Digital Romanticism: A Pixlr Remix of "Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog"

So, I have really been enjoying a new digital tool.  It is called Pixlr.  Pixlr is like an online Adobe Flash version of Adobe's Photoshop.  It is quite as nice, it doesn't have all the stuff photoshop does, but it has all the basics.  If you know how to use Adobe Photoshop, using Pixlr is almost the same.  If you want to learn how to use Photoshop and are a BYU student, BYU provides free online training at http://www.lynda.com.erl.lib.byu.edu .

Anyway,  check out this cool picture that I made with Pixlr!  In my Digital Civilization class we are preparing for the night where we will showcase our final projects.  In class we had a discussion about what we would name the evening presentation and also how we would market it.  Well... this is my idea...

Showcase evening name: Education 2.0: Teaching and Learning History Through a Digital Lens
Target audience: Other BYU students, BYU teachers, family, and friends
Marketing Strategy: Flyers/Posters to students of the above image with additional information, email to Honors Students, Advertise through the Center for Teaching and Learning, and word of mouth/Facebook.

What do you think?  Ideas?  Comments?

I plan on putting the time, date, and quick explanation  in the dark rocky part at the bottom of the image.

How To Get Involved in Distributive Computing

Einstein@Home is a distributive computing program
that looks for gravitational waves.

Today in my digital civilization class we talked about distributive computing.  The basic idea behind this is that most computers are wasting a lot of computing power.  When your computer is running, it performs cycles.  A cycle is when a computer gets (or is given) a task to do and then does it.  This is also known as a fetch-execute cycle.  When you are not using your computer, your computer has lots of empty cycles, in other words, it is doing nothing.  Instead of wasting your computer's ability to compute, I will explain to you some simple ways you can donate your spare computing power.

Adventures in the Galapagos

Evolution is the topic for Tuesdays class discussion, so I think it might be interesting to share some experiences that I have had.  I had the opportunity to live in Ecuador for two years in middle school.  The Galapagos Islands are a territory of that country; so, while I was there, my parents took the family to go see them.  I was fascinated by the wild life I saw there.  This was the place where Charles Darwin first thought of his theory of evolution by looking at the finches (commonly known as "Darwin's Finches").  Darwin noted that among the finches he saw there, all seemed to have beaks adept to the particular foods available to them on their respective islands.

It wasn't just the finches that Charles Darwin found interesting.  As highlighted by popular culture in the movie "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World" (2003) the character Dr. Stephen Maturin is captivated by the flightless cormorants he finds on the Galapagos Islands.  This small geologic hot spot island chain has numerous examples of creatures that have evolved from their parent species to better suit their environments.  Here are some just to name a few

New Learning Tools

I met with my group today and we discussed  our three different digital literacy labs.

• Rhett taught us about Data Organization Tools like Mind-Meister and Bubbl.us 
• Brian taught us about IP Telephony like Skype
• I taught my group about RSS Feeds and Feed Readers such as Google Reader

It was fun because as we were teaching each other we also discovered some new things.  For example, as Brian was teaching us about all the sweet things that Skype can do like phone conferencing and screen sharing, we decided to try out Google Chat 's new form of IP telephony.  We called ourselves and heard ourselves on Rhett's laptop.  How cool is that?!

From Rhett I learned about some cool organization tools and he pointed out to me that Mind-Meister ISN'T free!  Sad!  I am a lowly college student, I can't pay for online services.  So, Rhett directed us to a free version of mind mapping software.  Bubbl.us !  I tried it; I like it, so I have embedded in this post a mind map that I created.  It is an overview of what I learned today from my classmates.  Enjoy!

My Eyes Hurt

The problem with computers is that if you stare at one a lot during the day your eyes start to hurt before you go to bed.  Anyone ever seen the movie Battlefield Earth?  In one scene of the movie the hero is placed in a learning machine which mainstreams knowledge into his mind via his eyes (consider how Neo learning Kung Fu in The Matrix).  (See above picture)

This is me (from my webcam) after being
 in front of my computer screen for too long.

I am still getting used to this self-directed learning idea.  In fact, my new Digital Civilizations class is really confusing as far as what I should be doing.  I enjoy how the class focuses a lot on digital things, but also, because I have to get on a computer to do stuff for class I end up falling victim to my addiction to wikipedia, and youtube.  For Example:

I read the class assignment on Utopia my Sir Thomas More.  Unfortunately, reading an exert from a story I didn't know about piqued my hunger for wiki knowledge and I was instantly Google-ing who in the world Sir Thomas More was and what was his book about.  Fascinating.  It was interesting how More wrote that there was still slavery on the Island of Utopia.  Today a society with slavery would be far from a Utopia.

I really enjoyed reading about the geo vs. heliocentric models of the world.  That is because I delve into this realm often because I am an astronomy major.  So it turns out that even the heliocentric model is wrong!  The sun isn't the center because there is a center to the galaxy to which the sun is a part of.  There are billions of other stars and planets (exoplanets being my area of research) so we could never say the sun was the center of anything except a meager solar system on the edge of the galaxy in the Orion Arm.  Makes you feel small doesn't it.  Well, it was Galileo who first pointed a telescope towards the heavens and noticed that Jupiter had moons.  Guess everything doesn't revolve around the Earth!

About the Author

I look like I've just gotten out of an epic battle don't I? (Minus the car, seatbelt, and modern clothing that is.)
Regardless, my life has been one long exciting adventure.  In true epic fashion I will begin my narrative by saying the following:

"Call me Ishmael."  Unfortunately for this story, my name isn't actually Ishmael, it is Andrew DeWitt and I don't actually want to be called Ishmael, I just like really enjoy quoting things such as that iconic opening line from Moby Dick by Herman Melville.  Here, however are somethings you can call me.

"Call me Asian."  I grew up all over the world.  My dad worked in U.S. Embassies around the world so I grew up outside the US: Ethiopia, Uganda, Ecuador, and China.  Having served my mission in Singapore and Malaysia, I've spent more time in Asia that I have in the US.  I can speak Chinese, Malay, and some Spanish.    Dispite all this, I do consider myself an American and I am proud to be such.

"Call me a Physicist."  I am studying Physics-Astronomy at Brigham Young University.  If you were wondering, yes my brain hurts sometimes.

"Call me General."  I am in the Air Force ROTC.  Next August I will graduate, commission, then "Off [I] Go! Into the Wild Blue Yonder!"  Who knows if I'll ever be a general, but I want to be the kind of person that could be a general.  I love planes and I am excited that I'll get to be around planes in the Air Force.

Finally...  "Call me Mormon!"  I am a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  I love the Church, and I love the scriptures, especially The Book of Mormon. My wife and I currently teach the gospel to the younger children of our ward (congregation) in Primary.