All posts by Francesco

Final

Cesco’s Annotated Bibliography

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McDonnell, Andrea P., Leanne S. Hawken, Susan S. Johnston, JaimeeE. Kidder, Marjorie J. Lynes, and John J. McDonnell. “Emergent Literacy Practices and Support for Children with Disabilities: A National Survey.” EDUCATION AND TREATMENT OF CHILDREN 37 (2014): 495-530. Print.

All the contributors to the article are professors, associate professors, graduate assistants and deans of the Special Education Department of the University of Utah. The authors’ thesis is that emergent literacy is a key element in reading comprehension that needs to be addressed immediately. The main focus of the paper is the impact of various pedagogical strategies on children with many different disabilities ranging from reading comprehension issues to deafness and blindness. The authors’ intended audience is clear to be both students researching this topic as well as educators in the field who could pick different teaching strategies based on the findings of this study. The bias in the article appears to be that the authors believe something needs to be done for students with any type of disability, in contrast with some educators who believe that some of these disabilities are inexistent. One of the potential weaknesses of the article is the relatively low response rate from the sample size (about half). Another weakness is that the survey showed which strategies the teachers were willing to implement, rather than the results of the implementation. This material is especially relevant to our product research because it shows that our product would be used especially in classrooms where children had disabilities. The study supports our thesis because the instructor’s willingness to use new methodologies shows there is a need in the market for instructional tools.

Narang, Susheela, and Raj K. Gupta. “THE EFFECT OF MULTIMODAL REMEDIAL TECHNIQUES ON THE SPELLING ABILITY OF LEARNING DISABLED CHILDREN.”INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SPECIAL EDUCATION 29.2 (2014): 84-91. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SPECIAL EDUCATION. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SPECIAL EDUCATION. Web. 23 Nov. 2014. <http://www.internationaljournalofspecialeducation.com/>.

The authors are both professors at the University of Panjab in Chandigarh, India. Their thesis is that spelling is closely tied to reading ability and, as mentioned in the previous article, is something that needs to be addressed at an early age. The study uses three methods of instruction, one tactual and visual, another solely visual and the last auditory, visual and vocal. All three activities used flashcards with words and drawings to help the disabled students get a better grasp on the structure of certain vocabulary. Same as in the last study, the audience appears to be both students in the field as well as “special educators, teachers and parents, as in this
study an effort has been made to see the effectiveness of training in very important area, which has a direct bearing upon the education of children.” (Narang & Gupta) The only slant I was able to incur when reading the study was a belief in the legitimacy of these disabilities (which I personally believe in but many discredit). The authors themselves stated the weakness of their study: the small sample size (39 students broken up into groups of threes). The findings of this study support our thesis that visual aids can have a positive impact on children with learning disabilities and their learning. The students gained “increased confidence” and “willingness to perform;”— exactly what we’d like to see from our product. This material was equally relevant as the last in our research for the project because it shows that importance of visual aids in children’s pedagogy.

Burrell, A, Sodan A. C. “Web Interface Navigation Design: Which Style of Navigation-Link Menus Do Users Prefer?” Data Engineering Workshops. 2006, Atlanta, GA. Atlanta, GA: IEEE, 2006. Print.

The authors of this research paper are two computer science professors from the University of Windsor in Canada. Their authority derives from their background as instructors in the computer field. The goal of the research paper was to implement a series of different website navigation designs and test which were the most preferred by a series of participants. Their hypothesis was that “certain navigational styles are better for usability than others” (Burrell, Sodan). They claimed that existing literature at the time made them believe that left-hand side navigation was best, but their findings contradicted this initial statement. It’s also important to note that they didn’t adopt this as their own hypothesis, only acknowledged that this was a previous finding. The intended audience for the paper appears to be students in computer science departments, other instructors, and all website developers. I couldn’t find any bias or slant in the paper other than the hypothesis, which was that certain navigation layouts were better than others. I can postulate that as computer science professors (and possibly developers outside of school) they had some vested interest in proving that certain navigation layouts were preferable, although I couldn’t imagine how. I didn’t find any websites attributed to their name online to confirm or disprove this. The strength of the article is that they had 6 different fully-functioning test sites for the users to try, so they weren’t limited in options. Another strength was a varied age demographic in their sample—they didn’t limit it to younger students or older individuals. The weakness, as in the other research papers, lies in the small sample size (30), as well a requirement for the tested individuals to have a basic knowledge of computers and the Internet. It is possible that the results would have been different had they sampled individuals that didn’t know their way around a website. The research presented in this paper confirms our research regarding design because we, also, decided to place the navigation on the top and left of the screen—the top three results of the study for effectiveness. This paper is very relevant to our project when looking at how we decided to present the information on our website. It’s especially relevant because our product doesn’t just have a website as an auxiliary source, it itself resides on a website. It’s important to note that this study is from 2006, before this type of information became common knowledge to most, if not all, Internet users. It is still relevant, however, because it is good to know that users prefer this based on scientific research, not just habit.

