Learning Journal Week 2
Week 2 is coming to an end and it feels like the course is running at a much faster pace than the introductory first week. It can be really easy to fall behind already if you don’t pay attention and allocate time to know what your workload looks like for the week and plan accordingly. It felt a little crazy having to write out the rough draft for the Industry Analysis paper already. In regard to that assignment I think that my work was a little messy and I overused citations, but that’s why we have peer reviews to give valuable feedback and suggest how I can make improvements. I learned a lot about the subject company while developing the paper and I think it’s easy to see how much research I did.
Now let’s get on to summarizing what I viewed for the Module 2 Lecture. I watched ‘The Future Is Faster Than You Think’ video with Peter Diamandis’ lecture on why he thinks technology is going to rapidly develop and expand. The video is from 2018 and he was overly optimistic about how quickly technological progress was going to develop and in my opinion his timeline was far too fast. I agree with most of the statistics he mentions in the video and trends for growth but he seems out of touch with the real world and doesn’t appear to understand what he’s talking about when he discusses concepts such as the cloud and the “singularity”. I’m skeptical about the idealistic future Peter has imagined.
Next up was the Medium article titled ‘Software Engineering Trends for 2023’. The article claims that AI will continue improving and illustrates the best use case for AI in software engineering by using it to assist in writing source code. They also discuss the list of most popular programming languages from a StackOverflow survey and discuss how the top of the list is front-end languages like JavaScript and HTML/CSS because web developers are in high demand as websites are always needed. Cloud data businesses are briefly mentioned and they say the safest opinion ever, that cloud storage will continue to be used and that new cloud storage businesses may gain popularity. The final portion of the article talks about layoffs in big tech companies because they wrongly assumed business was going to drastically change forever post-COVID because of the move to work-from-home solutions. The tech sector will continue growing at a regular rate. It closes by saying 2022 was a turbulent year.
The ‘Introduction to Project Management’ video is quite straightforward in what it is about. It describes what a project is, how to execute a project, and the structure of people with different skills within a project. It talks about Strategy and leadership, workflow management, and business knowledge. The video also talks about the history of project management and how the standards and approaches have changed.
The Open Learning Initiative Module 2 was about team dynamics and how to work efficiently in a group. I had to watch some videos and read about how groups work. Then I answered some questions and did a social intelligence test.
When it comes to studying effectively I think that the top 3 items that I’m good at are extracting important information, setting aside appropriate time to study, and sorting and prioritizing my workload to do the easiest parts first. I feel my weaknesses are related to effectively taking notes, reading multiple-choice questions, and planning essays. I feel that I’m not very good at taking notes, but I do my best. I’ve noticed that I tend to overthink multiple choice questions and get the answer wrong despite knowing the content because of ambiguous wording so I’ve been working on that lately. In the past I haven’t used essay outlines before and have just written entire essays in one sitting while keeping all of the information memorized in my head, but I found that the outline for the Industry Analysis paper was very helpful in directing how I should structure the information.
Projects are temporary undertakings with a planned beginning and end that goes through multiple development stages to reach the desired outcome. Projects are difficult to complete because they have A work breakdown structure is a hierarchical breakdown of what kind of work is required to accomplish the main goal as well as define the deliverables that are required. Gantt charts are a critical project management tool for turning complex projects into concise visual charts that illustrate all of the prerequisites to completing a project.
I watched the video of the previous capstone project festival and chose three projects that stood out to me the most. The first one that I liked is Mirrored Fantasy. Mirrored Fantasy is a MOBA game that has opposing teams competing on a map that is split into two mirrored sides. The goal of the game is for the teams to compete and see who can get to the end of the level first while attacking their opponents with remote attacks that appear on the opposing side’s portion of the map. The project presentation is very impressive with many animated slides and video examples of how the game works. The presenter also offers detailed explanations of how the game was made. I like the presentation and can’t offer up any suggestions for improvement. The next project I liked was Traffic Tracer. Traffic Tracer is a software that can use existing surveillance cameras in businesses in order to gather useful analytical data about what customers are doing in order to help influence business decisions. Traffic Tracer can analyze data from existing videos and deliver a number of different statistics through a web portal. This presentation was a pre-made Youtube video and also very informative and well done. The last capstone project that I reviewed and enjoyed was Culture Connect. Culture connect is an android app which allows users to search a given area and see landmarks and points of interest. This is meant to make searching quick and effective, while also being comprehensive. Many applications focus on hospitality and are limited to places which advertise with them. This makes it hard to find places of cultural/historical significance. The android app is made using the existing google maps database. This is meant to reduce the effort it takes to find places to visit when you are traveling.
This was a very busy week for me and I’m glad it’s over. Attached at the bottom is the weekly activity log that I filled out for how I spend each week.
