snow.

Even thought I understand why it is, it took me a while to not be slightly surprised every time I was snow staying on top of the things it had fallen onto (unlike rain, which slides off of course).

It felt like I was living in a Christmas movie all day.

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My experience signing up for Obamacare

A few days ago I added myself to the queue for Cover Oregon, the health insurance exchange for Oregon, where I live. As mandated by the Affordable Care Act, each state has it’s own marketplace where residents can sign up and then choose and buy a health care plan for themselves. The rationale for buying it through this system rather than privately (the way people do currently it) is that:

The government has promised that any plan on these marketplaces will cover pre-existing conditions and all that jazz

You get a subsidy if you’re within certain percentages of the federal poverty line, and

If you don’t purchase by December 15th (so you can get coverage by January 1st, 2014), then the government will come after you with their money-collecting, throw-your-ass-in-jail powers. (Read: You’ll get fined). Basically, it’s the law. (Unless you’re in college or your parents or employer pays for yours, in which case THEY get to go through this fun process! *sarcasm*)

I’m 19 but not covered by my parents’ plan, and my mother had been nagging me about signing up for a while now but I’d always brushed it off the way every 19 year old brushes off advice from their mother. However, I’m going to be traveling internationally for 3 months starting in January and realized it would probably be a good idea to have insurance there, so a few days ago I decided to sign up. However, since I had seen numerous articles, like this one, this one, and this one, about how the website wasn’t working, I didn’t trust it to correctly sign me up if I did it on my own. Instead, I went to an insurance agent because I figured, if anyone knew what they were doing, it would be one of them.

Since the online system has been so unpredictable, Cover Oregon has been getting an influx of paper applications and has had to transfer hundreds of workers from other departments to enter people’s data into the system by hand. I was the first person this agent had signed up online. Prior to this, he had only dealt with paper applications that he faxed into the Cover Oregon office (and, according to him, the faxing method had only recently began to work). Keep in mind that this has been supposed to be working for 2 months already (starting October 1st) , so right off the bat, things were not off to a very good start.

Each agent has his own login and password, just like any other online system, but he also has to wait for an email containing a unique PIN for each new customer he signs up before he can proceed. Maybe I’m missing something here, but why does signing up for health insurance require more security than logging into my bank account online? Especially when it’s not even secure.

When he got the PIN, the agent signed in and then proceeded to spend a good three or four minutes trying to figure out which button to click to sign up a new customer. After finally finding it, we got to the first page of the application and went through it, entering my personal information, and then household, health, and finally income information.

There was a drop-down menu to select which state I’m in, but it’s redundant since I’m already on CoverOregon.com filling out Oregon’s health care exchange’s application so obviously I live in Oregon.

The sidebar shows all the sections of the application and highlights the one you’re on, but none of them are clickable, so you have to click the “Back” button however many times in order to get to a previous section. Similarly, after going back, if you want to jump ahead to where you were previously, you have to re-fill out everything on those pages.

Months prior, the agent had been given a video tutorial by Cover Oregon on how to use the website, but the video was made and released before the site was finished. As a result, it mentioned (but didn’t go over) things that were supposed to be working by the time the marketplace opened up for enrollment (again, now two months ago).

For example, when going through the actual application it’s best to use Chrome, but once you get to the end you’re supposed to switch to Internet Explorer to upload a file. When we got to the last page, however, there was no prompt to switch browsers and upload the file. The agent ended up going through the entire application twice and re-entering in all my information, because he wasn’t sure if he had clicked the right “Submit” button the first time or if any of my data had actually gone through since the instructions he had been given were faulty. As he put it, “Your SSN and private information could be in electronic la-la land for all I know.”

He ended up calling Cover Oregon customer service when we eventually got to a screen saying something to the order of “The system’s taking a bit longer to process your request; check back in around 10 minutes”. (I don’t recall the exact wording used but I do remember it sounding extremely euphemistic.) After 15 minutes on the phone and on hold, the lady on the other side said I had been processed and was in the system. So according to her, I was enrolled. Even though the website didn’t say if I was or not, and the agent couldn’t even tell because when he signs people up, he only gets back a number assigned to each person, but that number isn’t attached to their name or any other identifying information, so he has no way of knowing who has actually gone through or not.

