Week 1

This first week of Cogs 121 was a nice introduction to the course. The Tuesday lecture was informative and reassuring for me, especially since I do not have much programming experience and was afraid that it would affect my learning experience. After reviewing some history of the internet, I concluded the take home message of that lecture to be that technology is continually changing and it is not any specific programming language that is crucial to learn, but more importantly it is to be aware of the rapid evolution of technology and to understand how to approach it.

The thursday lecture more focused on the "calculation model of computation" metaphor and paradigm, which i becoming a less viable metaphor in recent times with newer technologies, such as the world wide web. Now, the new model is computation as interaction, with the utilization of the modern G.U.I. (event driven programming, widgets, & interactor tree). The lecture capped off with some background history of Tim Berners Lee and his creation, the internet, and other people that influenced him.

Since then, I have started my website that is due on Thursday. I downloaded firefox and firebug, and went through a couple of the tutorials on HTML. Since I am not confident in programming, it took me a while to get started. I'm finally getting the hang of it.. and my project is a work in progress. I'm doing a website for my sorority, which makes it even more fun for me.

I also have tentative group partners for the final project, and I am still brainstorming for what we could use for our content.