A Slightly New Direction…

So far in my blog posts, I have either given you a tedious amount of background on me or went into relatively heavy theoretical stuff that I state as fact and don’t site references for (see The Components of Thought, The Origin of Thought, and Thought and the Environment as examples).

I think, moving forward I’m going to try to write more concrete posts that are more relevant to more people.  I’m not saying I won’t dabble in the theoretical.  I’ll just do less of it, and will better tie it to concrete applications.

My interest in computers is based primarly on interactions, such as the following:

• People interacting with themselves.
• People interacting with other people.
• People interacting in communities.
• People interacting with software.
• Software interacting with other software.
• And, lastly, people interacting with other people through software.

I think I got them all.  Anyway, the point is that there are lots of applications, particularly in the Web 2.0 community that are all about the above interactions.  Also, there are a lot of interesting ideas in both the design world and the software development world as well.  So, from now on I will try to hit these.

Eventually, I would also like to contribute software.  As I explore the landscape, I’ll better be able to formulate my ideas.

I think my next post will be about Twitter, as I’ve become a bit of an addict as of late.  My twitter id is @purecognition.  Give me a follow, if you like.

If you have been reading my blog, I thank you for your patience as I find my voice.  If you have an ideas for things I should look into, based on my previous posts, please feel free to comment.

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One more guideline…

Oh yeah, I almost forgot one more guideline. As stated in a previous post, I’m going to stick with a conversational writing style. I can’t stand formal writing, and I know that I won’t keep up with this if I move in that direction. When someone writes formally, I feel like they are trying to almost disguise that they “a human actually wrote this.” I like humans too much to disguise my being one. I’m probably one of the few people I know that went into computers because they like humans.

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My Background – Part 7: From Cognitive Science to Computer Science…

I was worried that I wasn’t going to be as interested in computer science as psychology. But, that fear soon subsided. It turned out that computer science is just as rich as cognitive science. And, there is the added benefit of the fact that human created computers and understood their creation better than the mind. It was nice not to have to “guess” as much, and just know that that was how us humans did it. To bad God couldn’t have at least been a guest lecturer in some of my psychology courses.

Also, it turns out that studying computers IS studying humans. My study of the human mind didn’t stop when I because a computer scientist. Humans created and programmed computers in their own image…on multiple levels.

Right now, a thousand examples of the statement above are swimming through my head. However, I’m going to stop with it because those examples each deserve there own posts. I’m also going to stop with my “background” for three reasons. First, my “career” experiences will make it into the future blog entries by the very nature of what they are. Secondly, as helpful as my career has been in terms of learning experience, my path before it is what helped me form the interests that I have now and am blogging about…for the most part. And, lastly, I’m getting bored.

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My Background – Part 6: Full circle…

The two more notable research experiences that I had was in a conceptual development lab and a cognition and skill acquisition lab. I won’t go into a lot of detail right now about these. But, the short of it, is that I learned how people create and experience the world around them and how this affects their perception of their world and how they consciously navigate it.

While I was studying psychology, computers were pretty much just for writing papers and checking email. However, at some point (which currently escapes me), I obtained a renewed interest in them. It occurred to me that a computer is an extremely flexible and potentially intelligent environment for human consumption. It can be molded into virtually anything that is needed to essentially supplement the human mind.

So, after graduating with my degree in psychology, I decided to forgo the lucrative career that a bachelor’s degree in psychology would afford me and go back for a computer science degree. I was told to me that I didn’t necessarily have to go get a computer science degree to get into software development, but I am a strong believer in understanding the fundamentals of a discipline before practicing it…at least for myself. Also, I knew that it would be easier to get a job in it if I had a piece of paper saying I knew it.

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