The chance to explore

Growing up this was always my favorite thing to do. Explore. Whether it was on our bikes pretending to be cops, or in the unfinished basement acting like superheroes, I always found myself exploring everything around me. As we grow up we tend to forget how much fun it can be to discover the world around us. Through this semester we've taken a different look at our learning in our digital civilization course. This is my final reflection post on that adventure.

photo by Håkan Dahlström

Sometimes we can get caught up in the everyday without realizing that there are many opportunities to explore all around us. If you've followed this blog you've noticed that we've taken a new approach to learning and studying. We've taken subjects like nationalism and the industrial revolution and delved deeper to learn about the enclosure movement and the agricultural revolution. We've been let loose by our professors to explore the creative internet and consume as much as we could about topics that interested us, like the atomic age.

Being able to explore in my own learning has been fun. I've gained a new appreciation for what learning really means and instead of just relying on my professor to instill their knowledge on me, I've learned that I can take the reigns and explore on my own. I've loved the class and I hope to keep this blog up as I document my exploration. Who knows where it will take me next.

Great things can be done by ordinary people

Check out our blog!

 Are you still looking for ways to be more effective with your time on the web? You really have to check out our sites. We've made a lot of progress over the last few days. Not only do they look a whole lot better, but they're great places to find information! We've been working on getting up as much information as we can on both sites, and we're playing with the aesthetics and functionality as well. Check out both sites and let us know if you like the wiki format or the blog format better. Also if you have any suggestions let us know.

Check out our wiki!

Digital Revolution

Thursday the 9th of December we're going to have our final presentation to show off some of the cool things that we have learned this semester. We've got a big room reserved on campus for anyone interested to come learn all about digital civilization and some of the fun things we have done with our learning.  

Our group has been working hard on getting our two websites up for evaluation. We decided we would get opinions during our presentation on which format would be best for our website. We've been looking at a blog format as well as a wiki and each seems to have its good and bad features. Hopefully we can get each one to look the way we've envisioned it so that it will truly reflect what we have in our minds. Most of our time so far has been put into organizing the digital labs that our fellow class members have done so that we can show them off on our sites. Our hope is to introduce you to the incredible tools of Web 2.0 and help you learn of new ways to consume, create and connect with others. We're really excited because we think the site will be a great tool for anyone interested in learning what they have at their disposal.

(Image credit: Andrew DeWitt)

Agricultural Revolution

photo by swisscan

A lot at history through the eyes of modern inventions can give us an interesting view on how things develop. For my class we've been assigned to research different technological advances and how they've affected us today. I decided to do my research on the agricultural revolution and see how that is continuing today.

This site gives an overview of the agricultural revolution in England and some of the advances that came from it. As technology continued to improve, men became consistently more efficient at farming. This allowed more people to develop industrial jobs and led to an influx of migrants to the big cities.

photo by Stéfan

Now a days the revolution continues to make our farming methods more efficient as people discover new ways to gather resources. The machine below is  new machine developed that takes cow manure and converts it into usable energy. Not only does this make farming more efficient, but now farmers can be completely self-sufficient. Check out this article to learn more about the machine.

Lost?

Have you ever felt like you should be able to do anything with your computer but you seem to just be using the same things over and over? Well our group's final project is just for you.

Photo by Stèfan

We're compiling a list of tools that we think will be perfect to help you with any project, any assignment, or even just to have fun with. Our plan is to put this list on a web site where you can find them anytime! We're also planning on making it possible for anyone to add a great tool they have found as well. We hope this will be helpful to anyone who wants to learn what is out there. This will be a great resource for students, teachers, professionals or anyone looking to increase their proficiency with the computer. If you have any suggestions for us or things you would like to see let us know!

The Creative Internet

Google has created this great presentation that shows off a lot of interesting things that have been done with the web. Professor Zappala introduced me to this and I thought I should share it. A lot of things in this are really cool. Check it out and feel free to play around with them!

