Shared Minds
Show Course DescriptionThis class asks students to think about thinking. Based on first person introspection, meditation and readings in psychology, students will examine the experience of their minds. Then we look at how computation, in particular recent developments in AI, can better work as a medium to capture and share that experience. Class time is evenly divided between conceptual discussions around the psychology of media, looking at student work, and then learning coding skills for the following week. The early course materials direct students towards developing and implementing multi-user web apps to improve our society’s social media ecosystem but final projects often take different directions.
On the technical side, the class gently picks up from any introductory javascript coding class. Compared to Creative Computing it moves away from the p5.js in favor of vanilla javascript in an environment like Visual Studio Code assisted by AI. The class encourages students to find a healthy balance of using “vibe coding” while maintaining the ability to specify overall architecture and debug individual lines of code. In particular the technologies covered are Replicate.com’s API’s for Machine Learning Models for generation and relation of text and images, Firebase tools for server based databases, realtime sharing, storage and authentication. Libraries like UMAP for dimension reductions, Three.js for realtime rendering, P5LiveMedia for Audio and Video sharing, and Colab for running python notebooks.
Each week students will post a quick sketch experimenting with the technology as well a short written response to a prompt together with a short reading or video.