Now let’s get on to summarizing what I viewed for the Module 2 Lecture. I watched ‘The Future Is Faster Than You Think’ video with Peter Diamandis’ lecture on why he thinks technology is going to rapidly develop and expand. The video is from 2018 and he was overly optimistic about how quickly technological progress was going to develop and in my opinion his timeline was far too fast. I agree with most of the statistics he mentions in the video and trends for growth but he seems out of touch with the real world and doesn’t appear to understand what he’s talking about when he discusses concepts such as the cloud and the “singularity”. I’m skeptical about the idealistic future Peter has imagined.
Next up was the Medium article titled ‘Software Engineering Trends for 2023’. The article claims that AI will continue improving and illustrates the best use case for AI in software engineering by using it to assist in writing source code. They also discuss the list of most popular programming languages from a StackOverflow survey and discuss how the top of the list is front-end languages like JavaScript and HTML/CSS because web developers are in high demand as websites are always needed. Cloud data businesses are briefly mentioned and they say the safest opinion ever, that cloud storage will continue to be used and that new cloud storage businesses may gain popularity. The final portion of the article talks about layoffs in big tech companies because they wrongly assumed business was going to drastically change forever post-COVID because of the move to work-from-home solutions. The tech sector will continue growing at a regular rate. It closes by saying 2022 was a turbulent year.
The ‘Introduction to Project Management’ video is quite straightforward in what it is about. It describes what a project is, how to execute a project, and the structure of people with different skills within a project. It talks about Strategy and leadership, workflow management, and business knowledge. The video also talks about the history of project management and how the standards and approaches have changed.
The Open Learning Initiative Module 2 was about team dynamics and how to work efficiently in a group. I had to watch some videos and read about how groups work. Then I answered some questions and did a social intelligence test.
When it comes to studying effectively I think that the top 3 items that I’m good at are extracting important information, setting aside appropriate time to study, and sorting and prioritizing my workload to do the easiest parts first. I feel my weaknesses are related to effectively taking notes, reading multiple-choice questions, and planning essays. I feel that I’m not very good at taking notes, but I do my best. I’ve noticed that I tend to overthink multiple choice questions and get the answer wrong despite knowing the content because of ambiguous wording so I’ve been working on that lately. In the past I haven’t used essay outlines before and have just written entire essays in one sitting while keeping all of the information memorized in my head, but I found that the outline for the Industry Analysis paper was very helpful in directing how I should structure the information.
Projects are temporary undertakings with a planned beginning and end that goes through multiple development stages to reach the desired outcome. Projects are difficult to complete because they have A work breakdown structure is a hierarchical breakdown of what kind of work is required to accomplish the main goal as well as define the deliverables that are required. Gantt charts are a critical project management tool for turning complex projects into concise visual charts that illustrate all of the prerequisites to completing a project.
I watched the video of the previous capstone project festival and chose three projects that stood out to me the most. The first one that I liked is Mirrored Fantasy. Mirrored Fantasy is a MOBA game that has opposing teams competing on a map that is split into two mirrored sides. The goal of the game is for the teams to compete and see who can get to the end of the level first while attacking their opponents with remote attacks that appear on the opposing side’s portion of the map. The project presentation is very impressive with many animated slides and video examples of how the game works. The presenter also offers detailed explanations of how the game was made. I like the presentation and can’t offer up any suggestions for improvement. The next project I liked was Traffic Tracer. Traffic Tracer is a software that can use existing surveillance cameras in businesses in order to gather useful analytical data about what customers are doing in order to help influence business decisions. Traffic Tracer can analyze data from existing videos and deliver a number of different statistics through a web portal. This presentation was a pre-made Youtube video and also very informative and well done. The last capstone project that I reviewed and enjoyed was Culture Connect. Culture connect is an android app which allows users to search a given area and see landmarks and points of interest. This is meant to make searching quick and effective, while also being comprehensive. Many applications focus on hospitality and are limited to places which advertise with them. This makes it hard to find places of cultural/historical significance. The android app is made using the existing google maps database. This is meant to reduce the effort it takes to find places to visit when you are traveling.
This was a very busy week for me and I’m glad it’s over. Attached at the bottom is the weekly activity log that I filled out for how I spend each week.
Hi Vance,
ReplyDeleteIt looks like you have a good schedule and that you allow yourself a full day in order to take a break. It is definitely important to have that balance, to make sure you study and do your work, but also to have some time for yourself. Making sure that you finish any remaining work on Tuesday is smart as well, especially earlier in the day, that way you're not rushing.
On your post, when you discussed the industry analysis outline, I too was not used to using an outline format when completing my essay. I found it was really helpful and now that the essays are graded I feel it did help a lot. Wishing you well in the rest of the class!