Technology in Exile

In our digital civilization class we've been connected with blogs from all the different students. I've been assigned a short review of one of those blogs. Kristen has done a blog called Technology in Exile. She has done really well in her blog to connect with the different historical elements we have been talking about in our class. Her blog is well put together with different feeds and widgets and she's been connected many of our assignments to her work in Tibet. She's done a great job of displaying digital tools we've learned about and her blog feels very personal.I enjoy seeing the contact she has in Tibet and it has inspired me to try and reach out a little more. If you've never seen a Prezi she has a good one that she made about her ideas about digital literacy for Tibetan students. I've really been impressed with Kristen's blog and you can tell she puts a lot of thought into her posts. If you're looking for a good blog to follow, hers is definitely one to look at!

Reflection

The semester has moved forward and its time to take a moment to look at where we've come. I continue to enjoy this class a lot. Not only have I noticed myself becoming more proficient in research and computing tools, I also have really enjoyed studying the historical content by linking it to our our digital culture. I am still trying to get used to blogging my learning, though I've found that as I do, I've been able to find interesting things in our topics that I've wanted to share with those of you who read this blog. One resource that I have found very valuable in my research is our university's library. In my post about unsolvable problems I found two articles through BYU's scholar search that helped me understand Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. In my post on the atomic age I discovered an article by actually finding it in the library (something I admittedly don't do enough due to the easiness of online articles) that was about the influence that government has on research in technology.


The computing concepts that we are learning are also very fascinating to me which is probably apparent in my blog posts. I didn't play around with as many of the digital labs like I had done earlier in the semester, but I did try something new when I created a video game level to share some of the feelings I had about the book A World Lit Only by Fire. I have also focused more on connecting with others outside of my blog. As I have found other blogs and articles during my research, I have been actively posting my own comments and starting conversations outside of the class. One thing I would really like to do is get connected with some people in the business world and some computer engineers. I'm looking to go into these fields and would like to see what are the topics talked about in these different circles. 


Overall I've really enjoyed this class though I do need to be a little more diligent in posting regularly. Till next time, and I hope you've enjoyed it all so far. If you have anything you as a reader would like to see in my blog more often, please let me know.

10 Immutable laws of security

 Ten laws of security I found on Microsoft Technet. Click the link to learn more

Law #1: If a bad guy can persuade you to run his program on your computer, it's not your computer anymore

 

Law #2: If a bad guy can alter the operating system on your computer, it's not your computer anymore

 

Law #3: If a bad guy has unrestricted physical access to your computer, it's not your computer anymore

 

Law #4: If you allow a bad guy to upload programs to your website, it's not your website any more

 

Law #5: Weak passwords trump strong security

 

Law #6: A computer is only as secure as the administrator is trustworthy

 

Law #7: Encrypted data is only as secure as the decryption key

 

Law #8: An out of date virus scanner is only marginally better than no virus scanner at all

 

Law #9: Absolute anonymity isn't practical, in real life or on the Web

 

Law #10: Technology is not a panacea

What the atomic age means to technology

Generally the first thing that comes up when we study the atomic age is the advancement of military technology. The race for military superiority has been repeated throughout history and technological advances have helped numerous civilizations rise to power. In the spirit of our digital civilization course I decided that my personal study on the topic would be focused more on the implications of the atomic age on our digital culture.

photo by x-ray delta one

Like this boy with his big toy gun, military has always been about the most efficient way to hit the enemy. Many military advances have also brought to pass a myriad of other changes. A great blog I found called Blast Fax did this post about the history of technology.  In it they said "20th Century technology developed rapidly. Communication technology, transportation technology, broad teaching and implementation of scientific method, and increased research spending all contributed to the advancement of modern science and technology. Due to the scientific gains directly tied to military research and development, technologies including electronic computing might have developed as rapidly as they did in part due to war. Radio, radar, and early sound recording were key technologies which paved the way for the telephone, fax machine, and magnetic storage of data. Energy and engine technology improvements were also vast, including nuclear power, developed after the Manhattan project. Transport by rocketry: most work occurred in the U.S. (Goddard), Russia (Tsiolkovsky) and Germany (Oberth). Making use of computers and advanced research labs, modern scientists have recombinant DNA."

