For starters, I was surprised to see two Wikipedia entries assigned this week. In my Week One posting I linked to an article about the accuracy of Wikipedia, but at the same time I spend a lot of time in my library pushing students away from Wikipedia towards more reputable sources of information, thus I was a little taken aback to see two Wikipedia pages assigned for this week. And indeed, in the 2nd paragraph of the computer hardware entry there's one grammatical error and one spacing error.
As a visual learner, I appreciated that the Moore's Law entry was supplemented by a video. Left out of both these "readings," however, are the roles played by economies of scale and globalization in reducing circuit and transistor size. Briefly, export-led growth, a strategy pursued by some Asian countries, played an integral role in the exponential growth of processing power. I think a discussion of the economics surrounding the shrinking of computers would have been nice.
The video mentions that if cars followed this law, they would cost a quarter and go a million miles per hour. My rejoinder is that if cars performed as poorly as many computers, we'd all be dead. (I'd love to take credit for this joke, but like a lot of things hi-tech, he got to it first.) Perhaps this gets us back to the hardware vs. software part of the debate, and the role of RAM.
The museum was a nice trip down memory lane for someone who grew up reading Popular Science and watching Transformers. I highly recommend some of the older videos on their YouTube page to see how far we've come.
2 comments:
I was also surprised by the extent that we are relying on Wikipedia. This was actually my muddiest point for week 2. Since my background with technology is not quite as advanced as others in the class, I feel like I need more source of information.
I have a high school junior at home and Wikipedia has rapidly become an accepted resource for most of her AP classes. I'm glad you raised the issue as I'd love to have a group debate about it. I've long questioned whether it is a good thing or not and am not sure how I feel. I also appreciate your sense of humor in your blog! BTW, in answering your Japan question in my blog comment, yes, I was a JET. I love Osaka! I was in Sapporo.
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