Final

Cartoonclopedia

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Learning disabilities affect many students in the United States – 5% of the students enrolled in public schools have been officially diagnosed with at least one LD while many more go undiagnosed. There is a certain amount of stigma attached to this label with many individuals mistakenly linking learning disabilities to a lack of intellect or a manifestation of autism (NCLD). In reality, students with LD’s are of normal or above-average intelligence, they simply have trouble receiving, processing and storing information that other people do naturally. While some schools, mostly private and charter, attempt to address these disabilities by varying the teaching methods in the classroom, public schools make little effort in mitigating the struggle that these students face. Standards and test-based pedagogy dominates the public system, leaving little room for alternative methods including visual and oral teaching. In order to assist this under-represented demographic, and to make reading more fun, I’d like to propose a new web and app-based tool to improve youth literacy. Cartoonclopedia would bring together illustrators, artists and cartoonists from around the world in order to build a database of drawings for as many words in the English language as possible.

When a student encounters a word they don’t understand while reading, they’re expected to go look it up in a dictionary. In our current era of ubiquitous tech use, it’s much more likely that the student will look up the word online. If you Google a word with the term “define” in front of it, the first search result is a definition. Furthermore, resources such as Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com offer free definitions for anyone seeking them. Unfortunately, these sites require a revenue stream of some sort, so students get advertised to in exchange for finding a definition for a word. Additionally, both dictionaries and online databases rarely offer context for the definition. Occasionally the definition is followed by a sentence with the word in it, but at least in my experience, I’ve found that the sentences have obscure references and would certainly be difficult for a younger student to understand. Visual learning is a vital tool in children’s pedagogy; children’s books, computer games and instructional toys all illustrate the importance of a visual aspect in apprehending basic reading and writing skills. Even Vannevar Bush states that the human mind “operates by association,” and by offering an image for students to refer to when thinking of a word, we’d create a link to make comprehension easier. Few of these tools for improving a child’s literacy are free, so this restricts their usage to children of middle and upper-class families. Hence, students with LD’s tend to be from lower-income families. This is due to the fact that it is possible to substantially mitigate the effects of LD’s with instruction, but this requires equally substantial time and financial resources from the parents or school. What is missing in this market for instructional tools is a free resource to be used both at home and in school that would help all students with different learning types understand new terminology: Cartoonclopedia.

Cartoonclopedia would be a prime example of what can be achieved through crowd-sourcing in our constantly more connected and globalized world. The Oxford dictionary has about 170,000 words in it and it is generally assumed that our language uses about 250,000 words, so this would have to be a globally collaborative project. I’d aim to begin the project with an educational grant of some sort, whether it be from the government or a foundation which would allow the project to pay the first illustrators to contribute substantial amounts of drawings to the database. The framework for the website and mobile app would be relatively simple and cheap to construct, it wouldn’t need complicated user interfaces nor functionality. In the long run, it’d be ideal to have user accounts so that instructors and students alike could build their own lists of words. Teachers could compile a list of illustrations for the words they thought were the most challenging or recurring in a text which then students would look over before and while reading. Students could save the words that gave them the most trouble in order to return to them later and consign them to memory. In the short run, however, simple access to the database would be more than substantial. We would conduct studies including both surveys to teachers about what terminology their students found most challenging as well as usage of scholarly tools to identify the most commonly used words in school texts to base the beginnings of our database from.