An article I found in the library called "The democratic control of science and technology" (Physics in Technology, March 1979, Vol.10(2), p.49-53) talked about how many advancements in technology are direct results of government spending in military research. This article talks about advantages as well as many disadvantages of this system. Many times the government has the resources that no other organization can muster to delve into the intense research of technology. The government may also work quicker in these areas because of immediate threats or possible ones. A disadvantage of this is that much of this technology is not publicly released until many years after it has been implemented. This hinders the rest of the economy as they are not allowed to build on this technology until they have access to it. Many things may advance much faster if it is put onto the open market sooner. Another disadvantage is the dependency on the government once it advances technology. This article expresses this very well and I wont go into it too much, but it helped me look at the way our technology advances in a new light. Is it really the best thing for the government to lead the way in technological advances? There are obviously many reasons that this is the case. Being above the competition on a global scale helps greatly in the defense of our country, but could it all be improved? Let me know what you think.

Currency wars

This will be a quick post but I wanted to bring up something I found while researching economics. Its an issue that has grown since the expansion of international trade. Especially with the rapid connections in communication. Its called currency wars. Basically it has to do with the change in value of a country's money in relation to that of other countries. What I didn't realize is that some countries could actually benefit from lowering the value of their currency. Check out this video to learn a little more. Also this article I found talks about currency purchases and why this might not be viable today. I'd also be interested  if anyone has any more good sources on this topic.

Unsolvable Problems

I have a friend that is a math genius. He always blew us away in any math class in high school and went on to become a chemical engineer in college. We used to get into a lot of philosophical conversations about the universe, 4th dimensions and other abstract ideas like the String Theory. He had a very scientific mind and liked to be able to understand things from a logical viewpoint. During college he would show me fascinating things that he could do with math, such as proving that 1+1=3. The deeper he got into math the more he was able to explain with it. While I cant claim to understand everything, it fascinates me how math really dictates so many things.

Photo by JasonWalton

I recently started reading about Kurt Gödel and his two incompleteness theorems. The idea is that no consistent system of axioms can fully prove every system. This means that although we can do countless things with math, there is actually proof that it cant do everything for us.

Photo by tkamenik

I started doing a little research because I wondered how it was that he could prove that. While it makes sense, his theorems proved this point mathematically. I used the BYU library to look up some articles on Gödel and found a couple that I thought would help me understand this idea. The first one is called On Gödel's Second Incompleteness Theorem by Thomas Jech. It comes from the peer reviewed journal Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, May, 1994. It was a short explanation of the mathematical proof that Gödel used to show this theorem. It was interesting to see this put in mathematical terms, and it amazes me that he could come up with this. The second article I found was called An elementary exposition of godel's incompleteness theorem. This gave me more information on the principles and ideas behind the theorems.

I think math is fascinating. I think its even more fascinating to use math to prove that we cant use math for everything. What kinds of parallels does this have in our society? As we continue to develop computers, are we going to run into barriers that wont be possible to cross? My professor put up this chapter about what computers cant and will not ever be able to do. Its a fascinating point, but will someone figure out a way to make those things work? It'll be fun to see. 

Digital art

Photo by cobalt123

We're reading about modernism in our digital civilization class right now and something that seems to be a less prominent topic but consistently influential is the affect that art had on the period. We see many artists of the period come out with abstract forms of art such as Picasso using abstract geometric forms, Wyndham Lewis with his use of motion and change, and Kandinsky creating paintings with bold colors, lines and shapes. A similar movement in art seems to be evolving with the growth of our digital culture.

This blog I found talks about ways that old art pieces are being expressed and enhanced digitally.

