Monday, September 7, 2015

CST 300 Week 2

Week 2

Learning Strategy Reflection

There are many resourceful study suggestions within Bob Kizlik's "Effective Study Sills" article. There are many good studying reminders that he covers, like having a set study place. It's like the practice of only using your bedroom to sleep, so when you're in bed your body knows that it's time to sleep (which I actually follow). I think that is the most solid advice. I hadn't heard of the Survey, Question, Read, Recite, Review (SQ3R) method before and I really like the idea behind it. The acronym could use some work, but the process of actively learning is great and I will try it out. 

My strengths

  • Making and Revising a Schedule My free time has always been consumed by organizing and planning out everything. You should see what happens when I am in charge of Thanksgiving dinner! I will have the most perfectly planned out study schedule.
  • Taking Notes I take notes daily. There are many reminders and questions (mostly to myself) throughout my computer, phone, and on post it notes at home and at work. Taking notes for assignments is no different. It makes studying take longer, but it can be worth it, especially when wanting to refresh your knowledge base before exams.
  • Preparing Outlines and Writing Papers Preparing outlines goes along with my obsessive nature with organizing. Preparing an outline is possibly my favorite and most looked forward to part of writing a paper. In fact, I do this when writing simple emails to coworkers or making event schedules with friends. I always want to ensure that I cover the right topics.  

My weaknesses

  • Reading Unfortunately, I'm not great at completely focusing on the text in front of me. I find myself rereading paragraphs way too often because I have zoned out and am not in tune with what's going on in the text. Actively reading would prove tremendously helpful to me and I wouldn't be eating up so much precious time with my rereading!
  • Surveying Skipping straight ahead to the content and not considering what I'm going to be looking at is definitely something that I should improve. Many times I find that I haven't even read the title of what I'm looking at. Just want to find the quick answers in the thick of it.
  • Not Reading Aloud to Myself I had no idea that this was actually bad practice. I usually read aloud to myself thinking that I will understand something better. This is a lot of the reason why I want to study at home (I don't want to be the crazy person at the local coffee shop). I'm going to try it and maybe it will improve my overall reading abilities.

Preview Time Management Skills 

Mind Tool's Time Management information is useful, but I am pretty comfortable with my time management skills. I'm very focused and stay on task, especially at work. However, sometimes I can overbook myself and need to learn to scale back my load in order to not overwork myself, making me feel exhausted. See my day spent at work is described in my activity log below.


Project Management Basics

There are a few videos or slideshows covering project management. A summary of each video is described below their heading.

Introduction to Project Management

This video is very similar in content to the project management slideshow from Corpedia that is described below. A project manager (PM) oversees a project, which is a task that has a set beginning phase and ending phase. Within the project there are specific phases like initiating, planning, and execution. The PM is there to ensure that their project won't fail due to time, cost, scope, or quality issues.

Project Management Introduction ("An Applied Framework for Project Management" Corpedia Education Course)

Again, this video describes the different stages of project management. However, this slideshow also describes the different roles of people that could be involved in a project (aside from the PM). They bring up the stakeholders, sponsors and team members as well, which I think is much more important that the PM alone. It also covers how goals are met much better with a project management system.

It's interesting to see such a broad overview of project management. Since I've been working in the industry, I've really caught on to the shortfalls of project management and the technical team members. In this slideshow there was a section where they went over different stages of a project. Having a section for execution and nothing more involved is basically what I've seen when working under a corporate PM and it left me extremely unsatisfied and frustrated at times. There's a lot more that goes into execution for a tech company (like quality assurance, refactoring, etc.).

Project Management: What is a work Breakdown Structure (WBS)?

The lady in the video explains the importance of defining the "deliverable" for a project in order to keep the team on track, with an end goal in mind. She explains the importance of defining a hierarchical structure with the overall project at the top and the individual tasks at the bottom for defining the entire scope of the project. This hierarchy can include sub projects, phases, and small deliverables. However, there should be one overall deliverable item that the project will return.

Project Management: What is a Gantt Chart?

The Gantt chart is a horizontal bar graph that indicates time periods. Each bar in the chart can indicate a task. While some tasks may have to wait until another is complete, others may be done concurrently. There can be many indicators in these charts, like their completeness, the relation to today, and a variety of estimated durations. Gantt charts can also be created in Microsoft Excel.

Previous Capstones

At the end of the CSUMB online bachelor's degree program there will be a capstone project that I will need to complete. Here is an overview of a few previous capstone projects: 

Capstone #1 - Steebly Collaborative Programming Tool

Steebly was a project that allows developers, or aspiring developers, to collaborate live with a their group. The project appeared to have been done very well, supporting several different languages. Also, their team shirts made them seem very official. Of course, there's always room for improvement (especially in an agile process). I'm glad they chose a dark theme for their tool, but maybe they could later add a feature to let the individual user choose their theme. I'm also sure they could revisit some of their initial methods and improve their web application's efficiency. 

Capstone #2 - Eagle Eye Ag Tech Graphic Identity Package

The graphic identity package designed for Eagle Eye Ag was a project that basically bootstrapped marketing tools for a company called Eagle Eye Ag Tech. While the project's presenter seemed he could have used some practice presenting the project, the information he presented in his slides appeared that he did the project well. The logo came out nicely and looked appealing on marketing materials. I would have been interested to see what website he came up with using Dreamweaver. 

Capstone #3 - Traditional Chinese Health Concepts Animation

This capstone is a five minute animation of information regarding tradition Chinese health concepts. There were some still images of the project and the process of creating the animation on the slideshow, but it would have been nice to see a brief clip of the animation at some point (even if it's just a gif) that plays on the slide. It's impossible to tell from the slideshow presentation if the project was well done, but the presentation was nice and he was informative regarding his execution. 

Weekly Summary

This week has been crazy busy. I have been studying all night after work each day and still feel behind. I've started two more courses and settling into all of them is taking some time. I rewrote one of my course's syllabus' because there was too much padding (I learned that this is a legitimate criticism this week thanks to the reading assignments for the lab) and I couldn't easily find what I was looking for when referencing it. 

New Rules

Reading Thomas L. Friedman's "New Rules" article was a pleasure. He perfectly illustrates how America as been told in recent decades to just work hard and that's all you need to succeed and it's no longer enough. Unfortunately, I've seen too many people work harder and still not succeed. Working along side people at Starbucks with degrees that couldn't get a job and myself being one of those people that was hired for a technical job with no formal education allows me to relate to Friedman's point.

Writing Lab

The writing lab has been a bit steeper in work load this week. This week I've been considering my industry analysis paper so much more than last week. Reading through all of the APA formatting guides has also been a bit different. I'm working on committing it all to memory, as I've been used to MLA format. For some reason I'm consistently missing a couple of questions on the quizzes for the reading assignments. There is always at least one question that I don't know where to find. I read all of the material and find it frustrating that I'm still missing things. Maybe one of these weeks I will actually get all of the answers correct. 


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