One of the most exciting aspects of Cartoonclopedia is that, since it’s a global collaboration, the illustrations will be from artists with all different types of cultural backgrounds. The project won’t attempt to standardize the type of illustration, we’ll only check to make sure the content is both appropriate and intelligible to younger students. This will result in the proliferation of many different cultural values and traditions: the New Yorker-style illustration about what the word “chore” means might be contrasted with a South American or Indian illustrator’s interpretation of the word “work.” The individuals portrayed in the cartoons will often wear the garb of their own country and reflect their own traditions, as the illustrator won’t necessarily be American at all. In a world where many cultures are being forced to collide at a rapid pace, this would aid the new generation’s understanding and acceptance of the diverse population around them. It will help guarantee that cultural “knowledge evolves and endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an individual,” (Bush). Cartoonclopedia would both help students with disabilities have a visual resource to understand what they’re reading, as well as give all students a break from reading to look at something fun (and often funny) while still instructive.

While some picture dictionaries do exist, they’re not widely used, and Cartoonclopedia would work to bring the resource to any individual’s fingertips. The concept behind an illustrated word bank is reflective design, where we see vocabulary, “as alterable rather than immutable.”(Kraus) The images we associate with certain words come from our surroundings: social and media inputs. Cartoonclopedia seeks to furnish students (and all users) with a range of worldly perspectives about what words mean, allowing them more breadth of understanding. Let’s learn and laugh together!

vocabulary_cartoon_demo-1

 

Works Cited:

“What Are Learning Disabilities? | Learning Difficulties.” National Center for Learning Disabilities. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Nov. 2014.

Bush, Vannevar. “As We May Think.” The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 01 July 1945. Web. 09 Nov. 2014.

Kraus, Kari. 2013. Bibliocircuitry and the Design of the Alien Everyday (2013), The New Everyday, Textual Cultures.

Reflections

Track Changes Questions

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1. Do you think the portrayals of word processing in film, literature and the arts are accurate? If not, what sorts of biases do they hold? Why do these stereotypes about the technology exist?

2. What is the justification for an author adhering to an old word processor just to stay in his “zone”? It is probably more costly and wasteful to pursue 80’s tech rather than adapt. Isn’t it a bit frivolous of Martin as he could simply never connect his computer to a network and run a WordStar emulator?

3. What comes next? Would more functionality in a word processor be enough to take us to the step in digital literacy or do we need a more major overhaul?

4. Since we didn’t read the whole book, who was the first??

Reflections

Cesco’s Provocation

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It’s interesting how much Oryx’s perspective of her life varies from Snowman’s and Crake’s. While one can say that both Snowman and Crake are intellectuals, Snowman tends to care about intrinsic values and emotions more than Crake. Crake is practical and emotionless, at least on the surface. So much so, in fact, that he doesn’t have much of a reaction when his mother dies in front of him.

Snowman remembers how he would badger Oryx into telling him about her background and childhood. As opposed to his privileged compound life, Oryx grew up in the third-world pleeblands; a world where children were sold routinely by their parents and ended up being slaves or pornographic actors. Her view, consequently, is that she’s lucky that her life worked out the way it did and that she’s now where she is. She doesn’t hold any grudges against the people who used her as a child, and Snowman can’t understand this. This relates closely to our current socio-economic divides because it is often difficult for upper-class individuals to identify with or even see from the same perspective as the less well off. Snowman is preoccupied by the little things: finding out who these people were and exacting some sort of revenge for what was done to Oryx. Oryx, rather, remembers the situation, knows that there were many that were much worse off than her and is actively working with Crake to fix larger problems in the world.

Something I found scary was the future of the internet. We’re constantly fighting for freedom of speech, press, etc., but what happens when the demand turns to wanting to see videos of immoral, perverse and disgusting acts? At what point does there need to be a certain aspect of regulation?

Lastly, I thought the pertinence of Snowman’s career to our class was uncanny. We live in a society where advertising is king and marketing is one of the most profitable careers to go into. I think Atwood accurately portrays the qualms and successive lack of fulfillment entertained by advertisers. What do you guys think about someone who’s job it is to mislead people or instigate desires in them? It’s often seen as a glamorous job where you get products before they’re released and meet famous people, but what is the cost on the individuals psyche?

Uncategorized

Sirgutz Roundtable

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In its simplest form, the pertinence of Brian Sirgutz’ presentation and discussion is that he’s a Gallatin graduate himself. Fortunately, the roundtable was far from bland and actually tied in very closely to the media and technology studies we are embarking on in our class. Up until the floor was opened for questions, Sirgutz recounted his own story to success, rife with “cool” anecdotes about how many notable people he had worked and lived with. The most interesting part about his personal narrative was that he had not set out to be involved in social justice as he is now, but rather the business of music. He explained how volunteering in lower Manhattan post-911 had revolutionized his vision of the world, and there he had decided he needed to something more with his life (not that he wasn’t already successful).

