HUM 298 Course Guide

Visionaries, Deep Thinkers, and Precursors

George Gilder

In his 1989 book  Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology, George Gilder predicts how digital technology will change people, organizations, and society. Forbes magazine has archived Gilder's latest articles. Gilder also has a Web site hosted by the University of Pennsylvania. I especially recommend his article The Coming Software Shift.

Alan Kay

This is the guy Congress calls on to make sense of this computer stuff. They call Alan because he's been doing it for a long time. In fact, his design at Xerox's research lab in the mid-1970's gave Steve Jobs the idea for the graphical interface that became the Macintosh ten years later.

Also, people listen to Alan Kay because he speaks so simply and persuasively. Here's a version of a speech I heard him give in Philadelphia in 1996. It's called Revealing the Elephant: The Use and Misuse of Computers in Education but I'm sure you'll be able to apply the ideas more broadly. The title refers to Alan's thesis that when it comes to computers, schools are the blind people trying to figure out the elephant. What about the organization where you work?

Alvin Toffler

In The Third Wave, published in 1980, Alvin Toffler tries to understand the transition from an industrial society (the Second Wave) to an information society (the Third Wave) by looking back to the transition from the agricultural society (the First Wave) to the industrial society. Check out some of his more recent books and articles.

For an update of the Third Wave argument, try Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age. In keeping with the original Magna Carta, this one tells what to do today to meet the challenges presented by digital technology. Continuing the discussion, Feed reprinted the original and then "invited a team of commentators to write hypertext annotations."

Still to come ...

Roland Barthes

George Landow

Brenda Laurel

Marshall McLuhan

Ted Nelson

Don Norman

Walter Ong

Sherry Turkle

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