What's Different About This Course? Special Requirements & Self-Assessment
Manage
Digital Information || Explore and Discover
In order to prosper in the digital world, you must be able to do many things other than write sentences and paragraphs and work a keyboard and a mouse. Here are five activities that also apply to writing and to meeting the course objectives. Manage Digital Information To do well in this course, you will need a way to store and move digital files between computers, whether at school, work, or home. Also, back up your work frequently. I can't stress that enough so I'll just repeat it: make regular and frequent back-ups of all your work. You'll find a scanner in the library, in the New Media Studio, and at the H225 instructor's PC. If you don't own or can't borrow a digital camera, you can perhaps use one of the school's. In the classroom, you should make a nest for yourself on one of the computers. I will evaluate each of you by asking you to demonstrate your competency with each of these tools. Basic Toolkit
Please note potential compatibility problems: operating systems, file formats, software applications, and disk sizes. Think through the logistics in your personal situation and let me know if you foresee any problems.
Explore and Discover We use bits for things we already did well with atoms before we got on-line. For example, email can replace snailmail. We use networked bits -- hypertext -- for things we didn't do well before. Research is comprehensive, quick, and very cheap. Entertainment is interactive. I want you to focus on using hypertext to do things you
hadn't even thought of doing before you got on-line. The dreaming part is easy. The hard
part is making decisions. What do you want to do with
the hypertext?
Tolerate Ambiguity Listen to my students:
Whew! This course is not the kind where there's one right answer to every question. In fact, for a lot of questions in hyperspace, there are no right answers ... just as in real life. You want to be able to both lead and follow under such conditions. Think Big Transcend your and your organization's concrete situation into an intelligent awareness of broader, often abstract, contexts. A good test is the ease with which you can draw valid inferences from articles in the news. For example, do you understand why the Justice Department is so upset with Microsoft for bundling the Internet Explorer browser? Do you understand how the DOJ's pursuit of Microsoft affects your ability to send email to your boss? Your big thinking helps me distinguish an A project from an A- or B project. In real life, it helps the boss distinguish who gets promoted. Assess Yourself
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last update: April 27, 1998 |
