Honors 212: A Semester in Review

O, Hai!

For my not-so-local viewers (if there be any), the class this blog was focused on is ending. Part of our final evaluation is a simple reflective commentary on how we've met the learning objectives over the course of the semester.

As a bit of a foreword, this has been a fun class, and I have learned a lot. My leadership skills are still a bit iffy in my mind, but leading a group has shown me ways to improve. I now know more about Descartes than I ever thought I would, and I'm glad. I've seen a 50-person class somehow crank out 350 pages (that's what I heard) of actually pretty good content.

Anyhow, to the learning objectives! First a sort of sorting of my various published efforts over the semester (sorry if some of the G+ items aren't shared :(...

1. History
1. Modern Hieroglyphics
2. Various Group Brainstorms
3. Descartes Post
4. Various Ideas of Infinity
2. Core Concepts
1. control
1. clock domain analogy
2. Power of the Aggregate
2. information
3. participation
1. White House G+ feed spam
2. Amateur Radio
3. commenting on White House post
4. openness
1. some help with Gov't group presentation
3. Digital Literacy
• What is Digital Literacy?
• Applying These Four To My Droid
1. consume
1. XKCD on Encryption
2. Slashdot on Online Voting
2. create
3. connect
1. request for encouragement on class project idea
2. Discussion on usefulness of blog posts for large ideas
3. Call for Kindle Libraries
4. Defining "Social Proof"
5. request for assistance in deciding on blog topics
6. request for Tweethis assistance
7. Analysis of "Connect" efforts for event
4. self-directed learning
1. Why I Like Real Books
2. Facebook Geography
3. My brother and Tesla
4. Reading "Descartes: A Very Short Introduction"
5. Reading  "Networks and States"
6. Countless tabs opened while researching any of the posts mentioned here
5. collaboration
1. Class Project Proposal
2. partial analysis of class collaboration

My largest efforts in the realm of learning history have been centered on Descartes, as he was assigned to me at the beginning of class. This gave me a springboard with which to dive into the 17th century. From his troubles with the Church to sickness and medicine in his life, there was a lot to see from this thin crossection of history.

When combined with Descartes, my independent learning activities in previous classes, previous summers, and the efforts of other groups in this class, I feel I now have a fairly good understanding of history from the Renaissance down to the present. (I might even understand something about the future of digital civilization... *gasp*)

As for the core concepts of digital civilization, I thoroughly enjoyed our class presentations. At a superficial level, I am now aware of the [lack of] control I have when sharing things on social media. Google+ is my friend that way. Digital Glasnost is a current tendency I was only partially aware of--emphasis on the past tense, and I have actually participated in processes that I wasn't aware existed (I'm looking at you, White House stream!). One of my favorite parts of our chapter was the one involving openness, government, participation, and NOT democracy. We can participate in our local community and help improve our bureaucracy in ways I hadn't imagined (Code for America).

Digital Literacy was a broad, gradual topic for me to grasp. The most effective (and critically constructive) activity I did for it was not really related to class: I organized my cell phone's apps into these three categories. (A "hardware utility" classification arose from this, though I also classified my camera under "create.") While I don't think it is an end-all-be-all breakdown, Consume-Create-Connect has given me a different perspective on my activities on line. I think of it every time I pull up Blogger or YouTube, and I smile, knowing that I know what I'm doing...most of the time. :)

Blogger and Google+ were great tools for this class. I wish we had used them last semester. Exponentially multiplying my number of accounts right at the beginning might not have been so great, but I think I'll still go take a look at Goodreads. One suggestion here would be to use the communal blog model from last semester fused with the G+ model we used this semester. Give a good model for tagging posts for later reference (learning outcomes and people) as well, as that helps with writing reflective blog posts...at least, it did last term. I didn't even think about it this term.

Learning on my own has been a challenge. This has been a fairly hectic semester for me, and I'm now realizing I could have done better. I read most of "Descartes," the first chapter of "Networks and States," and I have about twenty bookmarks that I want to go back and read that are left over from Google and Wkipedia binges I went on looking for more information on a topic. I learned a lot and it was fun, but it is by no means complete. I definitely had to do some research to polish our eBook chapter for submission, especially for my not-so-ample sections. Then again, I brought a fairly broad spread of experience to the table in my groups due to past independent learning and was so able to help direct and focus others' studies.

For Collaboration I will call on the eBook experience, as I imagine many others have. (My Control and 17th Century groups definitely had amazing experiences in this regard, but they're not as recent and so harder to write about.) I got picked as a team lead. It was fun to try to come up with a direction, build a consensus, and start moving towards it. While the lateness in the semester led to less group interest in our goal, we were still able to divvy out assignments, converse amongst ourselves, and (sometimes) incorporate the constructive criticism we were given from outside sources. In the end, we produced something cool. Perhaps not Awesome, but definitely cool.