There is so much being done digitally with art these days that it would be hard to keep up with it all. I don't profess to be any expert in art either but it fascinates me how it has almost become necessary for anyone in an art field to become proficient with digital tools to further their art careers. The other day I met a man who had been an illustrator for most of his life, but said it was harder and harder for him to find work anywhere as an artist. The big fields are now in graphic design. Art is going to a whole new level, but its not leaving behind any of the evolution it has been through already. Most of what is happening now is building off what has already been done.

This link is a YouTube video of a few things that graphic artists can do with a little imagination.

A world lit only by fire

On my last post I mentioned the mini book-club that we're doing for class. Well the book that we ended up deciding on was A World Lit Only by Fire. I found the book in the school library and set off to read it. I haven't been able to finish the book but I've really enjoyed it so far. 

To help share this book I've decided to something a little different. Because the book talks so much about the dark ages, I thought I would try an idea that I got from our professors. I fished out a computer game called Oblivion, and started reading about how I could create my own world within it. The developers of the game have provided the code and tools to players to me able to create their own "mods" for the game. I took these tools and created my own scenario in the game. I put up my creation on a site where any player can share their mod, that way anyone with the game can try out what I've made. Here are a few screenshots of things I've been playing with. Not all of these are my own creations.

Mini Book Club

In our digital civ class we've been given the assignment to form a mini book club and read a book about one of the time periods that we have been studying. I've looked around for some good books and I've come up with a short list of possibilities. Let me know what you think.

1. The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy by Peter Burke.
I found this book through the Princeton University Press. The review on the book says that it "discusses the social and political institutions that existed in Italy during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and...analyzes the ways of thinking and seeing that characterized this period of extraordinary artistic creativity." It looks like it helps bring to light the complex connections between culture and society of the time.

2. A World Lit Only by Fire: The Medieval Mind and the Renaissance by William Manchester.
I read that this book is "One of the most lively, engaging history books you will ever read." I found in on Amazon and it looks like it gives a good history of the span from the dark ages to the renaissance and what lead up to the creative explosion of the later.





3. The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View by Richard Tarnas.
I found this book on Google Books and it looks like a good read. I don't know much about it but I read a really good review on it. It looks like a great book about the development of our western world and the changes in the cultural psyche of our society. 

Reflective blog post

This post is going to be a reflective post about how my learning experience has gone so far in my digital civilization course. Since this experience of blogging about my learning has been new to me, I think it will be good to look back at what I've learned so far. The focus of the class has not been directed at digital literacy but rather learning about classical civilization with ties to current digital culture. One thing that I have enjoyed is being able to follow the assigned reading material by following it with my own research. For example when we talked about the effect that the printing press had on the world, I really enjoyed Francis Bacon's essay "Of Studies." It led me to write this post where I found a great article talking about the evolution of print as well as a great outside blog post that talks about the opportunities that the decline of classic print presents.

Animation!

So I was playing around with some of the different create labs that we have for our class and I found this fun site where you can make your own animations. Its great! You can all sorts of fun things that different people have done. I started playing around with it and made this short animation for my wife about how we met. Its not long but it was a lot of fun to mess with and took me a lot longer then it should have :) Send me a link if you make anything, I'd love to see it.

Why giving matters

Lately a lot of our class blogs (check out Kristina's) have been talking about the impact of open source on government and communities. Something that came to mind when I was thinking about this was the forum given last year by Arthur Brooks. It was one of the best forums I've ever heard as a BYU student and I wanted to put it up so others can listen to it. (Click here to watch it) The reason I thought of this forum is because it gives statistical evidence that giving more makes a person happier, and even wealthier. While we all know how to give of our time and possessions, talking about open source has made me think that even giving our creations, programs or ideas could be included in these statistics. Its an intriguing idea that giving more can make a person more prosperous. It goes against conventional thinking. That's why I loved this forum, it helps us understand something that we've believed in for a long time. Or if we didn't believe in it, we can see why we've been taught the importance of giving. Would our social system be more efficient if we all learned to give more? What do you think?

Is programming hard?

