John Norman, '82'

VP of Technology and Security Officer at Iora Health

Talk Title: "Recipe: Combine healthcare, technology, and a fresh approach to billing. Stir. What do you get?"

The path to social justice for healthcare in the United States is made difficult because of the powerful interests and patterns surrounding it: insurance companies, awkward delivery of care, and bad technology. In this talk, John Norman will talk about how his colleagues have attempted to "bring humanity to healthcare" by focussing on and rebooting primary care. In his work, business and ethical choices affect all parts of the business including core engineering.

Biography

John G. Norman graduated from Grinnell College in 1982, where he majored in English. After graduating he came back to the college and worked for two years as a programmer/analyst. Norman then went to Harvard where he earned a PhD in English, focusing on the relationship between Renaissance literature and medicine. Starting in 1993, Norman taught at the Ohio State University. In his final year at Ohio State he returned to technology as the Director of the pioneering. Computers in Composition and Literature program.

Moving back to Cambridge, Mass. in 1999, Norman wrote articles and reviews about teaching with technology and taught online a course in “Digital Culture” at the New School in New York City. He started work as a software developer at Cambridge Incubator (now Cambridge Innovation Center) and its affiliate companies. In 2003 he co-founded the VC-backed h3.com, which provided for tracking and rewarding job referrals via email and the web. Over this period, he taught Java and Ruby on Rails at Harvard Extension, and contributed a chapter to the book Java Enterprise in a Nutshell (2005).

In 2010, with former colleagues from Cambridge Innovation Center, he was the technical co-founder of Roomzilla, a system for managing conference rooms that utilizes tablet computers as ambient indicators of reservation status. At present, Norman is the VP of Technology and Security Officer, whose broad mission is to change primary care as we know it (on the tech team, they say that they are changing primary care, one line of code at a time...). He also occasionally teaches engineering at the University of Minnesota.

Erin Owen'94, MBA

Talk Title: "How can technology bridge gaps in the capital and investment markets to benefit women?"

Biography

Erin Owen ’94 is disrupting herself. Currently, Erin is winding down her business of 14 years while she focuses on the start-up phase of her next business. What’s next for Erin? Channeling all her knowledge, experience, passions, values, and network-leveraging skills into a new business. Right now in the start-up or “ideation” phase, the venture is focused on expanding the capital market for women and falls into the “gender lens” investing sector. Tagline: “by women, for women”. Focus: giving every woman a chance to invest at the $10 and up level, driving more money to businesses with a product or service that benefits women.

Erin envisions an online platform where women can invest in other women (think Kiva or Grameen America) with the transparency of social media, bolstered by small group connection and support – the way that women have come together for generations. Why fight for a seat at the existing table, when we can build a whole new foundation upon which the tables of future generations are set?! Currently Erin is drafting the business plan, meeting with potential co-founders, searching for a fiscal sponsorship partner, and boot-strapping it along the way with a phenomenally positive support group.

Hannah Krieger Ney'11

Director, Technology and Innovation, Teach For America

Talk Title: The People and the Process: Bringing Loom into Reality

Loom, a network mapping product, was originally conceived in summer 2016 and finally brought to life in fall 2017. This talk will tell the story of how Loom, was built at Teach For America, a national education non-profit. The focus of the talk will mostly be on the process, including running successful design sprints and managing an Agile workflow, and working with the people and teams who helped take the product from dream to reality.

Biography

Hannah Krieger Ney is the Director of Technology Management and Innovation at Teach For America. Prior to this role, she worked for a technology start-up and spent four years working for Teach For America's recruitment team. She graduated from Grinnell in 2011 with a degree in Anthropology and then spent two years teaching on the Dine Nation in New Mexico. She currently lives in Minneapolis with her dog, Scout.

Luna Ranjit '00

Visiting Professor, Grinnell College

Talk Title: Does Technology Build Or Break Movements?

"In recent years, we have seen massive mobilizations that have all relied on social media to scale up - from Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter to #MeToo and #NotOneMore. Beyond the US borders, there have been massive protests across the world from the Arab Spring to Turkey, Ukraine, Hong Kong and South Korea. Additionally, the ubiquity of recording devices has made it possible to document human rights violations as they happen, and amplify the voices of activists.