Sirgutz is now the Senior Vice President of Social Impact at the Huffington Post, where he directs a series of articles that are aimed at improving the world. The business model for this wing of the Huffington Post works as such: a company (Johnson & Johnson was his example) donates money to Huffington to help fund research and development for an article, they are allowed to advertise their CSR (corporate social responsibility) programs on the web page, and subsequently their revenue from sales increases substantially (according to Sirgutz). This allows for companies to market their name, without directly marketing specific products, in a more ethical manner than usual. Sirgutz claims that Johnson & Johnson, for example, aren’t allowed to advertise their shampoos on the page with the article about children and mothers that they sponsored. While this may be just me being critical, I believe that there is no need for corporate sponsorship for this wing of the publication and that this sort of funding, regardless of the lack of ads that Sirgutz promotes, has an inevitable bias. This merging of corporate interest and news distribution should be avoided at all costs, especially in a relatively new, prolific, and profitable publication such as the Huffington Post. The social impact articles should be promoting companies that will do greater good without an economic incentive. However, I must say I wholeheartedly applaud Mr. Sirgutz; he’s found a way to integrate these noble concepts into the current system without upsetting it to the point where the social impact section would be shunned. And he certainly is “doing well, while doing (some, unquantifiable) good.”

Reflections

Kari Kraus Questions

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1. Once these specific methods of rendering books (and other objects) to produce alterity relation have become commonplace and standardized, won’t the books go back to creating embodiment and hermeneutic relations? Does the innovation need to be constant in order for the creation of alterity relations to continue?

2. Is Holl-Jensen’s book something that only needs to be seen and read once, furthering the reader’s understanding of not just that text but of how to look at future texts? Or does this method of helping the reader break down the text need to become present in more(or all) texts?

3. Since time is finite and we don’t have a comprehensive guide, which aspects of technological manipulation would you suggest we (students) focus on so that we can approach fluency?

 

Midterm

App App Revolution

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In our current era of ubiquitous social media use, there is much debate about the potential uses of new media for purposeful information distribution and social justice rather than solely economic purposes. The boom of smartphones in the last 8 years or so has catalyzed the app industry with the Apple App Store boasting over a million apps and 60 billion downloads to date. Due to the potential for mass exposure, developers race to come up with the next successful mobile application and make it big. According to a study by 148Apps, games make up a bit over 20% of all mobile apps, clearly showing where the profit lies. It is difficult to combine activism with revenue yet more and more apps dedicated to making the world a better place continue to pop up.

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The use of mobile apps began long ago in the prehistoric era of the 1990’s. Back then, apps were mostly used for simple tasks and were pre-programmed into the handsets. Tools like calculators, calendars and basic games, such as Snake, were labeled as mobile applications. In time, users began to demand more functionality, but mobile phone companies weren’t willing to open up the handsets’ code to outside developers. Up to this point, all app builds had been done in-house, with company coders, to minimize security risks. Lacking the financial motivation to fund these applications themselves, the companies sought a safe way to allow outside developers to build them. Their solution for these early phones was a dumbed down version of a web browser, since data rates were exorbitant and the hardware couldn’t handle regular HTTP pages. However, WML, as it was called, did not work for long. While the mobile phone companies raked in large profits from the data charges (less than what it would’ve been if they tried to run HTTP, but still very high), developers and consumers, on the other hand, got the short end of the stick. The primitive and simplified language limited the complexity of the online applications, rendered it impossible to adjust the viewing experience for different models of phones and made billing a struggle for the user, hence limiting developer revenue. Everything changed, though, around 2008 when mobile phone companies like Apple and Android (Google-owned) began releasing Software Development Kits (SDKs) to the public so that anyone could develop an application. These SDKs had the API frameworks that allowed developers to test their products and assure that they worked on different handsets. This jump-started the app industry because the range of options available with native apps, as opposed to web and in-browser apps, was humongous. The mobile phone companies reviewed the apps before releasing them and took a 30% or more commission from all revenue, so unregulated marketplaces sprung up in “jailbroken”, or unlocked, phones. The companies, however, mitigated this loss of clientele by voiding the warranties for any device which had been jailbroken, and the number of unlocked devices subsequently decreased substantially. Nokia evolucion

