Posted by Krystyna Hunt in
0
comments
The reason I know I graduated is that I received an official invitation to the convocation ceremonies, congratulating me on graduating, and that happens only to graduates.
It will be June 9, 2011 at the Living Arts Centre (large concert hall) in Mississauga. That is the municipality/city that lies between Toronto and Oakville.
With these last few posts (spread across dates more evenly) I will catch up to the happenings in my fourth – and last - semester.
One of the reasons I haven’t written much about this semester as yet is because it was substantially less melodramatic than the previous ones. By this time I have acclimatized and my fellow students (all under 25) have matured and we are not that far apart. Or at least we are used to each other. No one stares at me anymore or shuffles uncomfortably if I sit at their table. They even seem to accept the inevitability that I may be in their group for something.
I have come across several other young students who also have deep wounds from the whole group work business and were quite adamant that they want some kind of rules and discipline imposed on such things. I have come across born leaders who can instantly take charge, organize and carry great responsibility.
For half the last semester’s online publishing responsibility the instructors decided to divide us into workgroups of 15 each and that worked much better than groups of four. With 15 people you can deal with slackers much better. Each group had two students as co-editors and they kept the group pretty much in line and on schedule.
This time the whole class produced 4 magazines (a group of 15 each produced 1 each) with each of us having an appointed position with clearly defined deadlines and responsibilities – you know, like in a real workplace. I got the position of ‘writer’ (4 available) while others chose editor and design production staff.
Because our group chose technology as its subject I wrote on how activism had changed with the new technologies. I wrote about Avaaz.com, a petition site and astonishing enough, I discovered CitizenLab.org, a group whose home was the University of Toronto. Citizen Lab monitors the state of the Internet in various countries and can tell which countries block off the internet and when – and they have software that can find out if your computer has been hacked by various government sources. They discovered that the government of China is, or was trying to, hack into other government computer systems all over the world.
www.citizenlab.org
Because our group chose technology as its subject I wrote on how activism had changed with the new technologies. I wrote about Avaaz.com, a petition site and astonishing enough, I discovered CitizenLab.org, a group whose home was the University of Toronto. Citizen Lab monitors the state of the Internet in various countries and can tell which countries block off the internet and when – and they have software that can find out if your computer has been hacked by various government sources. They discovered that the government of China is, or was trying to, hack into other government computer systems all over the world.
www.citizenlab.org
It all went well. Better than the instructors expected mostly because everyone showed up. Everyone fulfilled his and her obligations and gave it their best. The cover of "Technophilia" is up there. I had no part in designing it, but if you had any idea of how little the ones who did design it, were capable of producing it a year ago, you would see it as miraculous.
