The most important thing I learned this year is that there is a fundamental difference between using technology and owning it. Most of us spend our lives as digital renters. We pay monthly fees for apps that track our habits or manage our schedules. We use these tools because they are convenient. But we do…
I started this course as a passive user, someone who just downloaded apps and hoped they worked. I’m finishing it as an owner. The biggest takeaway for me is that technology isn’t neutral. Remi Kalir talked about how “digital” literally comes from our fingers (digits), making marks. Whether it’s a pen or a keyboard, we…
This week was about Generative AI with Lucas Wright. The most useful takeaway was his shift in how we define work: we’re moving from “searching and creating” to “generating and evaluating.” That’s exactly how I handled my Excel project. I didn’t manually write every line of VBA code, but I had to be the one…
I’ve finished my project on Excel automation. The goal was simple: stop using “free” habit-tracking apps, build my own tool that I actually own and learn on the way. What I Built I didn’t know much about code when I started, so I used AI to help me write the formulas and VBA scripts. I…
The final stage of this project was personalizing the interface for my specific goals. I’ve refined the categories to focus on habits. The software includes health and fitness tracking. Because I built this myself instead of “renting” a subscription app, I have total control over the data. No hidden algorithms are trying to keep me…
Once the formulas were working, I wanted the sheet to do more than just sit there. I wanted it to act. This required VBA, which stands for Visual Basic for Applications. It is the programming language built into Excel. I used AI to write a script for a “NEXT MONTH” button. When clicked, the button…
The first part of building this software was getting the math right. Most people use Excel as a calculator, but to make a tracker, you have to use it as a logic engine. I focused on the “Momentum Streak” and “Daily Progress %” rows. The math is simple but effective: the sheet counts how many…
I’ve gone back to explore earlier course material for my next couple of reflections to make sure I’m catching the core ideas I missed earlier. This week was about social annotation with Remi Kalir. The most striking point Kalir made is that “digital” comes from digits, our fingers. Whether you’re using a pen in a…
This week, I listened to Maha Bali talk about digital inequities, and she used an analogy that really stuck with me. She talked about how, in the past, pilot chairs in planes were designed based on the “average” measurements of all pilots. The problem was that because nobody is actually average, the chairs didn’t really…
This week, I watched the lecture with Nodin Cutfeet, and it shifted how I think about why we even bother learning tech in the first place. Nodin works with Indigenous youth in Northern communities, and they pointed out something obvious that most of us miss. The standard “Silicon Valley” pitch doesn’t work for everyone. We’re…