bskool bloggin

Closing the Semester

As we close the semester I have a few thoughts on the course and how I've changed because of it which I think will help Bud in future semesters. First, with regards to blogging, this course may be the only one I've ever taken at Michigan where I got to hear relatively frequently about something, anything from everyone in my course. Normally you have a few students who make a lot of points, but many who you don't get to know at all. Beyond making me more informed about others, it was kind of fun to see when people were thinking about what...just kind of made BIT 320 a part of life whereever and whenever. I found myself checking blog posts when I was bored, because I definitely agree that it is more fun to read stuff that is written by people you know, and blogs are short enough to hold your interest. As far as the value of it for class, I think it did encourage people to communicate common issues that they were having, but the inter-student communication was very weak. Often it felt like a simple email to the professor would have really done the job instead of posting and waiting for a response, because most people want to hear from the prof anyway, even if someone else responds. Maybe in the future, people should receive credit for responding well to others. With the projects I think everyone wanted to blog about what they were doing, but at the same time not give away a competitive edge because of it. It might have been better to say "the projects will be graded based partially on who got something to work first and wrote about it instead of just who got it to work in the end."

Beyond blogging I think this class was valuable from the perspective that you really learn something you can't pick up in the Wall Street Journal, or even on your own very easily. Some courses seem to be glorified discussions of business week articles and don't seem to have much practical value unless a student happens to be a CFO, CIO, etc. Meanwhile, students of this course may actually be doing some of this, or at least communicating that this is what needs to be done, in the future, and will have some understanding of a fairly advanced technology that is used in business all the time. Also, interestingly, it's not really until the very end that I felt like I really 'got it' and I'm sure as you become more advanced you continue to have those revelations. The first day discussion about what XML is and what databases do seemed so nebulous and abstract versus feeling like we were doing so much good for an organization by the end using those exact concepts. As with my other CIS programming course, I feel a sense of pride leaving that I don't seem to feel with other courses where you memorize several texts for an exam and walk out wondering when you'll forget it all. I feel like we all accomplished something that will be with us indefinitely.

Now, before I get all teary eyed, I'll sign off, but I wish everyone the best and enjoyed working with all of you.

December 15, 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Double Edged Sword for Sheridan

It appears Mr. Sheridan should be weary of when his tactics might go bad. Check out how ad click throughs can be used for sabotage: Link: Blogonaut: 55699: Name of the CEO on Forbes?.....

Google even appears to be worried about potential loss of advertisers. Seems to be a business model that might be flawed actually. Putting a pay-as-you-go advertising situation is definitely a double edged sword.

December 02, 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Ctools and IFS

I emailed Scott Moore regarding Krysta's blog post Link: Hail to the Victors: DocuShare. He wrote a pretty good response about some tools I didn't know could be used for group work. Check it out here.

November 30, 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

How Cool are We?

Blog is the word of the year!  It is, even though I didn't know there was such a thing!  How cool are we for being bloggers?  Woohoo!  Article Here

November 30, 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

XML's growing pains- ADTmag.com

I read this article that kind of tells the story of the X-team we read about in "XSLT for Dummies" Link: XML's growing pains- ADTmag.com. and it kind of explains Jtrana's Question about why everything is so complicated.  Those who developed XML had different needs and thus developed different parts of it to fulfill them.  We are looking at a subset that seem to be commonly applicable in business, which is more and  more being conducted over the web.

BIT in general seems to really be about showing us what is possible given some tools that have been developed--not exactly what we should do.  Certainly it's easy to go out and buy a solution for a business process, but I'm glad we are gaining some knowledge of what is possible so that some day as a decision-maker I'm not left at the whim of some vendor as Bud pointed out. 

November 30, 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Gray-haired Inboxes

This article Link: Digital Chosunilbo (English Edition) : Daily News in English About Korea. suggests that Korean young people are treating email like many of us think of snail mail or telephone calls. The communication form they say is becoming too formal and slow in terms of response time. I tend to agree that in a world where I shut my instant messenger off less than my lights, it's definitely time to rethink what is acceptable communication for business. Sociologists will likely have a great time dissecting how the anti-social college students that you can best reach by IM are affected long term, but I'm about ready to trade in my stodgy inbox for something closer to free flowing communication.

November 30, 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Two Questions Regarding Final Project

I'm wondering the exact date that the final project is due?  I'm not sure when "the day of the final exam" is.  Also, the project 2 description/requirements say that "you will likely not be able to implement all of the functionality you think you need to" and "most people will choose to implement just a subset of the functionality listed in the requirements."  Can you explain what this means in terms of how you will grade?  What might we not be able to implement?  What is reasonable to just describe what is left to be done?  I'm confused as to what is expected.  What does it mean to "mock-up" what you didn't implement?

November 29, 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

coffee-addelement_literal.xsl

In coffee-addelement_literal.xsl, in the bestwith tags the value-of select = taste, I beleive it should be equal to bestwith.

November 22, 2004 in Code Issues | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Blogonaut: RissRoss: The Dream Team

Link: Blogonaut: RissRoss: The Dream Team. In regards to RissRoss's first question...are we going to be using any other namespaces than the one to define and XSL document? There seems to be a little section of each chapter (at least 4 and 5) describing the commands used to interact with namespaces in the XML documents.

November 17, 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

Kornstein999: Project 2 will be fun

Link: Kornstein999: Project 2 will be fun. And I speak for Mike's Group memebers in saying that we are happy he feels this way! No one can complain about having a guy in the group that wants to dive head first into XSLT. lol, just kidding around, I'm sure it will be fun.

November 16, 2004 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

»

About

Recent Posts

  • Closing the Semester
  • Double Edged Sword for Sheridan
  • Ctools and IFS
  • How Cool are We?
  • XML's growing pains- ADTmag.com
  • Gray-haired Inboxes
  • Two Questions Regarding Final Project
  • coffee-addelement_literal.xsl
  • Blogonaut: RissRoss: The Dream Team
  • Kornstein999: Project 2 will be fun
Subscribe to this blog's feed
Blog powered by Typepad

Categories

  • Class Issues (12)
  • Code Issues (7)
  • Information Business (5)
  • Project Issues (4)
See More