This week’s reading was about the intriguing concept new concept of design fiction by Sci-Fi writer Bruce Sterling. Bruce Sterling is a Hugo Award-winning science-fiction writer, has been one of the most vocal advocates of design fictions. According to Bruce, One intriguing new way to think about the future is through the concept of “design fiction.” When you first hear the phrase, it sounds slightly nebulous. One useful definition calls design fiction “an approach to design that speculates about new ideas through prototyping and storytelling.”

In terms of the workshop, it was pretty much normal as usual. We basically went more in depth about setting up our blog. We had more chances to do more exercise like embedding videos, pictures, how to use hyperlink and so on.   Apart from that, I also found particularly found Tim Chapman’ short tutorial on embedding images and videos into our blog posts to be helpful.

Double loop learning by Chris Argyris was particularly interesting. To begin with a brief background on Chris Argyris, he was born in Newark, New Jersey on July 16, 1923 and grew up in Irvington, New Jersey. During the Second World War he joined the Signal Corps in the U.S. Army eventually becoming a Second Lieutenant (Elkjaer 2000). He went to university at Clark, where he came into contact with Kurt Lewin (Lewin had begun the Research Center for Group Dynamics at M.I.T.). He graduated with a degree in Psychology (1947). He went on to gain an MA in Psychology and Economics from Kansas University (1949), and a Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior from Cornell University (he was supervised by William F. Whyte) in 1951

Chris Argyris has made a significant contribution to the development of our appreciation of organizational learning, and, almost in passing, deepened our understanding of experiential learning. His early research explored the impact of formal organizational structures, control systems, and management on individuals (and how they responded and adapted to them). This research resulted in the books Personality and Organization (1957) and Integrating the Individual and the Organization (1964). He then shifted his focus to organizational change, in particular exploring the behaviour of senior executives in organizations (Interpersonal Competence and Organizational Ef ectiveness, 1962; Organization and Innovation, 1965).

Based on the reading from class 1,  I think that the sort of experiences that might go through during this course will be interesting and unique, because it encourages speculative writing and media making, also critical writing that plays with fiction and voice. I will have my own space and blog to write on though, therefore allows me to be the author of my own story

What is a blog? Well, I’ve never really had a blog before, so this is new for me. But well, everyone has to start somewhere.

So, to begin with, a blog is an online media publication, traditionally consisting of varying lengths that are published in reverse chronological order. All posts also have a heading, date & time stamped, and usually attribute authorship. I can see that through this course I would learn how to identify, analyse and solve problems relevant to media practice, and help me write and publish for online media in the future.

The first class was pretty much an introductory into the new semester, and it was mostly spent on setting up our blog, knowing how to log in, knowing the URL of our blog, how to posts, activate spam filter and so on. We also talked about course outlines, assessments, readings, etc. As I had started this course partially before last year, I had a rough idea about what to expect, and it was pretty much the same basically, except for the fact that is now compressed into a 6 week course.

Hello world. I started this course before last year for a few weeks before and here I am again  .  I suddenly just decided to log on to my twitter account after God knows how long.  As I was browsing through all my old posts on my account, I found an interesting video, which I posted ages ago, and I thought was worth sharing here. The video is about a magician from England, who calls himself Dynamo in one of his series Dynamo magic of football. I remember watching the video for the first time, and I was just completely blown away. He fully justifies his nickname, and presented his magic in a unique way. Another reason why I liked the video is because he was performing his tricks in front of one of my favourite footballers. However, as I’m merely reposting this again, I thought I’d show something different for a change.