Throughout our class we've talked a lot about programming languages and how they're used. A lecture given by Randy Pausch from Carnegie Mellon University talked about a great program called Alice. The lecture itself is incredible and if you're got time I recommend watching it or buying the book. The program talked about though is a simple program designed to help anyone new to programming see in a very visual and easy way the basics of programming. Instead of trying to explain it I created a tutorial on screencast.com to show how easy it is to use. If you've ever had any interest in animation or computer programming, or even if you would just like to play around and make your own animated movie, check it out. The program can be downloaded free here.

Making friends with Ambiguity

A couple of people have asked me to expound on the idea of embracing ambiguity that I brought up in my lost post so I figured this would be a good place to do it. As a disclaimer these ideas are not my own. They all come from the book How to think like Leonardo Da Vinci. In the book there are exercises to help apply the different principles into our lives. The following are a few ideas that are given to "Make Friends with Ambiguity":

How to think like Leonardo da Vinci

In the spirit of our digital civilization course I started reading a book that I had received for graduation several years ago. The book is called How to Think like Leonardo da Vinci by Michael J. Gelb.  The book is written as an inspirational guide to discovering the genius inside of Da Vinci and how we can cultivate it within ourselves.

The beginning of the book talks about the life of Da Vinci and his many talents and achievements. The author Michael Gelb has a fascination of the life of Da Vinci that is contagious throughout the book. The book goes on to list the "Seven Da Vincian Principles" that can be emulated by anyone. The seven principles talked about are:

1. Curiosità- "An insatiably curious approach to life and an unrelenting quest for continuous learning." Leonardo had an intense desire to understand the essence of things around him. This led him to turn his passions into questions. 

What will happen to copyrights?

I've been reading about Nationalism, Empire, and Monarchy and how by the 17th century there was a growth of a middle class in many societies. I was curious about the "enclosure movement" of this time and I decided to learn more about it. I found an article titled "The Enclosure Movement in France" by Alek A. Rozental (the link only gives the first page) through BYU's library searches. I don't know how to link the full article since I accessed it through the library. The article gave a great history of this enclosure movement and described arguments both supporting and fighting this movement at the time. The enclosure movement was basically a shift from common farming and pasture ground, to "enclosed" properties owned my more middle class families. This led to many people moving into cities, giving strength to industries and forcing a shift into a new paradigm.

This blog I found compares this movement to what is happening today with copyrights and public material available online. He gives a good argument that copyrights shouldn't necessarily be done away with, but that we should limit them and charge a small fee for them. Professor Zappala and Eric S. Raymond (great audio file) have opened my mind to the idea of how beneficial open software could be, while I can see there is still a good argument for the other side. How much will things change in the future? Do you think that taking away copyrights would work?

The world of Wiki

LeeAnne taught me something great today about what a wiki is. Most everyone has heard of Wikipedia, but then what is a wiki? Ironically LeeAnne looked up "wiki" on Wikipedia and learned that Wikipedia is just an example of what can be done with a wiki. There is a history of how wiki's came to be and what they can be used for. A "wiki" is really just a public encyclopedia. The great thing is that anyone can create or edit a wiki. The idea is that with enough people editing each other, content would be verified by enough sources to be trustworthy. While this might not always be true, there are a lot of great things that can be done by wiki's. Once I had learned that there can be wiki's on anything, I found a wiki on one of my favorite hobbies: Warhammer. This one wiki is so full of information about this great tabletop game, that I could spend weeks reading all the articles. If you're reading this then you should try finding a wiki created specifically for something you love. You never know what you'll find.

Blog Searching

I'm pretty new to this whole world of blogging. I started this blog for my digital civilizations course at BYU and I've been learning a lot about this great tool. Last week I took on the task of learning about blog searching. Today I taught LeeAnn and Shuan what I learned and since we have the requirement to search out and post on blogs outside of our class, I realized this would probably be a helpful topic for anyone in the class, and anyone outside of the class who would like to find interesting blogs to read. A great post was made on this topic by our professors and I decided I would take it just a step further and see what I could learn.

