Reflections of a Semester gone by....

In past post I wrote about a project I was working on at school.  Our project was to promote eating not only local grown food, promoting farmer’s markets and such.  The ideas for the project to me seemed to come to our fairly easily.  We talked about our ideas openly and what the project goal was.   We discussed our schedules and what would work best for us in the way of communications.  I would like think that working on the project went well.   Of course there were always some issues.  Sometimes people ask what would you do differently.  I had hate questions like that.  I really do.  It seems to mostly be begging for you to focus on what went wrong or was screwed up.   It forces you to focus on the negative and could have beens instead of the positives and what you have achieved.  If I had to answer that question I might have said that I wished some would have taken it more seriously.  During this process I’ve learned that the media’s that are coming out will either fade away like myspace or grow into something that is everyday.    All this was really well explained in the book “Smarter than you think” by Clive Thompson, that I had to read.  But there are pitfalls and still things being argued over like Creative Commons and Copy rights.   I did find myself refreshing my memory on coding and programming through our class exercises.

 

Smarter Than You Think Book Review

Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better

· Written by: Clive Thompson (Graduate of Toronto University.  Runs Collision Detection, his blog, that I started to follow.  My favorite is the Star Wars Story Scroll and I don’t even like Star Wars.)

· Narrated by: Jeff Cummings

· Length: 10 hrs and 41 mins 

· Format: Unabridged

 

I listen to a lot of audio books, but not a lot of technology books. I don’t even read books about technology.  I usually expect them to be dull and dry.  Not the case this time and what I love about this book was that it was A) positive and B) it made sense.   The content was engaging and interesting and when you combine that with a talented narrator, it takes the book to a different level.

Starting out the author points out, that feeling apprehension and wariness of new technology is nothing new.   Dime Novels, telephone, magazines....even coffeehouses have something in common.  They had once been deem, the downfall of the human mind.

At first when he started to talk about chess and the computers, but as the book went on, I started to reflect on that more and more.  It also made so much more sense when he talked about Jeopardy playing Watson, (Another computer).

One of the things that I want to bring up is the subject of Life Loggers.  It was absolutely astonishing to me.  I had never heard of them before.   The wearable computers, the recorders, people setting up their houses to be recorded and why….It blew my mind.  I’m afraid of giving too much away, but listening and reading (I also read the kindle version when I could not listen to audio) to the way they had used technology and what it made them realize, was enlightening.  Parts of this book made me start to wonder if I was remembering things the way they were or if my organic was remembering them the way it think they should be.

One of the best statements of this book says that we will not know exactly what new technology will be for until everybody has it and it becomes common.    One of the beautiful about this is that while the author makes his case, he still allows for you to come up with your own conclusion.

On a little side note:  I love that he mentions DBSK!  One of my favorite Korean boy bands EVER!!!!