Brain Dump #1

September 30th. 5:30 PM. I've completed an individual brain dump exercise from the course lecture. To complete the exercise I had to write down what I was thinking - literally - for 20 minutes non-stop.

The following is a revised version of what I wrote about the, at that time, last time I engaged en any kind of social media.

We are asked to think about the last time we engaged in any kind of social media. For me it was this morning. I didn't get out of bed until 12 o'clock today. The lecture for this course starts at 3 PM, and I have no other lectures on mondays this semester. I woke up around 8:30 AM, though, and then I checked my smartphone for any kind of incoming messages or updates from social sites waiting for me to read and reply. There were updates from facebook from different groups related to the university. I commented on the important updates which i believe will gain from it. I use facebook groups to communicate asynchronously with my study groups throughout the courses which I attend this semester. Hereafter I found my tablet, an Acer Iconia Tab A500 running Android OS, and brought up the remaining literature that I didn't read during the weekend, and read it. At first I had the TV on while reading, but as expected and mentioned by the teacher on the webpage for the course, the readings was heavy and hard to understand - it turned out very. So I turned off the TV and focused as much as possible on reading the material. This turned out to be a good idea.

I've been writing for 15 minutes now, and there are still 5 minutes left. I'm sitting in a classroom with maybe 10 other students typing on their laptops, making the sounds from 10 students' fingers tapping keyboard buttons quite frustrating, because everyone else seems to be writing alle the time, while I'm having a hard time figuring out what to write.

Anyway, the actual last time I engaged in a kind of social media was just before this class when I met up with my study group for this course, which I mentioned earlier. We were to decide between two books, one book to read carefully and one to read strategically. We took good advantage of the Web 2.0 and read a lot of information provided by users and readers about both books. Based on our own assumptions, abstracts from the books themselves and the user-generated information on the Internet, we finally made our decision about which one to read carefully and which one to read strategically.

1st lecture

Today I attended the first lecture in the semester course called Digital Identities. We got an introduction to the structure as well as the content of the course. I even interviewed and got interviewed by one of the other students as part of an exercise, trying to ask good, qualitative research questions. Following a presentation by the teacher, Annette from USA, about her teaching philosophy based on open-endedness, exploring, inductive- and inventive learning - the american way. The difference apparently being that in Denmark we are theoretically strong, and in America they are methodolically strong and faster experienced in that matter. The implementation and completion of the american way of teaching (discussion-oriented instead of traditional lecture-oriented teaching) in all educating aspects is not something that I'm used to. It seems neither are my fellow students in this course. 

Annette went easy on us after the exercise and did a quick, little lecture, the traditional way, about the history of the Internet from way back when computers only had Command Line Interfaces (CLI's) and only experts were able to interact with the machines, through the time where the terms world wide web (WWW), online, offline, virtuality, cyberspace etc. became new and publicly discussed subjects, way up until now where the implementation of the concept Web 2.0 seems to get and keep everybody online 24/7, or at the very least offers the potential for you to go online at any time, 24/7. This era or digital age raise a lot of questions and subjects for us to consider as designers and researchers.

I met some very nice people today, and I have a feeling that following this course will be an awesome and new experience for me. I'm looking forward to it.