Power of words

One of the greatest writers of the Renaissance, Francis Bacon, wrote a very powerful essay titled "Of Studies." I found the essay engaging as it gave substance to what we engage in every day as students. There are so many powerful quotes in this essay and I recommend it to anyone. What I thought was interesting was the power that he attributed to words. In our classical civ. class we talked about how the Renaissance brought back a deeper understanding of the power of language through the study of Latin. Words really do hold power and the way we use and study them can change a person in so many ways.

Another article talks about  the evolution of print. Not just what it was like before or after a big change like the printing press, but what actually happened during those changes. The article talks about how we are going through another revolution in print today and the same chaos that accompanied the introduction of the printing press is rampant in our day. I found an interesting blog that talks about how the decline of traditional journalism may be more of an opportunity for journalists than it may appear.The power of words has not diminished at all.

"Of Studies"

 

 

 

The picture above is a result of my exploration on the power of words. I found this program online and I took part of Francis Bacon's essay and inserted it into the program called Wordle.This program creates basically a piece of art from words in the essay. What I like about it is the way that rearranging the words can give so much more meaning to the words used. Even though common words are omitted, "studies" remains the focus while the words surrounding it give an idea of what the soul of the essay is all about. What an incredible thing, the power of words.

Faults are fine

"Imagine! The great generosity of God! The happiness of man! To man it is allowed to be whatever he chooses to be!" -Pico Della Mirandola 
 


It fascinates me how early views of humanism differ so much from "secular humanism" now studied by so many. Ancient humanism presented a system of thought that studied the divine potential of man, while modern views have twisted that completely. How different it is when we look at life from the perspective that we were created  by a divine being. To be able to look around and know that we have so much potential, gives me hope and encouragement to strive to be better. While we have been created as the pinnacle of God's creations, we are not without flaws. Potential for divinity does not mean we are close, but within the journey we discover who we are.


I've trained myself as an athlete and many lessons that I have learned draw from those experiences. I'm sure throughout this blog I will make many references to sports and the things I have learned from them. One man that I admire is Coach John Wooden. To keep this post short I wont talk about the man as much as something I've learned from him. Wooden was a legendary basketball coach who taught as much about life as he did about basketball. He once said "I probably have all the same faults anyone has, and so do you. There's nothing wrong with that. Having faults means you're human; you're alive and breathing. There's nothing wrong with having faults so long as you work conscientiously to correct them. How hard you work at correcting your faults reveals your character." I believe this is the essence of humanism. God made us imperfect with the potential to become perfect. What are we doing with that potential?

Source: Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections on and off the Court

The future of politics?

I love books. I like to read and like to read a lot of different things. As we've talked about the evolution of public literature and the development of  blogs, I thought back on the book Ender's Game that I had read a while ago. In the book Ender's brother and sister take on fake identities on public forums. Even though they are only kids, their anonymity and superior intelligences help them establish themselves as public leaders. Through the power they gain on these forums, they are able to shape the government system itself. Ender's brother Peter gains so much power through his essays and writings that he makes himself into what eventually becomes almost a dictator.

I don't think we would look at our own public writing as something that could change the world, but when our words reach the right people we have a power I don't think we can fully comprehend. How will we use this power?

Just a scratch

Since revealing the incredible complexities and amazing traits of this Brandon guy would take too long, I realize this post is going to be just a scratch into his awesome world. In the picture you will notice that there is a much more attractive person attached to said Brandon...that is his much better half. (insert smooth transition into first person) I was married exactly four months ago to my best friend, cliche but the truth, and am loving life.

I grew up in Provo and have lived here for most of my days. I've been blessed with the opportunity to travel to all sorts of crazy parts of the world and learned to love each one of them. I'm still exploring majors and I'm way past time when I should have chosen but I like learning and there's just too much to learn. 

My middle name is Dare. I know, cool huh. Its a family name that has been passed down for a long time. I like it.