ITM501 slp1

ITM501 slp1 – (2 to 3 pages double space courier new and a reference page)

The purpose of the Session Long Project is to give you the opportunity to explore the applicability of the Module to your own life, work, and place in space and time, and to experiment with the Module to see how the otherwise academically rigorous presentation of a topic may, with more or less work and/or trauma, become “up close and personal”. This is done in a number of different ways — sometimes cumulative papers, sometimes practical hands-on experimentation with a tool of some sort, sometimes reflections on a place of work or life. The common thread is personal application, aimed at demonstrating a cumulative knowledge and understanding of the course’s material. The main purpose of the written parts of the assignments is to show that you’ve had some experiences doing the project, that you’ve thought carefully about what they mean for your own education, and that you can make some personal applications of this meaning to your own professional and/or personal understanding. Demonstrating this understanding is actually considerably more important than carrying out any specific step in the project instructions.

For this course, the Project will take the form of hands-on encounters with information tools and resources of several forms. Each Module will feature some information technology experience to which you can apply yourself and hopefully stretch the bounds of your familiarity with our increasingly information-rich but sometimes painfully crowded professional tool chest. It’s almost inevitable that for any given Module, some of the class members will already have had some experience with the “tool of choice”; when it happens to you, please resist the temptation to lay into the faculty with a claim that we’re not teaching you anything new; we assure you that even if it’s known to you, it is NOT known to a good many of your colleagues, and they’ll be glad for the opportunity. If you do have such experience, regard it as a minor gift of time from the Powers in charge of Session Long Projects; the write-up will be a piece of cake for you. You can use your spare time to dig further into another site or tool, or even to use the Threaded Discussion forum to share your experience and evaluations with your colleagues.

It is a good idea to be sure that your computer is appropriately protected from the bad Guys Out There. There are some security precautions that are particularly important to observe before setting out on any Internet excursion, including these projects. In particular, it is essential that if you are going to download anything from the Internet, that you have adequate virus protection and anti-adware/spyware/malware screening on your systems.Please review our suggestions for preparing your computer for active Internet use before diving headlong into that world.

(Accessing anything on the Internet entails some degree of risk for exposure to computer viruses and their relations and to various varieties of “malware” (adware, spyware, etc.) Most of you are already running some form of virus protection software (if not, shame on you!); many are probably running some adware/spyware protection as well.

If this is the first you’ve heard about these issues, we strongly suggest that you carry out some key steps that are simply part of good computer hygeine

• Check out the performance of your present anti-virus program. Compare it with at least one other; a reasonable place to start looking for an alternative would be PC Magazine’s comparative reviews of security programs (http://www.pcmag.com/category2/0,2806,1639157,00.asp). Another source for shareware and advice is Kim Komando’s website, www.komando.com; she does a radio show, among other things. If you’re firmly committed to free alternatives, take a look at brighthub.com’s Best Free Virus Protection for Windows (http://www.brighthub.com/computing/smb-security/articles/88397.aspx).

• Alternatively, or better, in addition, put your system through one of the reputable online virus scans from a major vendor. These include Trend Micro’s Housecall, PC Pitstop Virus Scan, or any of those described in this reference from About.com.

• Take a look at spyware/adware blockers. As an introduction, look at Firewallguide’s summary of the problems. A good starting place to look at alternative remedies is TechNewsWorld’s article on Free Utilities To Annihilate Spyware, reviewing popular and free programs. If possible, download one or two of them and install them on your machine; try them out at removing bad things from your system (you may be surprised — as an example, I recently ran a scan on one of my machines and found 286 new threats – and I’m a reasonably savvy and careful computer user!)

There are a vast variety of online resources available in this area available for you to Google at your leisure.

Just be sure that you steer clear of the unfortunately rather numerous programs that suddenly pop up on your screen, informing you that you have some malware problems and that you need to download their “protection” software right away. These are almost invariably malware themselves, and if you download anything from them, it’s likely to be something like a rootkit-based trojan like the one that a friend of mine contracted; it took me over a week, numerous visits to several tech support websites, and countless running of cleaning programs and rebootings before it was finally cleared.)

Most online demo sites, when you encounter them, will require you to enter a name and an email address by way of registration; if this bothers you, try using a pseudonym and a convenience free email account from Hotmail or Gmail or Yahoo, or just try some other name. All they want is a place to send a password, generally. It is also possible that you will receive follow-up inquiries from sites that you have visited. For a fuller discussion of these issues,please click here to read our policy note/advisory on website relationships.

