Digital Story: "Transhumanism"

Take this Ray Kurzweil!

Carly is a techie, like her teacher, but as with many in the class she sees how technology can "bite back."

This one is a stunner...hope you enjoy her techniques with digital audio. Do not have your audio on full-blast, however!

Digital Story: "Cogita"

Brett really dug in his heels, and coding skills, near midterm to explain why it would be so difficult for a computer to become an AI. I lack his mathematical skills, so I'll take him at his word about Ackerman's Function.



For the digital story, he returned to this theme and provides a twist on an old warhorse of the SF canon.

Digital Story: "Dirty Internet"

Minds out of the gutter, please. Mike's runner-up entry in the competition talks about how dependent we all are upon these "always on, always on you" technologies (the term is Sherry Turkle's).

We use the Net as we do air. And what would happen were the service to be interrupted? That, readers, is perhaps the one aspect of the technology that frightens Mike--and me--more than does our addictive usage.  On to the story!

Mike got no extra credit for pandering to my Clint Eastwood obsessions.

Digital Story: "I Facebook, Therefore I Am"

I want to congratulate my student Tyler, one of the runners-up in my digital-story competition.

As a reluctant and recent Facebooker, I found myself drawn into a narrative by a student who really enjoys her social networking with friends and, notably, family.

Small irony: for a guy who really does not bother much with social networking, I'll note this post at not only Twitter but on my Facebook Wall.

But for Tyler and many of my other students, social networking is like breathing, and her story provides eloquent testimony to the power of those connections. And now...roll the film!