"Like Wow"

I thought that we were going to learn how to use some database system, but I guess that Terry is not that impressed - sort of like he thinks that we can learn that database stuff on our own. His approach was much more ecumenical in that he placed databases along with other storage technologies like XML. What was interesting is that right from the start there was this metaphor of navigating through some sort of information space. That Edgar Codd fellow was impressive, like he is the father of relational databases and structured query language.

The XML stuff was interesting because it seems that everywhere one looks these days there are examples of XML or new technologies based on XML. Like, things are changing very rapidly, so from that point of view, maybe it was a good thing that Terry didn't spend a lot of time on some database system, because now I'm ready to learn about newer technologies. I guess that why this is called the FIT course. An example is that new technology called InfoPath. If we were to take the course in the Spring 2004, instead of this quarter, Terry would have shown us that technology too.

The Gerard Salton stuff, well, maybe Terry is a little over the top on that stuff. It is true that machines don't do a good job finding words, and there a lot of web applications that illustrate this point. But what else is there? In some way, it was about this point in the course that what Terry said in the very first lecture - remember - about the construction and meaning of informatiion, it was at this point in the course that I started to see it all now. It's in this area of automatic indexing that you realize how we use machines to parse language and then somehow determine the meaning of text. That was an interesting part of the course, and maybe I'd like to study that problem some more.

Actually, I'm a little scared of the XPath stuff because I know Terry will expect us to know it cold. If he gives us an example of XPath to write on the final quiz I'm going to give birth to kittens right there in the classroom! I really think that it's so unfair of Terry to expect us to memorize that stuff and know it cold. Why can't we copy? I hate to have to use my head and memorize that kind of stuff!

And then there was that horrible picture of that poor librarian and I think that Terry was really not nice to poke fun at them, the poor dears, and them trying to give names and Dewey Decimal numbers to things like books. Of course, it did sort of illustrate the fundamental problems that Terry was talking about. Which brings up another thing: did you notice that by this time in the course, we were starting to get really philosophical and stuff like that? Like, almost everything Terry talked about provoked somebody in the class to stand up and make a speech. Like everything came down to the meaning of language, etc. And then Terry did that section about metadata on the Web. It was way cool, even if nobody seems to know what's going on.

I liked the section on economics of the web, even if some people in the class were disappointed because Terry didn't know how to make millions on the web. That's the point, people don't know how to get rich quick, so it really isn't Terry's fault.

And then he did that section on the problems of information technology, and like, wow that when you really start to understand all the social problems that we have with IT. I mean, it's dominating so much of our lives now and what was amazing was that Terry had so many examples - like that Toppenish example from the Seattle Post Intelligencer. It made me shake my head, like I thought this course was going to be about how great information technology was and how it's going to solve all our problems, but it turns out, like, the opposite, at least according to Terry, like, he seemed to think that information technology causes as many problems as it solves. Like wow.