(In this class in particular, and in a number of the other classes in the our programs, the Session Long Project involves interactions with Internet-based resources including professional resource web sites and, occasionally, downloadable or online software experiences. This is appropriate, given the enormous proliferation of Internet resources and the need for students to become conversant with these resources; we’d be remiss if we didn’t try to call attention to the increasingly interesting and available materials available online. Happily, based on comments from the majority of students seem very satisfied with this approach.

Unfortunately, like most of the rest of the world, the Internet does not constitute a free lunch. In the areas that interest us, companies post information because they know eventually it will profit them. These profits pay for the maintenance of the sites, the development of the software, and for a marketing infrastructure to bring in revenue. In other words, if you come to the “showroom” and browse around, you shouldn’t be surprised if a “virtual salesman” contacts you to see if you are interested in purchasing something.

Students should be aware that there is a possibility that their interest in online resources may be interpreted as a marketing opportunity. However, this is not really a critical problem. I personally have been visiting such Internet sites, examining demonstration software, and making use of professional resources placed there by companies as part of a marketing strategy, for a number of years. I receive e-mail messages and occasional phone calls from sales personnel responding to inquiries that I make about their web sites all the time. This is simply normal marketing behavior on their part. By visiting their website, I do not incur any particular obligation to the marketer other than that to respond civilly. There’s nothing inappropriate about seeking information or even product demonstrations from a web site when that information is made publicly available, as long as you don’t misrepresent the nature of your interest.

If I feel a need to explain why I was interested in a website, I just say that I’m a professor teaching a course in the area, and that I’m interested in exposing students to available products and services, including theirs. I’ve had nothing but positive responses from those marketers I’ve talked with; they’re often really pleased to find themselves considered as an educational experience. For students who are so contacted, it is perfectly all right to respond that you are a student in the College of Business Administration studying the topic, in this case knowledge management, and that you might be interested in the various products and services available from the firms servicing the sector. I can’t imagine that any vendor would find such a response inappropriate, unless they had specifically said that they were interested only in responses from those who plan to buy. In that case, you should not have made the inquiry in the first place, but such restrictions are extremely rare.

I continue to believe that this variety of assignment, flexibly administered and with a relatively high degree of discretion in its accomplishment given to the student, offers a significant advantage over the more traditional experiential approaches. Excepting the occasional company inquiry, and some administrative restrictions on Internet access imposed by organizations operating in highly secure environments, there do not seem to be many downsides to this approach. The price of participation in the marketplace is generally just participation in the marketplace; companies make certain resources available to the public and ask in return only that we evaluate these resources and provide occasional feedback to the source. If a site states that software downloading ought to be restricted only to potential buyers of the product, I would not presume to violate that expectation. But this is seldom the case; for the most part, companies are pleased to have anyone experiment with their product, recognizing that second and third-hand transmission of such information may be as valuable to their marketing strategy as primary exposure.

If you are really concerned about maintaining absolute privacy, there are ways to do so. While it is not appropriate to lie to companies about the purposes of your inquiry, it may be appropriate to restrict the information provided in some ways. For example, as an e-mail address, you might use an anonymous e-mail account obtained from a public source such as Hotmail or Gmail, which is kept for such encounters exclusively and does not directly link back to you. Generally, the provision of information such as telephone numbers is voluntary; just because a piece of information is requested does not mean it has to be provided in full detail. Always feel free to withhold any item of information that you do not feel wholly comfortable sharing. For example, I almost never provide telephone numbers.

Having said all of the above, it, of course, remains possible that you may encounter something risky or malicious as a result of doing something in one of the SLPs. If you encounter any serious problems with any of these assignments, or if anyone is providing substantially negative feedback to you on your participation in their firm’s public offers of information, please let us your professor at once, so that we can share this information and reduce the possibilities for embarrassment all around. Conversely, if you have a particularly positive experience at some company or site, we’d like to know about that too. We hope that you will get substantial value from these assignments, and that they will constitute a useful part of the learning derived from this course in this program. We are always here to try to help resolve problems; let us know if any emerge from these assignments, and we’ll work something out.)

If you work in an area subject to security clearances and regulations, or if the computer to which you have access is restricted in critical ways in terms of what you are at liberty to download and use (because of capacity, policy and/or security rules, or other factors) then your ability to carry out the assignments as presented may somewhat compromised. Never Fear! TUI is known for its flexibility and ability to reconfigure assignments imaginatively, and we stand ready to help you here as well!Please click here to review our policy on assignments and national security. Alternatives are available, and while you might miss some of the learning benefits of the assignment, you can still get a substantial measure. Please let your instructor know as soon as you can if you will be operating under any sort of limitations on your computing capacity, so that you can work out suitable arrangements.

