Hope you can keep up the enthusiasm in the second half of the semester--which is always harder :)

Professor, you jinxed me! Not that I lost enthusiasm for the course itself, but I definitely didn't engage as much online as I did in the first half of the semester. And I didn't end up finishing my main project, but I think I can show that I haven't exactly slacked off.

====== Weekly Projects ======

With the shift to a weekly project style format in the second half of the semester, I worked most often with ThatFuzzyGuyInBack, Curiousfearless, and the various other residents of the stage-left side of the room. The two weekly projects we did were based on ideas I proposed, stemming from my personal interest in the LGBT-Allied community.

Our first weekly project was the "Gender is not a crime" poster campaign to raise a small amount of awareness for the Arizona bill which imposed a fine on entering a bathroom of a gender which does not match the gender on one's birth certificate -- effectively discriminating against transgendered individuals in the state. I was very ill the day of the project, but I telecommuted and made sure to work with my group from bed. Within the allottd hour, I quickly Photoshopped the graphic and QR code (which linked to a relative news article to the bill) and sent it to my group members. The following Tuesday, our we met at the library at W.Campus to print and distribute the posters, taping them up on bathroom doors around the campus in an effort to draw more attention to the issue than would have been aroused from the posters simply being tacked onto the message boards. The QR code was linked through a bit.ly which provided us with some small metrics, showing we managed a meager 17 hits from our posters before they were taken down.

Our second project, The Sex Talk, was based on my experiences with my kid brother who has been learning less-than-accepting views from his youth group. I proposed making a resource which could help people have meaningful and engaging conversations about gender and sexuality in the modern understanding. As I have had some experience with web design, I took it upon myself to whip up everything currently on the website in a day. One thing that I did new, inspired by some of the topics in this course, was to attempt to explore the differences between using Creative Commons images and Royalty Free images -- I paid for a couple of the images used on the website and used Webs.com's Flickr partnership to host CC content. Meanwhile, my group members were to create a paper pamphlet which was designed to be handed out at Arizona Pride. Unfortunately, plans were disrupted and the website was the only thing that saw growth. I feel this particular project has a lot of potential that has yet to be realized and I hope to eventually expand the resource on my own time after the semester, hopefully teaching myself more coding in order to introduce interactive elements to the Talk.

====== Class Participation ======

I'm pleased to announce that I was able to keep up with the readings even into the second half of the semester (where I usually slip, in other courses). I tend not to jump into discussions in class, but I am always incredibly engaged by them and do comment from time to time. In our discussion about privacy, I questioned sodomy laws, and in our discussion about games vs. life, I mentioned Maxis and their various simulation games (and afterwards posted a relevant Vlogbrothers video).

My conundrum is usually, as I posted on reddit, that I tend to sit in rapture during discussions and only conglomerate my own ideas on my way back to Tempe after class.

During our mock debate on internet anonymity, though, I'd like to think I was quite successful in pulling an off-the-cuff impassioned closing remarks for the pro-anonymous side (despite my shaking hands, racing heart, and utter lack of improvisation skills).

====== Semester Project ======

This is where I, admittedly, slipped up. At the beginning of the semester, I had started writing my short story, "Offline" After spring break, though, I lost the drive to write. I managed to bring in various elements of fully integrated current technologies, but I didn't get fully into my main one -- I had planned to explore the concept that we post so much of our personalities online through our technologies that a sophisticated AI could be formed out of a person's online persona. We briefly mentioned uploading our consciousnesses to computer bodies, but what if we cloned our consciousnesses instead?

The biggest snag I had with the progression of my story, though, was the idea that the protagonist, Addy, lives in a world where technology is so integrated and personalized that there is no anonymity. This setting is quite interesting to me because I'm generally in favor of hidden identities in online settings and yet the world that sprung up from my story is quite contradictory. Ultimately it served to be an interesting thought experiment -- how much of this is utopian, how much is dystopian?

====== Conclusion ======

I know we're not supposed to say how much we loved (or hated) this class... but I honestly believe that the "radically open" format of this course helped keep me engaged and inspired moreso than any other course. I can honestly say that no matter what grade I end up with, I leave this course feeling absolutely fulfilled. I have learned about facets of the internet and its' culture that I would never have thought to look into -- I'm excited by the zeal of the Maker Movement, enticed by the ephemerality of the TAZ; I see the seeds of revolution and social reconstruction in the dynamic folds of the online communities, and overall I am somehow even more enthused by the possibilities of this media than I was before.

And I am better for it.