Corinne's IST 110H Blog

It may be that now I am at an age where I am finally able to fully grasp the impact of elections, but I am fully inspired by the speeches that are being made by the candidates that have arisen as front-runners. The speech that Barack Obama made above is truly powerful and it makes me want to, not just support him, but to watch the speeches of the other candidates as well to see just how passionate each one is. In my opinion, if any of the candidates has half the presence as Obama, they are front-runners as well and I don't think that our country can go wrong by electing any of them.

I think that it's really cool that I can add these little heart with all my favorite songs haha I didn't know I could do that... so here they are

So my first semester of college is pretty much over now. I have one final to take on Friday and I am completely finished. Well I also have to complete an assignment for comp sci that I dont think is going to go very well because it is a group project but I do not have a group... so I guess we will see. In order to get a C for the course, which is what I need to have it counted for the SRA major, I only need a 35% on my final exam. Part of my just wants to shoot for a 35 and the other part of my wants to get 100% but knows that this is impossible because programming is my natural enemy.

I have some days when I really really care about my grades and others I feel like that I should just let good enough be good enough. I don't know if any one else feels this way but I do. I really hope that next semester I will care more and be less lazy and work to my full potential but you never know.

This week is going to be so hard for me and it really shouldn't be. One of the lessons that I have learned from this first semester at college is to do things when you are supposed to and to budget your time more responsibly. I made the mistake of assuming that as long as I wasn't drinking all the time that I was being responsible but even doing things like going to the movies or just hanging out with friends before you do your work is just as irresponsible. I have the worst work ethic on the face of the earth sometimes. I like to think that I can hunker down and get done what needs to be done but so far I have yet to see any evidence of this in myself and that kinda worries me. Next semester will be a real challenge. I need to rework my outlook on college and I need to stop accepting my grades as they are because they are "good enough" and start to work to my full potential.

Today I have to figure out all the problems facing NASA and come up with solutions for those problems. I don't really know how i'm supposed to do this and then make a 20 minute speech about it and since my group is supposed to be doing an equal share I am wondering what the hell they've been working on while i'm racking my brain for ways to fix a government agency that not even the government can fix.

Also today I have to find a book and write a paper on it for my religious studies class. The thing is I was supposed to have been working on this paper all semester and now that it's due on Friday and I don't even have a book selected yet I am starting to feel a little pressure. Ahh the stresses of procrastination...

So today is our last class of IST100H and i'm actually kinda sad. Well sad might not be the right word, but i'm feeling something, haha. I have thoroughly enjoyed this class and appreciated the opportunity to be in a class that was "honors" even though as Garrett and the SRTEs pointed out I am not a scholar. I don't hesitate to say that this class was by far my favorite class this semester and therefore my favorite class of my college career... so far :) I enjoyed the smalller numbers in the class, as opposed to my SRA class which is over one hundred people and the sheer number is intimidating and makes it nearly impossible to interact with your peers. I find this particularly inconvenient in a major where they put a specific emphasis on networking and making connections.

I was very fortunate to get an amazing group in this class as well. Being in a group for every single class I became very agitated a lot of the time, what with constant meetings and such, but with my IST group I can honestly say that I never "dreaded" a meeting or was even tempted to "skip". I enjoyed working with Garrett and Steve and I even liked spending time with them in during out Monday/Wednesday meetings that became the norm when working on our assignments. I am happy to have gained a "BFF" in Garrett and I am sure that Steve will be very useful in the future seeing as how I am very convinced that not only is he one of the smartest kids i've come across here at Penn State but he is also by far the nicest, and that is if anything an understatement.

I almost forgot D.J. ;) D.J. was a necessary part of this group because helped the group bond as a whole because we all collectively hated D.J. I am kidding of course. Although most of the time he was preoccupied with being a sexist bastard and just a jackass to me in general, I enjoyed our banter... it kept things interesting and I could always laugh his comments off.

This is not an attempt just to kiss ass, but I was very appreciative of Andrea as a professor. Even before school started she made me very comfortable with my decision to move from the IST110 class and into her section. I was initially doubtful of my abilities but she assured me that I would be better off in her class and she was right. I felt comfortable expressing my doubts and questions from the very beginning. I also loved that I felt like I knew my instructor on a somewhat personal level instead of her just being the person who stands in front of me and talks for an hour, twice a week.

I have honestly learned so much throughout this semester. It has helped me so much to learn about things like RSS feeds and even Second Life because whether or not I appreciate these things I must admit that they are the future of the industry that I would like to involve myself with and I should just accept it.

:) That's all for now... expect a lot more blogging over the next week or so because I admit that I am the biggest procrastinator on the face of the earth...

The library that I explored on Second Life was the State Library of Kansas.

The first thing that you notice about this library is its crazy landscaping and you almost wonder what is in store for you when you wander inside.

Once inside the library however, it is reminiscent of the public libraries that we are all used to. There is a help desk on the first floor where you can click for a link to the library’s website which has a listing of books and other useful information.

Throughout the library are posters for featured books that you can click on. Once you click on these books, a menu pops up giving you options, such as with this one where you can go to the Wizard of Oz website, read the book online, go to a wikipedia article on the book, or go to a biography of the article.

I chose to read the book online and I was pleasantly surprised to find the full version of the book conveniently linked through Second Life. I was originally doubtful of the functionality of a library on Second Life, however, once I discovered this feature I was almost instantly sold on the idea.