(Very important if you have a security clearance or work on a classified or partly classified computer system

We know and understand that many TUIU students, particularly those in the military, hold security clearances, work on classified or partly classified computer systems, or otherwise operate in the realm of national or corporate security. Since many of the TUIU faculty have or have had security clearances in the past, we are thoroughly aware of the issues involved and the restrictions placed on the individuals and the information in the secure environment. We thoroughly support the security clearance system and national security in all ways.

That said, the following cautionary note may be in order. A number of SLP assignments and Threaded Discussion topics in this course and other courses at TUIU may call for you to download software, analyze and comment on your computer systems and procedures, or otherwise engage in fairly intimate and revelatory behavior with respect to your system. Here’s the bottom line: If at any point carrying out the requirements of an exercise could lead to conflict with security regulations, breach security in any way, or otherwise necessitate doing things to systems, disclosing sensitive information, or anything similar, obviously Security Wins. You are never required to do anything you’re not supposed to as part of a TUIU course. Further, you will never be penalized in your grade or any other way for not being able to carry out an exercise for security reasons.

All you need to do is to explain the situation to your instructor, and appropriate adjustments can be made by either waiving or substituting required parts of the assignment.

We hope that this note makes it clear that while academics is serious business to us, so is national security. Inevitably, the two will intersect in some ways during your TUIU schooling; just remember that we understand what’s going on in the world as well as the academy, and we want you to keep in good standing with both of us!)

So — that’s the general SLP approach for this course. If you have questions at any point about what to do or how to strategize your exercises, please contact your instructor for illumination and assistance.

Module 1 SLP assignment:

As your project assignment for module 1, you are to experiment with alternative web browsers and compare their utility and features. As you undoubtedly know, a web browser is simply a piece of software that requests and then decodes and displays the files that make up Internet pages. Certainly Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox are by far the most commonly used browsers, but there are probably at least 50 to 70 others that are available for public use, and virtually all of them have their staunch fans and supporters. Two other major players in the game are Google’s entry Chrome and Opera, which has been through many versions and is very popular particularly in Europe. Different browsers appear to have different degrees of utility depending on the materials to be accessed and the used to be made of the material by the recipient. So for this exercise, you are to compare the performance of your most commonly used browser, whatever it might be, to at least two others that you can either download or access directly online, in terms of the way they perform on several basic kinds of Internet tasks.

A fairly complete list of possible browser candidates can be found in Wikipedia’s list of web browsers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers). There are also numerous browser comparison sites that you may choose to examine and use as a basis for your choice of tools. If you mainly use one of the Big Three, it would be most beneficial for you probably to try one of the other majors and one of the lesser known ones.

For each browser, try to use it to at least access, if not actively work with, each of the following type of common web sites:

• A news site (newspaper, cable news outlet, etc.)
• A sports site
• A large retail operation (Amazon.com or BestBuy.com might be good examples)
• A travel site
• TUIU’s CourseNet site
• If possible, a private site used in your workplace (obviously, nothing too confidential!)
• A social networking site (Facebook, Twitter, etc,)
• Something else that you use frequently, if possible

When you have had a chance to conduct your comparative evaluations and make notes (it may be helpful to take screenshots if possible — the key combination ALT-PRNTSCRN will copy the active window into your computer’s clipboard, and you can then use PASTE to insert the resulting picture into your Word document), please prepare a brief summary of your experiences with the different browsers, identifying any differences you detect, your overall assessments of their respective utilities, and for what, what you may have learned from the exercise about yourself, and how you may be able to apply this learning to your own future understanding.

PLEASE NOTE: If for various reasons you do not have the flexibility on your computer system to actually try out alternative browsers, you can still do the assignment by doing some online research about alternative browsers and reporting the results of your inquiries. It’s not going to be quite as fun as hands-on experimentation or quite as revealing, but you can still show that you understand the issues and demonstrate your ability to learn lessons for yourself from such research. After all, as we noted above, that’s what these exercises are mostly about anyway. You will never be penalized because your computer system won’t allow you to do something.

Try to have some fun with this!

SLP Assignment Expectations

LENGTH: 2-3 pages typed and double-spaced

The following items will be assessed in particular:

• The degree to which you have carried out the assignment completely, or clarified why you could not and investigated alternatives
• Your ability to describe your experiences clearly and draw conclusions from them, not just narrate events
• Your ability to focus on the overall purposes of the assignment, not just its specific steps
• Your use of some in-text references to what you have read, where appropriate; please cite all sources properly
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