Randy Connolly Blog

Every September in the first week of classes we have an orientation day for our first year students. One of the highlights of the day is a presentation that I and my colleague Mark Schroeder give on how to achieve success as an undergraduate. Rather than make the presentation all preachy, we decided to have a bit of fun. Instead of calling it 19 Ways to Succeed, we called it 19 Ways to Fail Your Courses. This year, I gave it the same treatment that I gave to my other presentations shown in my blog. If you are interested in using this presentation, just send me an email and I’ll send you the PowerPoint file.

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Presentations, Teaching

This May I gave a talk on BlackBerries and iPods for the College’s Faculty Professional Development retreat in Banff. Unlike the typical presentation at a conference, in which you are limited to about 20-25 minutes, I was given a generous 60 minutes, which allowed for significantly more audience participation and discussion, and thus was quite enjoyable for myself.

The two technologies were discussed somewhat separately. The focus of the Blackberry part of the presentation was the idea that this type of device allows for the withdrawal from co-present interactions to engage in technologically-mediated communication via these devices.
One of my on-going research focuses has been technologies that allow an engagment with remote others while at the same time disengaging with those nearby.

The focus of the iPod portion of the presentation was on the way that iPods are used as a way of inhabiting the spaces that people move between. Using anthropologist Marc Auge’s idea of “ordeals of solitude” in non-places (spaces without meaning formed in relation to certains ends such as transport and commerce), I argued that iPods provide a way of aestheticizing the spaces their users move through and thus help them cope with an underwhelming environment.

In an era where there is more and more routine, always-the-same time spent in non-places (such as when commuting), the iPod provides a way of deroutinizing time. The iPod (and to a lesser extent, the Blackberry as well) increases both the ability to achieve (and the desire of its users for) accompanied solitude.

Richard Sennett argued that during the 20th century transportation revolution:

“individual bodies moving through urban space gradually became detached from the space in which they moved, and from the people the space contained. As space becomes devalued through motion, individuals gradually lost a sense of sharing fate with others.”

My worry is that the iPod and the Blackberry will continue this process of detachment from the public places that connect us to others and to our common histories. The history of modern communication and transportation technologies is that of a gradual retreat away from public places to that of the private consumption of goods. As users become immersed in their own sound and communicative bubbles, the significant spaces they habitually pass through and inhabit may increasingly lose significance for them and progressively turn into the non-places of daily life.

There was over 80 slides in this presentation, so I’ve included just a few here.

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Presentations, Research

Below I’ve included some snippets from my lecture on American Progress from my course COMP 3309 - Computers and Society.

As mentioned in a previous class, one of the ways that I am organizing the section on “Thinking About Technology” is by categorizing it into four subsections that describe four common narratives on technology. They are: progress, convenience, determinism, and control.

Today, I want to talk about progress. In western culture (and especially in the United States), technology = progress, and vice versa in that someone who opposes a technology is often characterized as being opposed to progress in general.

But what is progress? At its simplest it refers to moving forward. More specifically for us, it is a belief that something improves over time.

However, this is by no means the only way to think about time. Some (older) cultures see time cyclically or if they do envisage time linearly, they might see time as a descent.

Prior to the Enlightenment (17th and 18th centuries), it was much more common to think of time as a descent in quality from the ancient world. Alternately, it was/is also common to think of time as a series of rise and falls. This latter belief is wonderfully encapsulated by Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire series of paintings, which show the rise and fall of a civilization.

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But throughout the Enlightenment (which refers to a phase in western philosophy and culture life in which reason and science became progressively prioritized over tradition and religion as arbitrar of truth or knowledge), progress in science and knowledge was gradually believed to be main means to achieving social progress. This belief is wonderfully captured in Joseph Wright’s painting Philosopher Giving a Lecture on the Orrery, in which the light of science actually illuminates/enlightens the children (the future), the bourgeoisie, and the working class/servants.

Joseph Wright , Philosopher Giving a Lecture on the Orrery

By the 19th century, the idea that history was a progression to a higher state had become one of the key ideas of western culture. Comte, Hegel, Marx, Darwin, and Spencer were some of the key intellectual figures in this movement.

This belief in progress was an absolutely vital aspect of American culture from the 1850s to 1950s. In particular, the type of progress that was valorized during this time period in America was technological progress. This can be seen quite clearly in the popular art of this time, such as Currier and Ives lithograph Across the Continent or John Gast’s American Progress painting. In these works, technological progress (the train, the telegraph) are moving westward, bringing civilized settlements and education, as well as banishing unruly nature and natives to a past of the setting sun.

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The newly emergent capitalist class were especially drawn to the belief that progress is equal to social progress. Why?

Recall that from the 1780s-1890s, the USA and Western Europe experienced dramatic growth in economic individualism and an expansion of an urban-based workforce. The new 19th Century middle and upper class were not rich from owning land but from their control over new technologies. These technologies made available new material goods; their message to the public at this time was that these new goods were in fact the definition of progress.

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By the turn of the 20th Century, technological progress had become an end in itself.

Courses, History, Presentations

I recently gave a talk to students at Western Canada High School about careers in computing. Like most IT-related programs, our Computer Information Systems applied degree has seen a massive decrease in numbers since 2001. These low enrollments have never really picked up, even though the job market for our graduates in Calgary is phenomenal. I put together this presentation in the hopes of attracting a few more students into our program.

I tried a new approach with this presentation. I wanted to make it visually more punchy and not look like the typical PowerPoint presentation. I’ve included a few captures of some sample slides from the presentation.

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The complete presentation is available below. You are free to use it, but please do not re-distribute it or re-post it.

high school session 2007 march.pdf (2.00 mb)

Presentations, Teaching