Mobile applications provide a plethora of educational, informational and productivity tools, yet the majority are inaccessible without an Internet connection. A large part of media justice is ensuring Internet access to as many people in the world as possible. One app developer working to solve this problem is Open Garden, based in San Francisco. They offer a free platform for “mesh networking,” where users share their Internet connection with others nearby. This isn’t much different than the concept of mobile hotspots, but it circumvents the hefty fees that mobile carriers tend to charge for users to share their connection. Additionally, Open Garden users can activate Fire Chat, which allows them to connect with nearby users without the need for a connectivity infrastructure. Fire Chat also allows for the creation of a network between devices, a “free, secret web” of sorts that is very conducive to activism. In Taiwan, for example, protesters organizing about a trade agreement with China feared that the government would shut down the Internet and decided to set up a humongous (and hidden) Fire Chat. (cite) This tool is especially useful in countries where free speech is limited and consequences for speaking out can be lethal. To those under the radar of ‘big brother’, this is a blessing. A decentralization of Internet access is beneficial to many more than if the power distribution remains at status quo.Thousands of Ukrainians are continuing to express support to eur

Boycotts are often ineffective; not enough people join the cause and after a while the fervor fades and many forget. Marketing and branding influence many of our spending habits and decisions, but they never tell the whole story. An app founded in Berkeley, California by UCB students and faculty is seeking to change the way consumers make their spending decisions on a day-to-day basis. GoodGuide is a website, and mobile app, that rates and scores consumer products from cars to shampoos. One can even scan the bar code of an item while grocery shopping to see more information about it. This intensifies corporate responsibility because the average, uninformed consumer can choose to support a company that aligns more closely with their desires about social and environmental impact. In fact, GoodGuide offers a system where one can select which corporate responsibilities they feel are most important, after which it provides suggestions as well as alternatives to less responsible products. Their 0 to 10 rating scale is intuitive, their platform sleek, simple and attractive and their research well founded. Another example of this sort of crowdsourcing social activism is the Human Rights Center app with a workplace equality guide. This guide, with a focus on LGBTQ rights, allows users to select products and view their producers’ standing on workplace equality, with detailed breakdowns on which policies are affecting the score.goodguide-mobile-3

The Internet has brought massive amounts of information to the individuals’ fingertips, but with this comes responsibility. The primary focus should be to guarantee Internet access to anyone who desires it across the globe; financial constraints should not be an issue. With this in hand, the dated establishment of technology as a social construct will fall, making way for a truly global community. With many free online resources to learn coding, individuals across the world will continue to express themselves through the creation of mobile applications that find innovative methods to tackle social issues.

Reflections

Cesco’s Book Traces

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First off, wow what a campus. According to the Columbia website, Butler currently has over 2 million books just in the stacks, and many more in several auxiliary libraries such as the Business and Dramatic libraries within the same building. The building’s construction was paid for by Standard Oil during the Great Depression, and the architect was the same who designed Yale’s library. Look at how gorgeous it is:

Dr. Stauffer’s hunt for old marginalia really intrigued me, and if I wasn’t completely convinced by the time I got to the Morningside campus, the examples he presented did the job. The class collectively went up to the stacks and began perusing old books (pre-1923) and searching for any annotations that appeared to be made by the original owners. Albeit looking through some 80 books, including very old Peter Pan prints and many decrepit ones in boxes that fell apart when I touched them, I yielded no results. Each time I’d find something written in the margins or underlined, it quickly became apparent that it was much more recent than what Dr. Stauffer was looking for.

Aside from my failure that day, I think the Book Traces project is a very important one. As the world’s population continues to expand and our collective knowledge as well, it is understandable that space begins to become an issue due to newly printed books. While Butler Library truly is huge, unfortunately, it isn’t infinite. For the most part, digitalization is a good solution; almost everyone has portable computers or e-readers, and therefore we can save all of these texts in online hard drives accessible to all. Critics argue that the feeling of holding a book is irreplicable and that e-books aren’t as engaging. Instead of arguing a subjective point such as that one in order to save the books, Dr. Stauffer takes a more ingenious tack and presents the case that the marginalia in these old texts is often just as valuable as the text itself. We can study the annotations and comments by these ghosts of the past in order to further our understanding and insights about the text. These old texts are living and breathing organisms, not just because they were crafted by trees, but because of the stories that reside within them; a prime example being the love story presented to us on the title page of an old book.

