Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Technobiography ...Part 2

The last 4 weeks have brought with them fresh and new insights into a field that I had always felt I was quite familiar with. With much of this new knowledge has come a greater knowledge of a world yet unexplored. In other worlds, a lot of what I learned was that there is a lot that I still don't know and in some cases didn't even know existed. Take for example, the one piece that amazed me most -Maya. This 3D scene and rendering program does things that I never thought could be done by artists rather than programmers and mathematicians. I knew little about the interface created to allow the artists depict the expression, the animators animate it and the programmers make it respond to certain logical but complex set of rules. At the end of the module, I was amazed as I was humbled. But that if there was one thing that I wouldn't be trying to incorporate into my two-week project was this powerful beast.
This occasion acted as a reminder that I couldn't know everything there was, even for a newly emerging area such as new media technology.

One very interesting perspective was looking at social software and asking the question, What makes certain technogies click while others fail? We had an interesting session on software but this is actually not where I thought about that. The moment happened when I was enjoying my dinner and Sarah asked about the facebook. Techologically speaking, there is nothing new about the facebook. All the techologies that make up the facebook are almost as old as the Internet itself. Yet the facebook phenomenon has spread like a wild fire across our campuses (typically small & medium sized liberal arts colleges) just within the last year or so.

This is not a question I had ever asked myself when thinking about technological advancements. My idea of technological revolution would involve moving from a vacumn tube to a transistor or from a command line DOS to a mouse-driven graphical user interface.

I will likely be needing to incorporate some of the answers to these questions into my open snippets project. At the end of the day, even with the best wiki code snippets repository, the ultimate success of the project involves getting people to actually use it as a resource for the codely needs.

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