Varsity's Play

Being sick, having three tests, and working three times last week put me behind a little bit…. So, I still need to blog over Kay and Goldberg’s Personal Dynamic Media.

However, I only want to make a few comments about the beginning of this essay.

What I got from this piece wasn’t so much about the Dynabook, but about completely understanding the definition of a medium from the section “Background, Humans and Media.” We have been talking about different forms of mediums all semester, but Kay and Goldberg’s explanation of a medium was a really strong definition. “Although thinking goes in one’s head, external media serve to materialize thoughts, and through feedback, to augment the actual paths the thinking follows.” People have been using different mediums to represent their ideas from the beginning of time. Kay and Goldberg explained however that these mediums have been mostly nonconversational and “do not change in response to the viewer’s wishes.” I thought it was interesting that they chose to use the word viewer instead of author. This was one of their goals with the Dynabook. This reminds me of Dr. C’s Wikicentral that we, cough cough, are supposed to be editing and adding to- so the site can be changed in response to OUR wishes, the viewers’ wishes.

So, now that we have that advantage, we should probably take advantage of it like we’re supposed to