Summer’s How Stuff Works? Activity: Welcome to the Cloud

Academic Cypher

In hip hop culture, the cypher is a circle of MCs, B-boys/B-girls, beatboxers, etc who freestyle and/or battle one after the other without interruption, exchanging rhymes and flows back and forth or around. The cypher is where training takes place and skills are tested, where people collaborate, and where people create "off the top" or written/choreographed, tapping into the place where thought and action come together to share energy and advance the craft...the Academy should aim to do the same.

Completing Summer’s How Stuff Works? Activity helped me to visualize how many connections I make to others through different cloud services. I also realized that I need to remove myself from the cloud a bit. I dislike not having ownership of things. That is a big part of why I refuse to put my music into a Cloud. I imagine one day that I’ll have to pay for space or access to the cloud. I refuse to allow a corporation/organization to control my access to music. I still buy CDs because of this fear. Its a bit crazy, but this activity helped me to see how much of my writing, files, etc are in the cloud. I didn’t have to add many technologies to the mind map because I could connect to the technologies already established.

Academic Cypher