Question for the last day of class — honor hanau

1 Reply

After seeing everyone’s wonderful presentations on their individual projects, I felt very inspired. Though so much of this class centers around the dangers of the rapidly increasing advancement of technology and the disastrous effects it could have within society, these presentations were a good reminder as to why technology is so incredible. So many people created such unique projects, with special functions that accomplish many different tasks. It was amazing to see what everyone could come up with. It made me feel safer about the future of the digital age, as it seems that with the right people, technology can expand to help all of humanity. Thus, I have two overarching questions to ask: how do we make sure the future of technology is placed in the hands of competent and well-meaning people? And then, how do we make sure everyone has an equal opportunity to contribute to these movements?

 

Thanks for an awesome semester!

4/25 Reflection

1 Reply

During the last class on 4/25, we explored the concepts of internet connectivity and data privacy. This session was an eye-opener for me, as it made me realize how much information our computers share with the internet even during basic functions. It was fascinating to learn about the different protocols used in internet communication, such as IP, TCP, UDP, and HTTP. Understanding their purposes and trade-offs, like reliability vs. speed, provided insights into the underlying processes of the internet.

The activities and lab exercises further reinforced these concepts. The simulation activity, where we acted as routers transferring data packets, helped me grasp how information is routed across the internet. It highlighted the collaborative effort of routers in transmitting data. The lab exercise on IP addresses shed light on the potential privacy risks associated with them. I was surprised to see how easily our online activities can be tracked and linked to our identities. Tracing the routing of a message and examining the role of cookies deepened my understanding of the complexity of internet infrastructure and the ways in which our online behavior can be monitored.

This class was definitely a wake-up call regarding data privacy and the importance of safeguarding our personal information online. After this class I became more conscious of data privacy and the need to safeguard personal information online. It also emphasized the importance of being informed about the information we share and the function of cookies. I believe this knowledge will affect my future computer usage helping me to take the necessary precautions to protect my privacy online.

Reflection May 9th

4 Replies

It was a very excellent class session to see everyone’s projects and presentations. It was so interesting to see the variety of ideas. I especially liked how many people collaborated on their projects – from taking courses to creating websites. Overall, I’m very glad we have this project so open-ended to explore topics of interest. The ChatGPT site and the course one stood out to me! Thanks everyone for the effort – we all learned a lot.

Recap 5/11

10 Replies

Today in class, we watched more presentations! I was so impressed with the quality and variety of projects. It is neat how we all took away different skills from the same class and displayed them so differently with our projects. We also created project mind maps that showed the core narrative we thought this class taught. I was also surprised by the variety of mind maps. This, too, shows that despite taking the same class, we all were able to get something different out of it.

While we all got something different from the class, one unifying thing was more confidence in technology. I know many people, and I felt overwhelmed by computers at the start of the course, and while I am by no means a hacker, I now know what cookies are or how to create a spice girls trivia game on Python. More than being a computer science genius, that was my goal with this class, and I accomplished it.

Reflection 5/11

11 Replies

Great job, Digital Agers! It was such an honor to share this digital and physical space with you all. I was so impressed with all of the final projects, especially the innovative and self-guided work on Python. It was great to see everyone’s individual approaches to similar problems in coding, and how we all pushed ourselves to expand the limits of our knowledge. This semester, I think we all learned a lot about the mechanics and innerworkings of the Internet, computers, and coding, and I hope we are all better for it.

I would like to thank Liz for all of the excellent course material, lectures, and encouragement, and thanks to you digital agers for being so open and engaged.

Have a great summer everyone! We should have a reunion! That’s it, I’m planning it.

5/4 questions

4 Replies

5/4 questions:

There was no class on 5/4. My partner and I were working together on our independent project, where we created a WordPress website focusing on ChatGPT. One question I have for this project is why we are choosing wordpress to make the website. Are there any other platforms that can also make websites? What is the strength and weakness of WordPress compared to other website platforms?

Some questions I have for the whole semester:

Why did we choose to learn Python rather than other languages for this class? Why do we have so many computer languages, such as Java, C, HTML, Ruby, Perl, etc?

5/9 Question

11 Replies

I was very impressed by everyone’s presentations today. The breadth of topics and creativity in each individual one was exciting to see. Some of the presenters already spoke to this, but I was curious what the inspiration behind these projects was for people? Personally, I was inspired to create a blog website due to my interest in writing and research. Great job on the projects everyone!

05/09 Reflection

3 Replies

One thing that particularly struck me during today’s class was Ben J’s rigged list randomizer. I thought it was a really interesting project, and it actually made me think about how much of a black box technology can be sometimes. By that, I mean that we often have no idea what’s going on under the hood of the randomizers we use–RANDOM.ORG makes their methods more public than a lot of randomizers do, but even there it’s hard to understand just how their random numbers are generated. And in the case of Ben’s project, without looking at the code itself you might have no idea that the six friends always get paired up with each other. There are certainly ways to figure out the trick of Ben’s project, but the way that it hides its interference makes me think of the larger issue of code lying about what it does.

This doesn’t only come up in cases where someone is purposefully adding a back door to their software, although that alone is a huge topic. For instance, something like Midjourney advertises itself as if it were entirely original, an AI inventing new works of art, but the obscured truth is that it draws heavily from the works of thousands of artists who are not credited. That’s only one example of this sort of hiding of the truth of a piece of software, and I think it’s something that’s important to stay aware of so we at least have a chance of spotting it.

05/09 Recap

1 Reply

Today was our last Tuesday class session. We had the lightning presentations for our second project. In today’s class session, we had a lot of people presenting on websites they created and python codes and only one twine story. There was a general issue with using the WordPress interface to create a website but most of the projects applied some sort of work around for this issue. Additionally, a lot of people used the internet to help them with useful knowledge for the project. The projects followed a general them of continuation from the class topics and ethical questions. We ran out of time in the end the last three presentations were pushed to Thursday.

5/4 Recap

Leave a reply

We didn’t have class today; it was a project working day. We are done with our lectures, and we will present our projects in the remaining time. We have three options for the final project: Coding with Phyton, creating a website, and using Twine. My partner and I decided to make a Website. Overall, I enjoyed this class and learned a lot about computer science as well as the essential features of the digital age. Good luck with finals everyone. I hope the best for you all!!