Reflection of week 12 and Entire Course

This session was pretty easy with no reading assignments!

I enjoyed the mini-project.  I'm sure my Linkedin profile will be useful in the future.  It's one of the few new accounts that I created in the class that I'll actually keep.

Overall I enjoyed the entire course, but all the writing made it exhausting.  However, papers are one of the best ways to learn in an online environment.

I think my favorite part of the course was just the readings.  For some reason I kind of enjoyed reading through all the material covered in the class, and how the text book was written.

Reflection of Week 9

I enjoyed this week’s work because it is related more to my current job in Information Assurance.  And it will be good credit for my CISSP CPE’s requirement! 

I enjoyed reviewing all the different types of security threats such as physical, disaster, and human threats, and the new technologies that are out there to help in defending against these threats such as encryption and firewalls.

The mini-project was interesting and kind of fun.  However, the main purpose just seemed to introduce another website to the class.  And it’s going to be yet another account that I have to remember to delete when class is over.

There were also some good controversial topics covered in the discussions such as GPS tracking and privacy.

Reflection of Week 10

This week was very busy, but it was a good experience working with the group on wrapping up our final project.  It was very busy because it was difficult to get much done on the final project during any of the previous sessions, but each member of our team seemed to get a good portion of their work done before the week, we set deadlines during the week for final submission, and everything worked out just fine.

There isn’t much to say about the content covered during this session since the week was focused mainly on finishing our final project.  I mostly enjoyed learning about how useful and dynamic Google Docs is.  I would definitely recommend it for any group projects that require shared documents.

Reflection of Week 4

Week 4 was a good review of networking topics that I have covered in many other classes and certification that I have acquired.

I usually agree with many of the thoughts of my fellow student in the discussion thread, but I really didn't like to read the discussions on how mobile technologies can be used to increase productivity for businesses.  It seems that most people use the benefits of mobile technologies as an excuse to get out of work. Obviously I would be wrong in stating that these new technologies don't increase productivity.  The issue I have is that too many people think replacing the traditional 9-5 hours at the office with working at home actually is a good thing.  I feel very strongly that mobile technologies should never replace office time for employees.  They should only be used to enhance the employees capabilities while working away from the office such as at a remote site or on business travel, and not for the case the an employee feels like working from home or if the traffic is to bad to come into work.  The latter only promotes laziness and poor work ethic, not productivity.  There are too many distractions at home compared to the workplace, and also a lack of supervision.

On another note for the week the mini project was okay, but I have already used twitter before and really wasn't a fan of it in the first place.  It is more of a technology for older generation mobile devices.  With today's smart phones I would rather follow a facebook page than a tweet.

Reflection of Week 3

Week 3 was another enjoyable week for me because of the topics covered.  There aren’t many other areas in the IT field that I enjoy more than databases.  This is mostly because I love developing. Once you master developing static content you instantly want to dive into more dynamic projects, and there is no better way to make a website or application more dynamic than to add a database in the background which will allow users to view, add, update, and remove content at their will.

Most of the content covered was familiar to me except for the large scale topics such as data warehouses.  I have plenty of experience with databases for small scale projects from school, at home projects, and small contracts.  The contract I am working on right now for my personal business involves a small three tier application including an Oracle database.

I also like reading about examples of massive database implementations such as the Google search engine.

Reflection of Week 2

Week 2 was much more enjoyable than the previous week for me personally.  The reason why it was more enjoyable is that the material was much more familiar and easier to understand.  I’ve never been part of a hardware team, but I’ve always been fascinated by electronics since I was little, and I like to build my own computers.  I also have certifications such as the A+, MCTS, and Linux, which also helped me understand the material more.

This week was a good refresher of topics I have already studied.  It’s good to go over in depth information on hardware and software, because the information that was covered in chapters 4 and 5 doesn’t really stick unless you review it from time to time.

There isn't much hardware involved in my current position, but I will be able to apply the software knowledge since I am part of a team that works with administering and configuring many different operating systems.

Reflection of Week One

I learned a lot from Chapters 1 and 2, but I’m going to have to review it more to see how I can apply it in my own endeavors.  Chapter 1 was a summary of Information systems and their structure mostly so its purpose was mostly just informative and good to know.  Chapter 2 was mind boggling because up until now I was always just a technician.  I didn’t care about keeping a business competitive or the enterprise structure through the use of technology, because that was always an executive or manager duty.  But now as I have grown I can see that this information will be useful in the near future.

A great example of how IT technologies have affected my management is that my team is in the DC area on the east coast, where as another half of our team including our management is in San Diego on the west coast.  Our work is so closely connected that we need to communicate both through audio and visual means and share business related documents and files on a daily basis.  I’m sure this would have been inconceivable not too long ago.  We are able to do this through virtual conferences that allow us to share visuals, and we also make us of basic telecommunication technologies.  We are able to seamlessly act as one team on opposite coasts thanks to technology.

I will be able to apply the knowledge I learned from week one for my own personal business to help it become more competitive and to minimize the threat of losing business to other companies.