What tools did I use during Philosophy of HCI?

What kind of question is that, I ponder? The interesting thing is that studying philosophy requires not much more than a brain (one would joke that a brain with a liking for knowledge, but I digress). I would argue that, before anything, I used my brain a lot.

Ha ha, funny, you'd answer, we all use our brains for learning; but do we? If you're in a simple listen-and-repeat mode, your brain is being taken for a ride - you go to a lecture, you listen (or you waste away playing silly games on your laptop in the hopes that whatever seeps in through the cracks in our concentration accounts for learning) and you then repeat ready-made concepts in a test. We've all been there - able to answer some questions on a given subject, but unable to think critically about it. But if you don't allow yourself to philosophize during a philosophy course, what else are you going to do? I have seen philosophy courses being taught that way - teacher blabbers philosopher's names and their schools of thought, students "learn" them, never think of what they had to say, game over. Not this course though - we heard of movies, football matches, idleness, but not of Spinoza, Kant, Deleuse, Nietzsche. Not much space for easily digested factoids on philosophy there.

So we were not taken for a ride - or maybe we were, but we had to pedal our own bikes this time. Like one of these nice GPS-enhanced countryside explorations Emanuele talked so much about, we were powering our own little exploration of the field and, in the end, our 'brain muscles' hurt, but have we seen some beautiful stuff in the way!

Another good friend of mine that I took to these rides was my trusty smartphone. Nowadays, saying "I brought a smartphone" is like saying "I wasn't naked" - we all carry these little buggers everywhere. But just like our brains, it's not having one that counts, but how you use them. From the very first "experiencement", I used mine as a chamber of isolation, pumping tunes into my head, as a source of easily searchable information, or simply a nice escape for my idle times. Oh, what effect this course had on what I think of idle times - but that I'll leave for another post.

Just as when riding a bike, I could definitely finish this course only using my 'brain muscles', but my trusty sidekick was there. When biking through the marshes and hills and woods of the subject, I could find solace - and distraction, and sometimes some cheap satisfaction during times of doubt by quickly Googling away some question - thanks to my phone. My sidekick. My side-brain.