Ada Lovelace Day | Professor Lee S. Sproull, Stern School, NYU
For this first Ada Lovelace Day I've chosen to write about Professor Lee Sproull an internationally-recognized sociologist whose research centers on the implications of computer-based communication technologies for managers, organizations, communities, and society.
I heard Professor Sproull talk at the MIT/Brown Vannevar Bush Symposium celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Bush's As We May Think.
In her 1995 talk at the Bush Symposium, Information Is Not Enough: Computer Support for Productive Work, Professor Sproull said:
Any vision of a new technology implies a vision of human beings and their behavior.
In this talk I describe the vision of human behavior associated with the most influential technology visions of personal computing, epitomized by Vannevar Bush's Memex -- the vision of the solitary thinker and problem solver. I contrast this vision with an alternative view of how human productive behavior actually occurs -- in interdependent social relationships. I review the current state of computer support for social actors and propose an alternative view in which information processing is subordinated to relationship managing. - Abstract
Professor Sproull conducted research in Fortune 500 firms, scientific communities, municipalities, universities, software development teams, households, and electronic groups.
At present Professor Sproull is Vice Dean, Academic Affairs and Professor of Information Systems & Management, Lawrence N.
About Ada Lovelace Day
On January 5, 2009 Suw Charman made a pledge to publish a blog post about woman in technology that she admires, but only if 1,000 other people pledged to do the same.
Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.
Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Whatever she does, whether she is a sysadmin or a tech entrepreneur, a programmer or a designer, developing software or hardware, a tech journalist or a tech consultant, we want to celebrate her achievements.
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