A Final Reflection: My world, My country, and Me

As a final reflection for this class I first decided to make wordles of the headlines for all of posts. So here they are:

A Digital Revolution

Here is the video from our final presentation! This experience and class have been amazing. I hope you can get as much from this video as we have to give.


Watch live video from Digital Civilization on Justin.tv

Bazaar Remix: The summation of everything I've learned

Home Page for CatB Remix

For most classes as they conclude students take all of the information they have learned and spill it out onto a piece of paper in a series of A,B,C,D,None and occasional short responses.

This class has, naturally, taken a different, and in my opinion more fulfilling, route. We are sharing what we have learned in a series of presentations of various projects. Go here for a complete list of projects and more information on the night.

Not only is this event exciting for attendees because of what they can learn but this event excites us for the exact same reason. It is the ultimate showcase of the efforts of two of the most amazing professors on BYU's campus. Their students taking what they have learned and sharing with others, the ultimate goal of the entire class.

Wordles for Cathedral and Bazaar

Blog Nomination

The class blog that I have read most consitently throughout the semester has been Shuan's, "How did all this get here?". Always Shaun engages her reader because she brings her style and personality to the fore in every post. One of my favorite posts from her is "The Girls", a simple title for a powerful story. This post show self directed learning as Shuan looked for an event that captured the legacy of the Industrial Revolution in a single tragic event.

Shuan as does well in finding various visual resources to incorperate in her blog. For this post she found this engaging video:


Additionally Shuan's post was so interesting to some of her readers that they connected to "the Girls" and Sara Wills even mentioned Shuan's post in her blog.

New Direction

As the end approaches for the Cathedral and the Bazaar project we keep changing and editing ideas and directions. I believe we have settled on a final direction though. If you want to come and see the final edition it will progress on the internet here.

However, if you want to come and see all of the spectacular final projects yourself, the class is putting on a presentation on December 9, 2010 at 7pm. The place is the 3108 room of the Jesse Knight Building on the BYU-Provo campus. All of the projects should be great, however if you are like most of America and motivated by food, there is a promise of some of that too. I recommend that you attend for the purely intellectually insightful experience of viewing the projects and learning how they were created for the new world of Web 2.0

Here is a further taste of our project:

Bouncing Back

For those of you following our groups progress on our final project you will notice that we recently, as in 10 minutes ago, suffered a slight setback. Here is the email from our fearless leader Brad.

So fearless teaching leaders, if you are wondering about this groups progress, that is it! Hurray!

Web 2.0 and the overwhelming feeling of trying to learn it "all"

Web 2.0 is the nickname for the socially driven World Wide Web that we find flooding us with information every single day. Not only is there new information daily, but new ways to view, record, and share information with those that matter, and those that matter less.

Paul Anderson and Tim O'reilly outlined six ideas that form the basis of the driving force behind Web 2.0:


1 Individual production and User Generated Content
2 Harness the power of the crowd
3 Data on an epic scale
4 Architecture of Participation
5 Network Effects
6 Openness

Three of these held particular interest for me, as they directly relate to the final project my team and I are attempting to piece together, for a grade and the rest of the world to enjoy.
1) Individual production and User Generated Content
3) Data on an epic scale
6)Openness

Final Project: Initial Internet Search

For the final project of the awesome Digital Civilizations class I am working in a group of three, to remix the current online version of Eric Raymond's The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Prof. Zappala originally got us interested in this project but I am now really excited to see where it goes.

Over the weekend I have done a preliminary scooping of the internet for related works. I came up with a couple of different (and similarly boring) versions of the same text and a couple of other references from MIT's open course ware.

Here are the different online versions:

• http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
• http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/
• http://www.redhat.com/support/wpapers/community/cathedral/whitepaper_cathedral.html

Here is the audio file that we listened (or at least we were supposed to listen to it for class):

• http://catb.org/esr/writings/homesteading/linux1_d50_96kbs.mp3

Here the book is available for purchase on O'reilly:

• http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596001087

Here are the links for the two PDF files from MIT:

• http://ocw.mit.edu/resources/res-6-004-principles-of-computer-system-design-an-introduction-spring-2009/online-textbook/readings_open_5_0.pdf
• http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of-management/15-351-managing-the-innovation-process-fall-2002/lecture-notes/lecture2324.pdf