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.