Now that I was signed up, I expected an email confirmation with some sort of ID number or at the very least, information on what sort of plan I qualify for (based on my income) so I could start looking for one to buy. But no, since we’re dealing with the government, I can expect to get something in the mail in the next few weeks. Not only is this not secure in the slightest, but it’s slow and will end up taking entirely more work (time, labor, money) than simply sending an email.

Cover Oregon has already cost Oregon taxpayers $300 million, including $3 million on a hokey ad campaign and $4 million to hire workers to process paper applications until the site is up and running because they “ran out of time to do adequate testing.” The entire process took a whole hour, when it should have taken at a maximum about 15 or 20 minutes. The website should have worked the way it was promised by the President (apparently it’ll be working bytomorrow, but I wouldn’t hold my breath), and I should have gotten an email confirmation. This is 2013. This is the United States. Doing something I’m legally obligated to do shouldn’t be so cumbersome that it feels like something out of a movie or a 3rd world country.

This article isn’t political. Yeah, I’m disappointed in my government for letting such an utter failure happen, but if a Republican was in office, I would feel the same way I do right now.

(Originally published on Medium)

[catherinestevens-blog]

This is what Self-Directed Learning looks like

When people hear the words "self-directed learning", taking online classes and reading books usually comes to mind. However, in my experience, these aren't as *self-directed* as they could be because even though you have to be accountable to yourself and take initiative, you're still following someone else's lead. 

My best (and by best, I mean "most educational") experience with self-directed learning wasn't through online classes or an internship, but rather working on a project with other people. While helping build Course Pods (a platform to online learners with each other in real life), I had to teach myself many, many things I never learned nor would I have thought to learn in school. It was the first time building something from the ground up, so out of pure necessity I learned entrepreneurship, marketing, product design and communication and teamwork skills, but most importantly I learned how to go from merely having an idea to executing on it. After all, I had told everyone and their mother that I was doing this, that from now on I was going to be "Co-Founder at Course Pods", so I really couldn't back out. 

Before we launched, we spent months talking about our grand vision of the world we hoped to create, working out what should be on our splash page, what our one-sentence description should be, and how we should design and lay out the site overall. Communication, conflict resolution, knowing when something has been iterated over: these were all things we struggled with and had to learn how to deal with.

On the marketing side, I had to figure out how to pitch a product to people who would ordinarily be skeptical of it. I learned the importance of brevity: how to write concise yet engaging emails and what makes a good 30-second elevator pitch (hint: you learn through real-time trial and error, seeing how people react and respond to what you're saying and if they understand it without much further explanation). 

I learned many, many things the hard way: how much having a strong team and foundation to start off with matters and why the people you work with can either make or break a project. I also learned (again, the hard way) the importance of talking to potential users about what they want and what they think of your MVP. The fact that you think your solution will fix whatever problem you're trying to solve means exactly that - it's what you think, not necessarily what others (i.e. your users, the people who will actually benefit) think. 

Even though I ultimately left the project, I ended up learning more than any class could have taught me, and all by putting myself out there, saying I was going to do it, and just fucking do it. Yeah, it was scary. Yeah, it was hard. And yeah, I had literally no idea what I was doing half the time. But it was the epitome of self-directed learning: deciding that you want to learn something or do something or make something and just doing it, even if you have to teach yourself everything along the way because there are no classes to take or books to read.

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Moving to Oregon

Recently I made a pretty major life decision, which is to move to Oregon for a few months to try living on my own in a new place (I've never been outside of Palo Alto), grow personally, and experience different things and pursue different interests. When I told some people this, I didn't frame it in the best way possible, so I got some reactions I wasn't expecting (these are taken from Facebook messages with 3 different people):

This:

And this: 

And this:

I'm particularly glad I had this last conversation because it really made me think about and question why I was making this decision. I decided to write out my thoughts on the matter so here they are. (And this is by no means comprehensive; many, many blog posts could be filled with all the *life* things I've thought about lately.)

Up until a few weeks ago, I had spent my whole life in Palo Alto, CA: first living with my parents and then in a hacker house near downtown. All that changed a few weeks ago when I learned my mother had inherited a house in Corvallis, OR from her mother (my grandma). My parents' initial plan was to just sell the house, but I immediately realized that my sister and I could just live in it for a few months and learn how to manage a house on our own. I could live in a place I was completely unfamiliar with, experience things I would never dream of doing in Palo Alto, get away from the hustle and bustle of the Silicon Valley tech and startup scene (which is the only thing I've been exposed to all my life and the community I've been immersed in for the past few months), and have an adventure! 

