Weekly Summaries

Week 1.
The first day is always the most nerve-wracking. This week we met Stephen Stockwell, the lecturer, who did an overview of the course. He explained to us what new communication technology is and showed us examples. While listening to his definition of communication, I could not believe how simple it was “the speaker produces a message that is heard by the listener.” Really? No way! Anyway, the rest of lecture talked about how the world uses technology to communicate. It made me wonder about my friends overseas and made me thankful we have the resources to keep in contact. Where would we be without if? Stephen also went on about technology and communication has broadened our knowledge and areas of study. Courses within the two fields range from communication to PR and journalism, and now to the more modern curriculums such as Cyberstudies and web studies. Communication opens the doors, Technology opens the windows.

Week 2.
Numero duo. So this week’s all about the history of the computer and the internet. While going through the lecture I couldn’t help but think “could this be easier?” Not in a sarcastic way but in a constructive way. Surely, a time line and some dot points wouldn’t go astray? Nevertheless the history lesson went on. The first sign of a computer appeared in the 19th century thanks to a man called Charles Babbage and his “sugar mumma” Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace. But when it comes down to it, without Alan Turing we wouldn’t know computers the way we do. Alan Turing is the father of computer science- creating the first computer in World War Two. An odd comment made in the lecture was that he was homosexual and ultimately killed himself due to that fact. Sad. In the 1950s IBM started to commercially make computers which were slow, huge and expensive. Gordon Moore also contributed to the progress of the computer- creating Moore’s Law: a microchips capacity doubles every two years. The lecture went on about the history of Apple, Xerox, IBM & Microsoft and GNU/ Linux. Stephen also defined some key terms such as, cyberspace, the internet, world wide web and email. I would go into more details around these topics however by the end of the lecture I was coming in and out of concentration. The stories of the companies triggered my imagination – I thought of miniature computers that would find information just by reading you thoughts and computerised shoes that made your feet walk when you didn’t want to. Ha! To think of the future and what crazy things that could be…