Final Blog Post

What is the most important thing you learned in this course? Why?
The most important thing I learned in this course over the quarter would have to be the societal impacts of new technologies. For the longest time, people choose to only see what they want to see. After taking this class, I now understand and see that our culture is only in a huge bundle of cultures. I realize that we are lucky to have the resources available to us and to be able to communicate the way that we do. I have learned about underprivileged people living in other countries who have never even touched a computer. After using a computer everyday to carry out every day tasks, the though of not having one seems unimaginable. For my personal knowledge, I believe that this is one of the most important things to take away from this class, and through learning about all the new and emerging types of media, only further shows how lucky we really are.

What topic would you like to have had more time to study? Why?
I would have really liked to study the creation of websites. Not only how to make them because I understand that this is a concepts course, but to know how websites are created and what goes into the thought behind the design would have been really interesting. We did a little bit of this in the extra-credit readings comparing Kerry & Bush's websites with one another, but further examination of websites would have really come in helpful. I think this is an important thing to study because websites now consume a huge aspect of our lives. We as Americans visit websites everyday, but not knowing how they work or how to write a simple line of html seems absurd. We read newspapers and magazines everyday, and we know how those are printed and how to write them. I feel that learning more about websites, and internet as a whole would be very beneficial.

What topic was least interesting to you? Why?
I really didn't like the unit on the open source software movement. The readings in this section were very difficult to read and understand, and the concepts were confusing. I still really don't understand the whole idea behind open source software, but felt that it was something that I was supposed to know what it was. I feel if this topic was presented in an easier to understand way, it could be very interesting. Because the GNU manifesto made absolutely no sense because we didn't have any background on what we were reading, it made this a very uninteresting unit.