Our team decided to build a museum of sorts in ISTania which actually serves as a walk through the history of the College of Information Sciences and Technologies here at Penn State University. Each member of the team took on separate roles and I personally built the walls and the roof. Building in Second Life can often times be frustrating and time consuming but it is something that becomes easier with practice. I didn't mind this project as much as I thought I would. I was very frustrated at times, because Second Life just does that to me, but my team is pretty good so whenever I came across a problem I had three very skilled people to turn to with my questions.

In a recent survey taken by Sophos, businesses were asked to account for their biggest concerns in regards to security and risk as far as the technologies of their companies were concerned. The main consensus of these surveys was that a large majority of businesses still believe their employees to be the main risk to exposing the company to IT threats.
Paul Ducklin, Sophos’ head of security stated that the conclusion that can be drawn from this is that administration has yet to take desktop security seriously within lower level of company workings. Ducklin also stated that most of the attention in these companies is focused on “the outside” rather than “the inside”, but most physical accidents with laptops and other such devices are unavoidable and more time should be devoted to things that can be easily prevented, like IT threats.
A separate survey conducted by the Department of Trade and Industry went one further to pinpoint the errors that compiled the human risk in companies. In this instance 1,800 people were given passwords to remember and over one third of these participants wrote down their password or storing it on their computers.
It goes without saying that this is a huge risk to be taking in today’s IT world, which is saturated with hackers and potential identity thieves. Companies seem to be realizing the risks that human ignorance can bring upon a business yet these surveys have been run annually and the numbers have yet to drop in favor of more intelligent IT practices. How long will it take for these companies to realize that they need to educate from the bottoms of the corporate ladder upwards? I would like to say that the lesson has been learned but outside of the realm of information technology there are still many who are unaware of the risks they are posing to their own systems.

These are the articles where I read about this:
http://www.news.com/Survey-Office-workers-still-the-greatest-security-threat/2100-7355_3-6213227.html?tag=item

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2007/06/18/dti_it_security_research

Many teachers on the high school and middle school level and most college/university professors strongly discourage the use of Wikipedia http://www.wikipedia.org as a primary source for research papers and other such projects. However, a new extreme as arisen in a New Jersey school district. They have gone as far as to ban Wikipedia from their network. Their reasoning behind this? Students will be too "tempted" to use Wikipedia and its untrustworthy information. I agree with one critic, Denise Walker, in that this is sad. I agree that sometimes the information found on Wikipedia is not up to the standards of a primary source but most of the time it can give you a good place to start if you have no idea what you are talking about. Walker mentions that it is a shame that this school district simply banned the site instead of making it into a learning experience. Instead of telling them not to use the site, why not tell them to contribute to the site and add the information that they find from their primary sources to the information already on Wikipedia, or why not take the opportunity to have a discussion about the importance of integrity in media. I would never use Wikipedia as a primary source but before I start a paper or a project with a completely new subject matter I almost always start with a wiki. I gather information and use it to search other key terms associated with my main focus in order to write and inclusive paper. I think that banning Wikipedia would be tragic.

The article I based this blog posting off of can be found at the following URL:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071127-banning-wikipedia-at-school-good-idea-or-missed-opportunity.html

There is not much about Second Life that I understand. I don’t know why people would spend so much of their recreational time fiddling with it or why it is important to construct the perfect avatar or even why some insist that it is in no way a game. However, there is one aspect of Second Life that I understand and even have a respect for, and that is businesses using the site for practical uses. IBM uses the site in many different ways. One way that it uses it is to give more information about the company to consumers, potential employees, and even other businesses. IBM also uses SL as a way to hold meetings with its employees, which I thought to be slightly dysfunctional until our class help a similar meeting. I thought that if the members of the meeting had things like their jobs on the line they would be less inclined to take off all of their clothes and drop down on their colleagues at inappropriate times. I think that without this little defect our class meeting could have been fairly effective.

The things that IBM has on their island, well the one that I explored, as IBM has many, are conference rooms, theaters, and even media centers. As a person who is still inept at SL workings I found the island fairly easy to navigate and it helped that there were people to ask if I wanted to find something interesting to look at.

“The Sales Center Reception area of the business center is staffed 24 hours per day, 5 days per week, with global access from Los Angeles to Paris to Sydney.” –cnet.com IBM makes it very clear that they are user friendly and I liked this quote that I found on cnet.com and I did not find anything like this on the Sun Microsystems site which is the next one that I explored.

I think I would recommend this space to a friend if I thought that they had a particular interest in the business. It was well organized and there are a lot of websites online that reference this particular presence on SL so it was easy for me to find outside information.

The other island that I decided to visit was one from Sun Microsystems. I thought I would go back and explore more with this company because I did this particular one when examining the blogging policies and I wanted to make a link of sorts. The Second Life space for Sun Microsystems did not seem to be as developed as that of IBM. I also found that there weren’t many people to ask questions so I had a hard time navigating the island and I had a hard time finding things that would be of particular interest to me and that would prove interesting to mention in my blog entry. Also there were several islands of Sun Microsystems but many of them would not let me go there. There was only one that I found that would allow me access in the first place and once I got there I was disappointed with the lack of interaction that I experienced when exploring IBM.