Intro Interactive, Spring 2008

You may recall that the final step for this course is a final exam.

What is it?

The final exam is an opportunity for me to get a feeling for how well you’ve retained the ideas and information we’ve reviewed during the semester. To do this, I will ask a set of questions about the course during a one-on-one telephone conversation.

What kind of questions?

I’ve been putting together a long list of questions that I will ask people. It’s likely that I will reuse some of these questions, but everyone will have a slightly different sample. These might be very specific (”What was Bush’s machine called?”) or very broad indeed. In previous courses, I’ve asked questions like “What do things mean and why?” I probably won’t go quite that broad, but I may ask you to apply your knowledge to a novel situation or compare some of the ideas we’ve read about. The set of questions listed for each module in Blackboard would be one starting point.

How many questions?

As many as we can reasonably cover in the space of about 35 minutes.

When is the exam?

I’ll be conducting the exam via telephone on Tuesday (5/6), Wednesday (5/7), Friday (5/9), and Saturday (5/10). You should sign up for an appointment here ASAP.

Is it open book?

Yes, the exam is open book and open notes. That said, I would suggest that having the readings and videos in front of you will be of little help. I am hoping you can answer after a moment of thought. I don’t want to wait 30 seconds while you dig through your notes, let alone the original materials.

Can we work together?

I strongly encourage you to collaborate before May 6. You can collaboratively generate and compare notes, and the like.

You may not discuss the exam once people start taking them, or share the questions with people taking the exam at a later time.

You may not use a lifeline: your answers must be yours alone, and you cannot have others around helping when you take the exam, or available via IM, email, etc.

I have another question.

Ask them below.

Brilliant talk by Clay Shirky. Will definitely fit it in for next year’s 501…

This site is obviously not safe for work, but if you are a virgin, and don’t want to be, and are a proponent of Net Neutrality, Tania Devereaux will deflower you. There are some caveats (aren’t there always?), but it’s an interesting barter.  But it looks like you don’t have long to take advantage of it, since she’s planning on killing herself.

I’m still blown away by the fact that my cheap flash drive holds 4Gb of data. It astounds me. I’m not that amazed by the idea that it might be 8 or 20 Gb next year. But, I would be a bit taken aback by 500,000Gb:

Can you even imagine an MP3 player with a 500,000 GB capacity? It’s pretty much beyond belief. The most generous player today can only hold around 40,000 songs – they’d hardly make a dent on this.

The thing is, it could easily happen. Scientists at the University of Glasgow have created a nanotechnology breakthrough that could increase storage capacity by 150,000 times. It could mean 500,000 GB on a single chip and inch square.

The Glasgow scientists worked to create the molecule-sized switch that’s at the heart of it all.

I have a little Creative Zen. I would love to be able to call up every song ever recorded, every movie ever released, every TV show, or every book, from just a little recorder in my pocket. Or, considering what we are reading this module, be able to have an ongoing video of every moment of my life.

Some of you were having difficulty reading my comments on your self-assessments. I’ve made some changes to Blackboard that should fix this. Remember that Blackboard still doesn’t play well with Firefox (standards, and all), but if you still cannot see my comments in Internet Explorer or Safari, please email me and I’ll try to extract them for you.

Please complete the following tasks:

• Listen to a lecture on media futures. mp3
• Read Rheingold, H. (2002). Shibuya epiphany (pp. 1-28). Smart mobs. New York: Perseus. pdf
• Read Gershenfeld, N. (2005). Fab (Selection). New York: Basic Books. pdf
• Read Gemmell, J., Bell, G., & Lueder, R. (2006). MyLifeBits: a personal database for everything. Communications of the ACM, 49(1), 89-95. pdf
• (Optional) Read Wired interview with Nick Carr. link
• Watch Neil Gershenfeld, The beckoning promise of personal fabrication (TED). link
• Watch Ray Kurzweil, How technology’s accelerating power will transform us (TED). link
• Listen The persistence of memory, link
• Write a response to the readings and videos on your blog, no later than 4/29
• Write a response to the semester: your likes, your hates, what should be done differently next time.
• Write at least five blog postings (including those above), totallying at least 1,200 words, no later than 5/6
• Write a self-assessment for the unit, no later than 5/8

Remember when I said no more delayed grades :). Will I’m out of the country again by tonight. For those who have already posted their self-assessment, I have posted a reply, but since it’s never easy to know how much connectivity you will have when you are traveling, I’ll make no promises! Hopefully I can turn the grades around while I’m traveling, but if not, it may be next weekend when I get back.

Spam sucks, and as a result of our success, we are now even more a target of spammers. So, think of it that way, if you are getting a lot of spam, spammers think you are worth targeting! I will try to do something about the problem, and make us a bit more resilient.

RepRap is one of several projects aimed at making fabbers (3d printers) more accessible. In particular, the quest is to make a machine that can make copies of itself. Cornell also recently released (open source) plans for building your own fabber.

Please complete the following tasks:

• Listen to a lecture on policy. mp3
• Read Baase, S. (2007). Professional ethics and responsibilities. Gift of fire: Social, legal, and ethical issues in computing. New York: Prentice-Hall. pdf
• Read Halavais, A. (ND). Search engine society. Cambridge: Polity Press. Selection. pdf
• Read (Optional) Story, L. (2007) To aim ads, web is keeping closer eye on you. New York Times. link
• Watch Larry Lessig, How creativity is being strangled by the law (TED). link
• Watch Humanity Lobotomy (2nd Draft), link
• Watch CNBC on Big Brother, link
• Watch (Optional): Install utorrent and download Steal This Film 2. link
• Write a response to the readings and videos on your blog, no later than 4/18
• Write a response to one of your peer’s responses (be sure to link!)
• Write a response to a blog post by someone–anyone–OUTSIDE the class (be sure to link!)
• Write at least five blog postings (including those above), totallying at least 1,200 words, no later than 4/22
• Write a self-assessment for the unit, no later than 4/25