Lab Activity 4

     There was not much to do when I reached the library, I already had my sources and most of my research centers around my survey. I asked for suggestions on getting my survey out to people, but the only advice I got was to set up in the student center and get people to fill it out. So far my survey has received more responses than expected from me putting it out on Facebook. This is good, because I might not have the free time during the normal hours of the day, when most students are in the student center. So I did not get much help at the library, but that is no fault of the librarians, just the fact that my research is not literary focused. For anybody reading this, here is a link to my survey, please take it and share it if you have not already.
http://goo.gl/forms/7xTjJc8Q0j

Journal week 3

     So far I am on track with my plan, as I have completed the final draft of my survey and will deploy it tomorrow. I will then tell my friends on Facebook to take it. On Wednesday I will pass out a slip in class with the URL and encourage my classmates to participate. Hopefully I will get a large turnout, but I will try to look for other outlets to advertise my survey.
    In the meantime, I will also be selecting what kind of information I want to provide my audience with about malware out of my old security books and possibly reinforcing it with info from online sources as well. I have a few sites in mind, like Wikipedia's entry on malware and the sources listed below. However, I think my collections of textbooks are probably enough.

    That is my progress report. As for addressing one of the questions, the most challenging in selecting a research topic for this assignment was defining my big question. After the suggestion of doing a survey, I have had more focus on where I want to go with my study. I knew I wanted to look into ways to prevent different types of malware, but as a security administrator, I would be more concerned with the general attitude about malware protection. It will be interesting to see how serious people take their security.

Progress Report Week 4

     So far I am on track with my plan, as I have completed the final draft of my survey and will deploy it tomorrow. I will then tell my friends on Facebook to take it. On Wednesday I will pass out a slip in class with the URL and encourage my classmates to participate. Hopefully I will get a large turnout, but I will try to look for other outlets to advertise my survey.
    In the meantime, I will also be selecting what kind of information I want to provide my audience with about malware out of my old security books and possibly reinforcing it with info from online sources as well. I have a few sites in mind, like Wikipedia's entry on malware and the sources listed below. However, I think my collections of textbooks are probably enough.

Lab Activity Week 3

     Since there is no word count for this assignment as far as I can recall, this might be rather brief. I keep track of my online sources with the bookmarks of my browsers. Usually I use Firefox, but if I need to use another browser to properly access the site, then I will bookmark the site in that browser. I had to do that with Labsim, which only works in Internet Explorer. I organize my bookmarks in folders, so for research it would be in my bookmarks under school/research. I go through my school bookmarks at the end of each quarter, deleting ones that are no longer useful.

     Most of my literary research will be in my old advanced security textbooks which I have slips of paper sticking out of the pages with the information I need.

   My surveys will be tracked by Google Forms. If anybody does any surveys on paper, I will enter them into Google Forms and file them into a folder.

Progress report week three

                This week I have been deciding the best way to get my survey out to people and I have finally made a decision. I am using Google forms to create the survey and I will promote it on Facebook as well as in the class. The survey itself is almost ready to put out, but I am going to go over it a couple times and delay its deployment till next week.
                Once I begin conducting my survey I will continue to gather data for another week and a half. I plan to stop the survey and begin analyzing the results on Wednesday of week 5. By the end of week 5 I should be ready to create the outline for my document.
                When my outline is completed, I will create my rough draft, which I will smooth out into my final document. Writing the will probably only take me a week at most, but this plan has me finishing by week 7. My presentation that will accompany my research should only take a day or two to make with Microsoft PowerPoint.
                The great thing about this plan is that it has me finishing early, meaning I have enough buffer zone before it is due and I can push back dates if I hit a snag or perhaps extend the time that I am conducting my survey. Also it gives me time to work on assignments for my other classes.

Journal Week 2

While exploring and scanning, list the key words you used to prompt your research—explain why you chose those words.

For this week’s journal I am going to discuss a couple keywords I used to begin my research. The first term is malware. I chose malware because my study will be focused on finding out how concerned people are about malware. Malware is short for malicious software, which is and umbrella term for all the nastiness you can get from the world wide web if you browse without protection. This includes worms, trojans, viruses, root kits, and any other software that was designed with a harmful purpose.

The second set of keywords that was important to prompt my research was malware protection. It was important for me, because I want to know what kind of options people have, when it comes to defending themselves from malware. Especially because my research will be to determine whether or not people are protecting themselves enough and to do that I need to be certain of what is available. By understanding what is out there I will be able to develop sound questions for my survey and have some sort of a baseline for what is considered a reasonable amount of protection.

               
     Something I wanted to note about using the combination malware protection as my keywords is that I had to further narrow down when searching through Google, because all of my results were the homepages for various antivirus programs and advertisements. The problem with that was, I was just wanting a general overview of solutions to the different forms of malware. Adding wiki to the end help direct me to all the wiki and knowledge base sites that held the basic information I sought. The greatest thing about these sites is that they serve as a general source of information, yet they list their references, allowing me to validate the information. These sources also serve as avenues of further research should I need to explore deeper.