While the sadness that comes along with discarding and rendering these books unaccessible is inevitable, I think there are other solutions. In the same way that new technology plays a large part in the downfall of these texts, it can help save them as well. It would be a tedious task, but just as we can have interactive comments in Google word docs, we could collectively input this marginalia (or at least the more important/intriguing portion of it) into the e-versions of the texts. Additionally we could preserve a part of these old collections according to which were used the most. That way, students and alumni could still access history hands-on for a part of their research, and still find everything else online. I wish I’d found something of value in my search, but the experience of digging through the stacks and seeing what my peers around me found was amazing. I’ve always been a bit wary of these dungeon-like rows and rows of books but our interaction with the library changed the way I viewed it. As technology continues to evolve, we will continue to find better and more efficient ways to preserve these texts in their entirety, while still conserving space.

Reflections

Cesco’s Kelly Provocation

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According to Kevin Kelly, the most important feature of technology and the technium as a whole is its ability to create new choices and opportunities. While we may be a bit disconcerted by the notion of an unstoppable driving force causing certain technological concepts to be inevitable, Kelly reminds and reassures us that a large part of the process is malleable and very influenced by us, Sapiens. Through analysis and constant regulation, we can learn to harness these technologies and appropriate them to more useful tasks if they seem ineffective or wrong in their current use. Kelly strays into some murky waters when he begins to analyze the Unabomber’s anti-civilization manifesto and agrees with portions of the logic. However, he ultimately uses the Unabomber’s and the Amish’s somewhat hypocritical beliefs to further prove his point about the necessity of new technology. Rather than living off the land, the Unabomber’s shack in the woods was chock-full of products purchased from Wal-Mart and other department stores. The Amish, similarly, wouldn’t be able to maintain their lifestyle of selective technological use were it not for the modern civilization right outside their towns. Kelly describes how increased technology in mega-cities like NYC, Shanghai, Mumbai, etc., attracts millions of people yearly from the countryside. Increased technology and civilization offers a plethora of choices and opportunities not present outside of it. The well-researched example of Amish life, though, gives the reader some useful insight; the idea that technology can be selected carefully and methodically on the individual level so that we aren’t overwhelmed. Kelly doesn’t want to decrease technological progress, though, claiming that, “To maximize our own contentment, we seek the minimum amount of technology in our lives. Yet to maximize the contentment of others, we must maximize the amount of technology in the world. Indeed, we can only find our own minimal tools if others have created a sufficient maximum pool of options we can choose from.” (238) In our search for conviviality with the technology we create, and our correlated investigation into the possible harms deriving from it, Kelly believes that it’s near impossible to calculate these harms, but that this shouldn’t stop us from still creating and implementing them. He believes that the best method for testing a technology is by rendering it ubiquitous; by suggesting this he also rejects the Precautionary Principle (which I was taught in AP Enviro. and didn’t question until this book). Another key tool that we have in affecting technology is deciding which direction it’ll go in in terms of transparency and decentralization. While it’s true that technology decreases privacy, we can structure it so that it increases government and corporate transparency. We can hold active roles in the modification of the new tech because of how it is structured, therefore decentralizing the power that one owner/director/company might have.  Kelly believes that an innate search for complexity, diversity, specialization, ubiquity, freedom, mutualism, beauty, sentience, structure and evolvability details the path that technology will take in the coming years. Ultimately, Kelly asserts that technology “brings to us individually of finding out who we are, and more important, who we might be.” (349) We are the curators of the art which is technology. We (NYU kids specifically) are the “haves” that can perfect, reduce the cost of and share the technology needed to expand the lives of the “have-laters.” We have the opportunity to play the infinite game where we play with boundaries rather than play within them. (353) While the negative consequences of our industrialization and construction of ridiculous amount of technology are very apparent, we must not forget that we are lucky to live in this era of choice and opportunity, and that there is the possibility to do all of this on a much cleaner/greener platform.

My provocation question is: What do you think about Kelly’s eventual reflection on religion? He almost gives the possibility that these scientific laws we’ve discovered, which drive evolution and technology, are made by a God. Or that this increasing complexity is God organizing and building himself. Or that we must be modeled after a great creator because we have created this child which is technology. This book was a mind trip but I loved it and I’m looking forward to hearing all of your insights in the next class discussion.