So on July 9th my family drove up to Corvallis to check out the house and see if this would work. The house was in pretty poor condition when we arrived so we spent the first two weeks staying with a friend while we fixed it up. My sister and I convinced our parents that we were mature enough to live by ourselves in "their" house 600 miles away from home and I transferred all the utilities to my name. Since there are 3 rooms in the place, we're going to rent out the 2 spare rooms to students on a month-to-month basis (we're used to sharing a room and at the hacker house I shared a room with 3 people. Plus, this way, we get to make a little more money and meet more people :)). 

I'm really looking forward to immersing myself in a new city while taking on the responsibilities of being an adult. (I didn't have any real responsibilities at my old place besides paying rent and keeping the place clean ("clean" is a relative term here considering I was one of 2 girls and 14 guys living there :P). And while I plan on using this as a chance to explore some interests that I've let fall to the wayside the last few months (cooking, knitting, playing violin) as well as experience things I just wouldn't think to do if I stayed in Palo Alto (apprentice with a bakery, cook a wider variety of dishes, run and maintain a house, explore and travel more, experience new ways of life and different types of people, etc), I'm also looking forward to discovering what the tech/startup/self-directed learning-UnCollege scene in Corvallis is like.

I'm not sure how long I'll be here or how I'll have changed by the end of it, but I'm confident is a good idea and will let me grow in ways I can't even begin to imagine right now. I see no harm in taking a few months (or even a year) and exploring a different path from what I've been doing up till now. Plus, unlike people who move away from their hometown for college (or what I've seen a lot of, which is move from their hometown to the Valley), I've never had the chance to truly "move away from home" and start a new life somewhere else. And almost as importantly, leaving Palo Alto for a while will make me appreciate it so much more when I return. 

I am planning on chronicling my journey and what I learn and experience in Corvallis here. If all this sounds intriguing, click "Follow" in the upper right corner of the new blog to get updates :).  

[catherinestevens-blog]

What I learned from Course Pods: Teaching

As part of forming Course Pods, I led a study group for an intro to programming class, which was designed to be a supplement to an existing free online class (a MOOC), with the idea being that students would work a lesson a week at their own pace, and then meet up in person for an hour and a half to ask and answer questions, work on problem sets, and get individualized help. The students were all in their early-mid 20s and I created an environment that did three things:  

Made students feel comfortable asking and answering questions and helping each other.

I wanted the class dynamic to be very equal: just because I had already taken the class didn't mean I knew everything. To ensure this ideal actually played out, I made it very clear to the students that I was still learning just like they were and that there would be times when I couldn't answer a question and we would have to look it up together or ask a classmate. In addition, I never "lectured" at them. Instead, I spent almost all of my time next to one of them, looking over their shoulder, and actively helping them with whatever it was they were working on. The only time I stood up at the front of the room was when I whiteboarded a concept or problem. I also wanted the students to not just learn from me, so I had them do pair programming and explain to the group how they got the answers they got. The result of this was a class in which students taught and learned from each other instead of passively listening to me.

Challenged them.

The original online class didn't include any instruction on programming graphics (drawing shapes, interactivity, etc) so I made an optional problem that used graphics to illustrate a programming concept. This problem gave students another way to look at the concept but also required them to learn some additional methods that weren't taught in the class. I wanted to give the farther-along students the opportunity to learn something new, which not punishing the students who weren't as far along.

Gave them control over their learning.

I intentionally gave the students many choices along the way. They weren't required to show up to class if they didn't want to since there wasn't any sort of external motivation for taking it. Each week I would give them between 2 and 5 extra problems and they got to choose which ones to work on, who they wanted to work on them with, and how to solve them.

[catherinestevens-blog]

Optimizing your Networking

The concept of "networking" is something I've struggled with for a while now because I've always had a problem with the sleazy networking mentality that lots of people seem to have. I see two main problems with this method:

1. Getting to know people as business connections/opportunities first rather than as friends or people in general

2. Approaching the interaction in terms of what you can get from the person rather than how you can help them

Getting to know people as business connections/opportunities first rather than as friends is a bad idea because once your business interaction is over, it'll be awkward if the only connection you have to them is a business one, and why would you want to do business with someone you wouldn't want to be friends with? 