However, technology has also facilitated gross human rights abuses, allowing governments to not just filter and block online content but also spy on their citizens. Activists have been arrested, detained, and tortured, based on their digital footprint. In the U.S., government entities have used similar technologies for religious and racial profiling and “predictive policing,” justifying them in the name of fighting terrorism and gang violence.

Does technology support or suppress movements? Is it possible to code ethics?"

Biography

Luna’s work is rooted in the community, and guided by transnational solidarity. She seeks to advance social justice through her writing, teaching, and organizing. For more than a decade, she worked alongside worker leaders, mostly immigrants and women, fighting for their rights. Together, they were successful in changing laws to improve the lives of domestic workers and nail salon workers across New York State. Luna has written OpEds and been featured in print and broadcast media on the issues related to workers’ rights, migrant rights, language justice, and civic engagement. Her groundbreaking work has been recognized by many community organizations and elected officials. In 2016, she received the Grinnell College Innovator for Social Justice Prize created to support and inspire innovative social change makers throughout the world.

She holds an MPA degree from the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University and a bachelor’s degree from Grinnell College. She splits her time between US and South/Southeast Asia.

David Neville

Ph.D, Digital Liberal Arts Specialist; Project Manager, Immersive Experiences Lab

Talk Title: "VR for the Liberal Arts and Social Good"

This talk will examine the technological and psychological affordances that make virtual reality (VR) particularly well-suited for investigating liberal arts topics and promoting social justice issues. True VR allows a user to move and rotate in all three directions and interact with objects as a person would in the real world, which in turn can foster a sense of being physically present as an autonomous individual in recreated, remote, or even hypothetical sites. Not only can this sense of presence be useful for contextualizing knowledge within the spaces of these sites, but it can potentially also be used to transfer knowledge between the virtual environment and the real world.

Provided that hardware costs continue to fall and more VR experiences are released as open educational resources, VR also has the potential to democratize learning by giving a wider range of users access to sites that would be too difficult, dangerous, or expensive to see in person. Finally, by allowing users to to assume the first-person viewpoint of another human being and to experience reality from the perspective of this individual, VR has demonstrated the ability to promote empathy, self-other merging, and perspective taking.

Biography

David Neville earned a PhD in German language and literature, with an emphasis in medieval German studies and Latin, in 2002 from Washington University in St. Louis. Having developed an interest in educational technology, he enrolled in computer science and programming courses at Weber State University, eventually transferring to Utah State University to earn a MS in Instructional Technology and Learning Sciences. David is particularly interested in situated cognition theory and how goal-directed activity in 3D, VR, and AR environments can assist students in creating mental narratives that structure and guide the learning process.

Liz Rodrigues, PhD

Talk Title: "Humanities and Digital Scholarship Librarian"

Open Education: A Movement & A Community of Practice

The Open Education movement seeks to harness the potential of Web-based publication to lower the barriers of cost and access to education. This workshop will introduce you to the history, ethos, and practices of this movement. We will then work together to brainstorm how we might continue to open education at Grinnell College.

Biography

Erik Simpson, PhD

Professor of English

Talk Title: "Humanities-Computer Interaction: Social Justice and the Digital Humanities"

This talk will showcase some of the ways in which humanists are using digital methods to illuminate and influence social issues. Part of the talk will highlight a number of recent projects at Grinnell.

Biography

Erik Simpson is a scholar of British Romantic and Transatlantic literature, as well as the digital humanities—the field that lives at the intersection of computational methods and humanistic inquiry. He is Grinnell’s Principal Investigator of Digital Bridges for Humanistic Inquiry, a four-year grant from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation supporting collaboration between Grinnell and the University of Iowa in the digital liberal arts.

Samuel A. Rebelsky, PhD

Professor of Computer Science

Talk Title: "Accessible Technology"

Technology has the capability to make materials accessible to differently abled people, people with differences in hearing, vision, movement, and more. But technology also has the capability to disenfranchise the differently abled. In this hour, I'll talk about issues of accessibility and technology and then we'll discuss a case study relating to accessibility.