S15 Awakening the Digital Imagination
New Media Seminar for Virginia Tech faculty, staff and graduate students
Re-watching Ted Nelson’s eulogy for Doug Engelbart last week reminded me of one of the many (many) reasons Nelson’s thinking about computers and society resonate so powerfully with me. Mourning the loss of one of the most pivotal stars of the new media revolution by indicting his colleagues and making them laugh (nervously), invoking the […]
I’ve posted before about how central Doug Engelbart is to the Awakening of the Digital Imagination. This time I’m going to let an image — or more precisely, a mural — do the talking. Created by Eileen Clegg and Valerie Landau for the fortieth anniversary of the Mother of All Demos, this graphic representation of […]
I am not a numbers person, but reading Alan Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (NMR), and watching The Imitation Game has me thinking about numbers, what they mean, and what we make of them. The excerpt in the New Media Reader was first published in 1950 and teems with binaries. Turing’s original conception of the […]
We’ve been thinking through the “Awakening” of the Digital Imagination all semester, and today the New Media Seminar concludes with Scott McCloud’s “Time Frames” and Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s proposal for the HTTP protocol that created the World Wide Web. Now that the Web is in it’s twenty-fifth year I wonder how we might think about […]
At the end of an evening of tinkering — fiddling, exploring and stirring — tired and scattered, but invigorated by newly-made connections and the promise of more coherence tomorrow, I offer these modified nuggets-cum-stepping stones from the learning webs of Ivan Illich to those of the 21st-Century connected course. 1) From the introduction to De-Schooling […]
