understanding technology
Idea: an intensive 4 week course on technology, covering all of the basics, say 2 hours/weekday or something ridiculous like that. People walk out knowing how things “work”.
In a chance encounter, I was approached yesterday by a business-student acquaintance of mine who was seeking some basic advice on some iPod add-on he envisioned. I hope I impressed him with my intimate knowledge of Apple-trivia, but the gist of it is that he seems to regard these things with the same kind of magical awe and reverence I place on, well, bussiness-y stuff.
(Can you tell I had a summer internship at a bank?)
I don’t blame him. He hasn’t spent years studying stuff like that. Thusly, there must be an endless sea of business students whose future will be ruled by and for the use of technology. The increasing rise of Technology is, for better or for worse, inescapable. It’s already completely taken over the backbone of the financial industry and the increasing ubiquity of personal electronic devices like crackberries and their push-email-everywhere ecosystem seems only to confirm this.
Example topics: (Week 1-2) Turing machines, basic procedural programming, which leads into, say, (Week 2-3) basic CPU design (cascading half adders should be sufficient), and then basic networking principles (how the intertubes works).
The important thing here is to impress the notion of encoding information (everything is a series of bits) and basic computation. On a grandiose, super abstract level, that’s all that ever happens: devices exchange series of bits, perform computations on those, and return other series of bits. The real lesson is that the present level of technology has gotten very good at abstracting all of this away from you, into text fields, windows and sound files, not pages and virtual tables and cache hits. Oh, and that copying bits is so easy and so cheap it’s almost free.
I’m not entirely sure how useful such a brief survey of these topics would be, but the ultimate goal would be leaving the course being able to tell whether people are bullshitting you or not, not actually implement things yourself.
What do people leave Information Technology Management knowing?
Conversely, I should find me an “Intro to Economics” book.
