Our group's idea for teaching Conceiving Ada is to divide the class into small groups and assign certain scenes from the movie that we thought raised interesting ideas to each group and have them re create and film the scene from their own interpretation. "Re- create" would be used very loosely allowing students as much freedom as possible when making their own scene. We thought it a useful exercise when trying to understand a movie to actually try to make one yourself. This idea was inspired by Hayles' critique of critique and call for generating knowledge. Instead of critiquing the movie we would like students to generate their own little movies using themes and questions raised by the film.

Notes for 2.23 follow, but you have to click to read them.

 On Tuesday's class, Professor Grobstein mentioned a couple of interesting NYTimes articles. One of them discussed the "threatening scent of fertile women" and the other, "A Romp Through Theories of the Cradle of Life" talks about the theories of the origins of life. This article in particular struck me as very interesting - not only does it challenge Darwin's conceived thoughts, but it also brings me back to Dennett's book.

Our group (vgaffney, izemmahi, and I) came up with several ideas for using Hayles's ideas to teach the movie Conceiving Ada. The first topic we discussed was posthuman scholarship. We thought that a “posthuman” mode of scholarship might look more like the depiction in the film of Emmy's obsession with Ada – scholars learning with technology and using new tools to alter the ways in which they learn. We then touched upon how the film encourages us to forget meaning by giving us a somewhat confusing narrative that requires us to ignore the smaller details in order to appreciate the larger, intellectually useful themes.

I am continuously amazed and convinced by the importance of technology and hyper reading. I really do think that Technology has become an extension of us, more like part of us, as if we're reaching out to outer space, to improve, to expand, to reach for the best and we rely on Technology to do that. Just like rubickscube said, the world wide web has enabled us to communicate in ways never thought of before. Tim Berneres-Lee showed us the initial intention of the web, to communicate and reachout to people, sharing information and creating that sense of community across the world. My mind and the way I think are becoming more and more technology-like, hyper reading, e-mailing, blogging, skyping and connecting with people from over the seas.

In discussing the film Conceiving Ada, our group initially had difficulty finding something coherent to focus on in the film and coming up with a way to teach it. As already noted by many of our classmates, we found the scientific/realistic inconsistencies and the questionable morals of the main character's choices off-putting and distracting. However, we eventually decided that it would be interesting to focus on the questions the film raised about what constitutes life or the self and the idea of a 'medium' in the film by looking at the relationships between the virtual/artificial and reality.

 In the film and in our readings one theme kept reappearing, the quest for greater transparency in the exchange of information.  Each new form of communication comes with the promise of less filtering through experts and greater access to aggregate data and facts.  The internet seems to fulfill that promise.  We disassemble the world around us into disconnected facts and images and make them searchable.  But ultimately, to sift through the amount of information, to make meaning of it, we must rely on new filters.  New filters would include individual search criteria, a primary site that gathers and presents you with information it thinks you want, or another person's summary.

When teaching Conceiving Ada, one might want to consider the ways in which reading the information or "data streams" that are transfered and the most effective ways to draw those meanings from the movie. Focusing on specific scenes in the movie are rather futile as the movie challenges the ways in which typical narration is presented in film. In order to understand the movie, it is most effective to practice the distant reading Hayles described.

 The technological advances in the area of warfare has changed the dynamics of war. The tools used to fight in war have improved, and because of this, the relationship between violence and power has changed. Advances in war weaponry made the task of killing easier, as the ability to exterminate hundreds of people in seconds has become a reality of war. In fact, the great World Wars would not have been successful at extinguishing so many human lives without the aid of technology. Although advances in war weaponry has improved the effectiveness of war, the need to kill has been exacerbated, and that can never be a good thing. Also, the ability for common citizens to obtain firearms has contributed to hundreds of accidental deaths in America every day, many of them young children.