Recap of Week 1 of Classes

I'm a little late on this one but I thought I would try throwing all my thoughts on all my classes into one post. It might be a bit chaotic and I'm not sure if my terrible excuse for a memory can handle going all the way back to Monday. I'll give it a shot though.

1) Digital Information Technologies and Architectures (DITA) (INM 348)

First class. 9am on Monday. Excellent. We talked about computers and what they do, binary, and file types. Not that difficult. I was a little rusty on the binary thing but it was easy enough to grasp. The whole ASCII part, though, with binary used to represent letters and whatnot would certainly be a little tougher than just 00000001 = 1 and 00000010 = 2, etc. I haven't really looked into it much. In lab we did an exercise in which we created a document and made formatting changes to it, then opened it in notepad to see what the formatting did to the document. Whoa. Not English. Lots of symbols and undecipherable (by me) gibberish. I have to say, however, that it is amazing how very complicated even the smallest changes can be underneath the surface. We then made our blogs. Simple enough.

2) Library and Information Science Foundation (INM 301)

The lecture was on the History of Information. The five information ages are as follows:

• the age of spoken language

• the age of writing and recorded information

• the age of printing

• the age of mass communication

• the age of networked digital computing

We looked at what can be considered language in terms of written/recorded symbols (is there a way to decipher it? Meaning, is there more than one sample of it which can be used to compare and translate the symbols somehow?). Several different examples of ancient texts and writing were shown in the slides. Very interesting stuff. 

3) Spanish: Lower Intermediate (Not part of my degree or anything but still recapping it)

I haven't taken a Spanish class in about 7 years. Sure, I learned a bit at work these past few months but most of what Papi and Alberto taught us were cuss words and therefore not all that useful in an academic setting. I followed the lesson as best I could although I'm not at all sure what the professor was saying sometimes and she talked rather fast too. I got my Instant Immersion: Spanish CD-ROMs in my package from home this weekend so I'll be using those to play catch-up and have study times so as not to look dumb in class. I also downloaded a couple of Spanish dictionary and conjugation apps on my phone. Huzzah!

4) Information Management Policy (INM 341)

We looked at different models of information management (TS Eliot/pyramid model vs LS Lowry/cognitive model and so on). We also discussed information as a resource and how it is different from other resources in that it is difficult to ascribe a monetary value to information. Information is also a unique resource in that it is sharable: it can simultaneously be given and retained.

5) Research Evaluation and Communication (INM 356)

This class will serve as a basis/introduction for our dissertation research. The lecture discussed the various ways of collecting and analyzing data, qualitative vs. qualitative data, and how important it is to set up a plan for how the information collected will be analyzed before even collecting said information. We talked about the pros and cons of the three different types of research: surveys; experimenting,
 evaluating
 and observing;
and 
desk
 research.

So that's the first week in a nutshell. I've received a few of my books in the mail already and am starting to read them. Well, I've read one chapter in one book so far. I'd say that's still progress. Week 2 starts tomorrow!