These are my two cents on how I met the learning outcomes. I did well, but I definitely could have done better.

Honors 212 Event: Reaching Out

For those tuning in to this blog without further introduction, it will be useful to know that I have been in a "Civilization" class at university for the last four months. It has been a fun and challenging course culminating in the production of one eBook and one TEDx-style event. Part of the event production was a sort of marketing blitz in which we were to invite friends and interested folk to either attend in person or view it over the web.

I'll be brutally honest. My efforts to invite my friends to the event were...lackluster. I don't think I hit the "quota" of 10 personal invites by a fair margin. This was due to me not being sold on it; I wasn't excited by the beta versions, so I found myself nearly unable to talk it up to anyone.

The silver lining is that I can more closely examine my efforts this way!

The people I invited fall into four categories:

1. Apt. 21
   This refers to a set of amazing friends I have. They are often very supportive of things I do, so I invited one of them. Turns out the LDS Institute here was having some sort of really cool speaker that had already taken precedence before I got around to inviting them. (That and extensive fatigue from working.)
   
   
2. Wilson&EEs
   Two of my friends in electrical engineering got an invitation right after class a day or two before the event. Turns out one was actually fairly interested, but both were planning to put many much late hours into a final homework sprint that night.
3. Roommates
   I invited a couple of my roommates, but anything I am in is likely either a) over their head or b) not as interesting as their normal activities. Such is the life of the awkward nerd.
   
4. Google+ peeps
   This was, by far, the most itneresting group I attempted to interact with. One of our tasks during the semester had been to attempt to find people interested in our selected/assigned topic. Most of my work in this direction was on Google+, and I wound up finding a number of interesting characters. Tim O'Reilly was easy to bump into, but I also added a couple of university students as well as Ibrahim Elbadawi, a strategist and eGovernment specialist for the United Arab Emirates. (Several avenues of social exploration -- including social bookmark sites and asking for referrals -- were stones left unturned, so this is no doubt a very small sampling.) Inviting them to the webcast was, tragically, a 6:59-PM-literally last-minute step.

Finding people is great; however, my difficulty was in contacting and inviting them. For one, I'm shy, especially in social settings I'm not familiar with. This is, admittedly, a personal shortcoming and not a good reason. (We call such statements "excuses" and they generally stink. ;) Star power also had a factor--inviting someone as famous as Tim O'Reilly to my class's little presentation seemed a little silly. I also failed to realize that our event would be a webcast too; this was also pretty much all my fault.


Still, all of these could have been overcome had I been sold on my product. The Google+ post that should have gone out inviting these people to contribute was typed, reauthored, and eventually abandoned whey I wasn't convinced by my own call to action. Why wasn't I? You guessed it! I blame me. Perhaps the upcoming class experience reflective blog post will reveal the details. :)

Infinity

I'd like to highlight two fascinating minds that have graced the pages of history: Rene Descartes and Georg Cantor

Rene Descartes was a French physicist in the 17th century (1600s, as I always have trouble matching them). He developed a technique for systematically breaking down and interpreting problems in physics. His most noted contributions are to geometry (a normal x-y plane is the epitome of Cartesian coordinates) and optics. While many of his discoveries were moot within a century or so, I have described before the change in approach his physics embodied.

One of the problems he encountered was that his new system didn't rely heavily on God and, used carefully, implied a heliocentric solar system. Having seen the impact of Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems on that astronomer's research (forced self-repudiation and house arrest), he spent the bulk of his energy couching his physics in a philosophy that he thought the Catholic Church would like. Among these arguments was the following, summarized by Tom Sorrell in "Descartes: A Very Short Introduction":

"Descartes thinks an infinite substance is more real than a finite substance[...]. In the case of an idea of God, the idea represents an infinite substance, something whose category or degree of reality cannot be exceeded. According to Descartes' principle, therefore, the cause of the idea has to belong to the same category as the thing it is an idea of. More explicitly, the idea of God has to be caused by an infinite substance. But there is only one infinite subtance, namely God." (Kindle Edition, location 688)

I will not deal with his argument here; you can imagine the difficulties ahead. Instead, I would like to highlight the idea of infinity here. The finite and the infinite are different categories, with that which is infinite being the greatest degree of reality (and paradoxically, filled with exactly one thing).

Enter Georg Cantor in the 1800s.

Beginning as an engineering student at university in Germany. He soon took up mathematics instead and gained a name as an analytical theorist. In 1873, he published one of his first breakthroughs on the topic of infinity.

To explain, I'd like to briefly describe the concepts involved.

Countable Infinity
Take a box of an infinite number of blocks. If you can pick them up, one by one, and count them, all the way to infinity, this is a countable infinity. The most familiar countable infinity is the set of counting numbers, one to infinity.

