Journal week 8

     These get harder to do now that the class is nearly through and we get closer to turning in our work. I got the date mixed up and completed my rough draft early. I have not reach any real surprises at this point. If anything, I only had to shuffle around the contents of my paper to make it flow better. I did have to grab a few more sources for my research, but I knew I would have to when it came to defining malware and providing advice for protection. In the end this paper has become more about informing people about how to protect themselves than it is about the survey. Well, I suppose that is a surprise, but that is about it. I really am not sure how I can stretch this to 300 words.

Lab Activity Week Eight

     I find doing presentations fun and easy. This is probably because I took performing arts in high school and I am comfortable with the occasional need to improvise. Generally I like using the whiteboard when presenting, but a PowerPoint is useful when I need to provide a deliverable. I find that if I have a particularly long presentation planned, it is good to have some notes on index cards. However, normally I know my material enough not to need them. 

Lab Activity Week Seven

      Collaboration for school project has been an interesting learning experience. It has been fun learning what works and what doesn't. From delegating the work to making sure expectations are communicated, I have been learning how to be more agile on how I tackle problems. Especially with the fact that this quarter I am not only collaborating with two groups, but leading them as well. This has given me the opportunity to see what kind of leader I am and practice some of the leadership methods and skills that I have learned over the past year.
      Sometimes collaboration can be a bit of a hindrance, especially when there is only enough work for part of the group to do. This was sort of an issue before, when our groups did not have enough hands on work for the network experts to focus on. The networkers would work on writing assignments, or handle managerial tasks. However, this often felt like it was not as much work as the coding and web development that our project needed. Another Problem with collaboration is managing the workload with each individuals personal workload, outside the group project. This is especially true with the group from my leadership class. Half my team have different classes and may have more work than me from those courses, or the opposite may be true. It is hard to assign them a reasonable share of the work that will not be too much when combined with that outside work.
      I personally put my group work first when I need to, since I do not want to upset my team and lose their respect. Because in the end, my teammates will have the final say in regards to how much I helped, and to be successful I need to earn their respect and participate equally.

Week 6 progress report

     Progress is going well. My survey period is complete and I am currently defining my outline and shaping it into a rough draft. I am currently ahead on a few assignments and will be taking advantage of the extra time to write my report. I let my survey research period go a few days longer than I originally intended, but it was worth the extra responses and I believe I now have enough data for my report.
     I hit no major issues so far and hope to have my report completely written by the end of next week. 

Journal entry Week 5

What is your prior experience with citing your sources? Have you had to use APA or MLA formats? Is this easy for you, or do you struggle? What sources do you use to cite your sources and/or create bibliographies?  


       My experience with using citations was pretty limited before going for the Bachelors of Applied science. Now I have at least one class each quarter that requires APA citations with most assignments. It is a bit of a struggle for me and I always use an online citation machine to do it. I could never remember on my own how to structure an APA citation and I sometimes have trouble finding some of the information I need. Though even the citation machines are not perfect and there is information that they often fail to find, such as author or publisher.
     I can understand why it is important to include citations and use a standardized format for presenting the references. It gives credit to those who worked hard to provide the information that I use for my research. However, I find that I don't really need to remember how to do it, because of the availability of online applications that will do it for me. The way I see it, is that I have more important things to worry about, such as writing the paper itself. Just as long as I keep track of my sources and make it easy for myself to recall the information I have, I can easily go back and gather everything I need for citing them.

Is plagiarism a problem on college campuses? Are you confident you know how to avoid plagiarism?


   I thought I would touch on this because it is related and I want to make word count. I don't like word count limits very much. I think plagurism is a problem at schools. There are several motivating factors, such as trying to find filler to meet a word count. I understand I am being candid, however, my opinion is that many people plagiarize out of laziness. I am sure some do it to cheat and they don't know the information they are copying. But, finding that information and knowing that it is what they seek require some degree of understanding. What I mean is that they at least have to know something about their topic to know what they are looking for.The people who do that are just trying to make themselves look smarter than they really need to be. Still, I think most people copy and paste because they don't want to write so much.

Lab Activity Week 5

This is the mind map I made for my research project

Progress Report Week 5

I am still on track with my research, except that I have not reached my desired goal of at least fifty responses yet. As a result, I have extended the period that I have it available, until the end of this weekend. Right now I have forty responses and I believe that I can pull those last ten, especially after broadcasting it through my friends on Facebook again.

The difficulty in doing my survey is my limited time, which prevents me from sitting in a booth and passing it out in a public area, such as the student center. Still, the survey has been much more successful than I honestly anticipated at the start and I have already received enough results to work with. Still more responses are desirable to reach a sample size that represents a larger look at the overall population. I honestly would like my study to represent the average American, as hard to define as that is. To achieve this, I have encouraged friends of any background to take it.

I will end the survey this Sunday and analyze the results. I will still be on pace with the plan I created for myself and next week I will be writing the rough draft, starting with the creation of my outline on Monday. I have a basic outline already, but I will polish it into a more useful skeleton for my paper’s organization at that time.

Journal Week 4

Develop a comparison outline of the types of resources (news articles, technical papers, discussion boards, scholarly journals…) you used, highlighting strengths and limitations of each tool.

I used two forms of resources for my project, each having it's own uses and advantages.

For my literary research, I relied on old textbooks of mine and a couple websites that list and define malware. These sources are great for helping me provide background information for my readers and lead into the main subject of my research. However it still does not provide the data I need to answer my main question, how secure does the average person feel they are from malware attacks?

The main source of my research is my survey, which will hopefully help me understand the attitudes people have towards malware and security and answer my defining question. I consider this a sociological issue and although there may be studies that already aimed to collect the same data I am going for, I thought it would be a good idea to collect the data for myself. So far I have 39 responses and I will still be conducting the survey for another week, allowing me to obtain a larger sample and have a more realistic idea of the general population.

Textbooks and websites
Pro: Provides background info for my topic
Con: Does not give a definitive portrayal on the general public's attitude about malware.

Survey
Pro: Gathers peoples opinions, which is the central focus of my study
Con: Does not define malware or ways to prevent it.