Day 21 - What is a Human? #edcmooc

As week 3 draws to a close, I realize we have only one week of content left and then a mad dash to finish up our artifacts and *poof* no more EDCmooc! I find it hard to remember LBM (life before MOOC).  But as that is still many a sleepless night away, I will defer further reflection on that topic.

This week we’ve been studying the question, "What makes a 'human'?"
We’ve looked at real vs. digital, alien intelligence vs. mere human "meat." 
We have even gone down the road of creation vs. evolution.  But I think the question is a much simpler than any of these.

Earlier this week while bouncing around through the resources made available on the Facebook and Google Circle pages associated with this course, I came to a mosaic of self portraits which appeared to be taken with cell phones.  These pictures, called "selfies," are taken of oneself, usually with a cell phone with the intent to post to a social media site. 

In my blog post for day 18 of this course, I shared a selfie taken by a two year old boy.  When you look at that picture (below), you can see the pure joy on the face of this little boy--joy over his mastery of his moms iPhone; joy over seeing his own face smiling back at himself.  This self awareness, this joy in our own accomplishments, this thirst for knowledge at the tender age of two,THIS…I think…is what makes us human.