Uncountable Infinity
Given a similar box of, say, all (real) numbers, start picking them up again. Count them. No matter how careful you are at picking numbers as close together as possible, I can find one in between them that you missed. This is an uncountable infinity, as they cannot be counted using the counting numbers, e.g. you can't pair each real number up with a counting number, as there are too many.

To Cantor, this ballooned rapidly. If you could have one infinity be bigger than another infinity, you could find a third bigger than they all. After those three, a fourth, larger infinity can be found.

In his work, he describes God as the biggest infinity of them all.
(This is an impossibility according to later advances in transfinite theory, but this fits with an entity who is everywhere but nowhere...)

His peers had a hard time with this. Up to his seminal article in 1874, "infinity" was merely some incomprehensibly gargantuan behemoth that had one size: infinity. It was like in elementary school, when you said "You're stupid times infinity!!!" and the argument was over because Nothing(TM) is bigger than infinity.

I do apologize I haven't been able to finish this arc of thought; I hope you liked this much!

Amateur Radio: Participation

The Amateur Radio
Relay League is the largest
association of amateur radio
operators.

Briefly, what is Amateur Radio?

The Amateur Radio Service is a system for people to use radio for two-way non-commercial communication. It is useful for both long- and short-range communication. (Amateur Radio, a.k.a. Ham Radio, is NOT Citizens' Band (CB) Radio, which is intended for anyone to have short-range personal or commercial communication. It does not require a license and works rather well for this.)

The FCC gives three purposes for it:

• advancing the field of radio communication
• maintaining a pool of people proficient with radio technology
• enhancing international goodwill

What does this have to do with Participation?

Have you ever wanted to improve the image of your country abroad?


Have you ever wanted to meet amazing people from all over the world?


Have you ever wanted to know why the radio on your shelf (or the WiFi radio in your computer) works?


Have you ever wanted to talk to someone in Japan by means of the moon? How about using only the electronics you can hand-build in a tuna can? (OK, fine, you probably haven't thought of those specifically, and low-power (QRP) EME takes more than a tuna can... ;)

Ham Radio is an open, participatory medium for communication.

As a licensed amateur radio operator, I have talked with operators from Uruguay to Canada. I have built and (mostly) understood a simple radio beacon.


To wrap up this hardly-begun post rather than leave it unposted:

Amateur Radio is an unparalleled opportunity for participation in diplomacy and science, in engineering and community. Check it out!

So What DID We Do?

That is a brilliant question.

[Conn's students] were learning, by trial and error, largely error, how to build a set of pseudograv engines. And they were putting together a hundred and one other things, all of which was good training for the time they'd be ready to start work on Ouroboros II.

[...] Conn was enthusiastic about that, remembering the so-called engineers on Koshchei, running around with a monkey-wrench in one hand and a textbook in the other, trying to find out what they were supposed to do while they were doing it. Poictesme had been living for too long on the leavings of wartime production; too few people had bothered learning how to produce anything.

Cosmic Computer (Junkyard Planet) by H. Beam Piper, p. 140, 159.

I'd like to take a moment to follow in Hillary Ulmer's footsteps but with a focus on what we did rather than what I learned. I feel we've been much like the students in this story, with an eBook writer in one window and a "SomeSortOf(TM) HowTo(TM) Write eBooks(TM)...for Dummies(TM)" site in another.

1. We took a disparate group of ~40 students in a Renaissance-to-Present Civilization class, decided on a combination eBook/TEDx approach, organized them according to individual interests, and produced a tremendous amount of content.
2. We learned that honors students--especially younger ones--are very very very grade oriented and react adversely to being told "you are not being graded...even though you are." Older students also react adversely, as they are on their way to graduating and seek to minimize their outputs. (I'm looking at you, James :)
3. We increased Google+'s membership by 30-40 people. Goodreads, Twitter, Flickr, Prezi, Diigo, Wikispaces, and a couple of others have also benefited, though I suspect most of these accounts will go fallow after the class ends. (I'll be keeping my Google Plus account though. It's much better at flow control than Facebook ever intends to be.) The wide variety of web 2.0 services that I've experienced have left me excited about the power, nervous about the vulnerability cross section, and bewildered by the maintenance costs of them.
4. I love Kindle. I've possibly read more fiction than nonfiction this semester, as I found H. Beam Pipers works on there for free (public domain FTW).
5. We almost wrote a book. A tremendous amount of work went into this, and an amorphous out-of-reach goal is, at long last, nearly done. Hopefully the folks over the summer will be able to bring it to fruition.
6. We learned how to and how not to work in groups. Marissa Pielstick got extremely frustrated with the Open Science group's rigidity, while James Williams and Phillip Pare were able to lead one of the larger groups to a poetic synthesis of the media.

Anyhow, these are just a few thoughts. I do recommend the above-quoted book. :)