I feel like this exercise exposed a rather unflattering personality trait in me. I get frustrated easily. I am not one to suffer fools and so I will admit that during the assignment process, my fist pounding on the table was starting to make the family stare and ask questions.

If there is a special level reserved for the “no it alls”, the “security line budders” and and “drivers that don’t signal”, I imagine that this is the form they will have to fill in to get into that “Bad Place”. I got started on this assignment later in the week with many other projects going on in my life and gave up on Thursday evening in frustration at the “almost done” page.

On Friday night, I returned like an addict to try again and again to solve the many GUI challenges and finally made it to the end. My frustrations didn’t end there. I struggled to get outlook to open for about 5 minutes,

and my attempts to upload an image from my phone to this laptop were stymied at every turn. Eventually, everything worked out and I recall myself thinking that I should be using this type of experience as a way to model the type of behaviour I expect from my grade five students. arghghhhh!

The weeks module has been an eye-opener in many respects based on Tristan Harris’ video that reminds us that our media is watching what we watch and picking the path we take whether we like it or not. Having lived through the 2016 American election and the latest Senate hearings with MArk Zuckerberg trying deftly to avoid painting himself into a corner, I am not ignorant to the planning that goes on behind the scenes of the social media world. What scares me most is the lack of human intervention. When an algorithm is the conductor of the train, who will stop us from going off the rails?

I have left poor Carlton Banks on his side because that is the way life is in the real world and I am okay with it. 🙂

Harris, T. (2017). How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/tristan_harris_the_manipulative_tricks_tech_companies_use_to_capture_your_attention?language=en

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