I recently attended a conference in which everyone there was clearly very passionate about their work, so talking about their *work* was essentially the same thing as talking about their *interests*. I didn't try to weed out who I talked to by immediately inquiring about their work because I knew that if our business interests did indeed intersect, that would eventually came up in the course of talking about our interests. 

In more traditional networking situations, where a person's "business" and "interests" might not be so aligned, try to think of your interaction not in terms of what you can get from the other person but rather what you can give them. There's a paradigm when interacting (networking) with others, that you can either be a taker, a giver, or a matcher. "Takers" think of how they can benefit from the situation and the person they're talking to whereas "givers" place more emphasis on how they can help the other person before themselves. I think the best type to be, however, is a "matcher." This type of person has the mindset that if they help others, eventually the favors and kindness they've paid others will come back and help them. 

Personally, I try to be a matcher, simply because I've found it's far easier than the other two, and it actually works! I don't have to constantly worry if something I do will put me at a disadvantage compared to someone else, and I don't have to worry that I'm burning a bridge by not helping someone out. If someone needs a connection or introduction that I can make and that doesn't adversely hurt me, I just make it, because why not? What do I have to lose? If you only stay in your own little world, don't ever help anyone, and always have a "What can I get out of this person?" mindset, you'll never get the chance to learn from others and people won't be likely to return your favors. 

[catherinestevens-blog]

How To Start Programming – Get Thee To A Hackathon!

Even though I was one of the less experienced people there, there was always something I could contribute to. If I thought of a feature for our app but didn’t entirely know how to implement it, I could always find the help I needed.

This was originally published in the Women 2.0 blog.

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With all the changes in education that have occurred in the past few years, the one thing that hasn’t changed is certification. 

This was originally published on the UnCollege blog. 

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This evening I went to an event at Stanford, one in a series of lectures exploring how education might be different in the future and what role college and academia plays in that. This particular talk was called "Expanding rights to know and learn - in and out of school" and the guest speakers were John Willinsky and Rob Lucas, both of whom talked about ways to open up access to education and meaningful and relavent learning.

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http://gitready.com/beginner/2009/01/18/the-staging-area.html http://betterexplained.com/articles/a-visual-guide-to-version-control/ http://try.github.com/

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Last Wednesday I found an example of how computers are only as smart as what you tell them to do. Here's what happened:

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As part of my learn-to-code journey, I'm learning about GitHub, which is an online service that helps you do version control for the files in your coding project.

[sdneysage-deactivated20140304]

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"I have sleepovers with my parents 'cause you know, I'm cool" :)

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Now is an amazing time to be a hackademic because never before have there been such a wide variety of educational resources available. From MOOCs and other online classes to tutorials such as iTunes U or Codecademy, the opportunities for learning outside of formal education are growing rapidly. Education has gone from being a one-time event to being a dynamic, life-long journey.

I originally wrote this for the UnCollege blog. 

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The most difficult part about being taken seriously as when learning outside of college is showing the world the unique skills and talents you have, as well as the projects you've done. While a resume and transcript works for people who take the standard route of going to college and getting traditional jobs, when you hack your education and create opportunities and projects for yourself, you need a different way to showcase your accomplishments. In this case, one of the most beneficial things to have is a digital portfolio.

 I originally wrote this for the UnCollege blog. 

[catherinestevens-blog]

When I was in school (both high school and college), I sincerely believed that my grades gave the single best indication of how smart I was. Since kindergarten, it had been drilled into me that if I did my homework correctly, passed all the tests and quizzes, and didn’t fail the final exam, then I knew everything I needed to know and was therefore “learning”. So each year, I did as I was told and filled out worksheet after worksheet, crammed for tests, and managed to get “good” grades. On paper, I looked like a great student. However, when I look back on what I spent my time learning in school, I can’t even remember most of the things I was taught. Because grades were my only motivation, I was focused solely on doing the bare minimum necessary to get an ‘A’ rather than gaining a true understanding of what was being taught.

I originally wrote this for the UnCollege blog.