An Application for Citytech – Survey

Please complete the survey with this link  –   Survey Link 

NYCCT

An Application for New York City College of Technology
* Required
How often do you visit Citytech’s website? *
By knowing how frequently the students visit Citytech’s website, it’ll allow us to know how reliable the respondent’s reply will be.
This is a required question
When you visit Citytech’s Website. What page do you visit the most often? *
We will know which website page to optimize the view for our application.

This is a required question
Rate the difficulty of navigating the college website. *
It gives us a general idea of people’s impress of our mobile application. Since our goal is to make the app simpler to use than the website. If they find the site difficult to use, people may like our app better.
Very difficult
Very easy
This is a required question
If a mobile application is built for Citytech, would you use it? *
A very important question, when we create the mobile app for Citytech. Will people use it? If this application is not popular, then creating this app may not be beneficial to the school, and this project will be canceled.
This is a required question
Do you own a smartphone? *
Find the percentage of smartphone user. Which leads to the next question.
This is a required question
If yes to the previous question. What operating system is used by your smartphone?
This determines what mobile platform we will create the app for first.
Check all that applies.
Would you like to communicate with your fellow students within the app? *
ex. Selling/buying textbooks.
It is one of our planned feature. If people like it, we can continue developing and make it usable.
This is a required question
Scale your interest in reading Citytech’s news. *
Another planned feature.
Not interested
Very Interested
This is a required question
Is there any feature you would like to see in the application?

Comments and Questions.

Class notes 11/12 (Samson)

In Class Discussion – Summary

– First sentence of the summary must include title, author, and thesis.

– Reread and fix typo.

– Reverse outline for the article.

– Limit the use of examples given by the text.

– Use third person writing.

Summary need to be able to present to readers who never read the article. Use information given by the article only, don’t alter.

Grading 

20 points will be taken off if there is no article annotation, and 15 points for lack of annotation.

 

Minute – Written record of meeting.

Purpose of minute is to keep track of progress internally (for the group) and externally (public information). The audience of the minute can potentially be anyone.

Include in the minute 

– Attendance’s name

– Meeting time, and location

– An example to end the minute. “Respectfully submitted”

 

Discussion – Annotation bibliography Guideline

1- MLA format citation

2- At least 150 words paragraph summary.

3- How is it useful to your project?

4- Source can not be superficial

 

Group’s Plan for Next Week

Board Game – Sketch/Layout and draft of the rule

Computer Club – Survey and Memo

Horror Game – Testable game

School’s App – Survey and prototype

Website – Survey

 

For Next Class

1- Lab day (Bring all materials, sources, etc)

2- Individual meeting with professor (bring draft and questions)

3- Agenda and Minutes due Tuesday night. Blog and upload to Dropbox

*When contacting the professor with project related question, do it as a group. Everyone in the group should see the conversation.Unless it’s private*

An App for School – Samson Gong, Tony Chi, Goutam Seepersaud

For our final collaborative final project. We are proposing to make an application for mobile device to navigate through the college website. The application design will be simple, clean and fast. With a touch of a button, it will bring you to the frequently visited link within the school’s webpage. For more convenience, weather report around New York City College of Technology will be displayed. In addition, informations in regard to college weather closing, will be displayed on the main screen. If one can not find what they are looking form links provided by the application, there is an option to view the full website.

Completing this project will require plentiful amount of technical writing. The creator will have to take notes on the process it takes to complete the final product. When the prototype is ready, testers will subject to using the application looking for bugs. Similar to the “instruction and usability” project, there will be trial and error, where suggestions and problems will be logged. When the final project is complete, a full report will be provided.

The project’s aim is to provide convenience for both future, and current students attending Citytech. It will be useful to people who wants to look for a specific information, like the college academic calendar. Users will able to touch on a button specifically made for that file, view it, then leave the application. Stakeholders would include Citytech, their students, and potential students. The stakeholders would find the ease of access will allow users to quickly navigate the website for course requirements.

To complete this, our first priority to research on where the students usually go when they are in Citytech’s webpage. After the finding, we will need to create a prototype to see if everything is working accordingly. If so, we would include more feature that may be of convenience.

There are three members in this group, we will split the work evenly amount each other. We will combine ideas and during the testing period we will have to give in our suggestion and fix and buy that may arise. While creating the application, works and codes can be combined later on for a product. Our meeting will mostly be held either in class, or online webcam communication on Monday night. The reason is mainly due to our work and school schedule, a group member has multiple jobs, while the other has work that takes up most of the time. We prefer webcam session because it would be the next closest to face to face communication.

Communication will be hard but, by the end of the project, we will learn how to code together, work collaboratively, and to cope with each other’s schedule. In addition, we will have experience of real life work situation of creating a project and working in a team to accomplish a product.

“The Flight from Conversation” Summary

The article “The Flight from Conversation” written by Sherry Turkle is about how technology eliminate conversation for connection. People’s lives are now “plugged-in”. Conversations are gone as families sit together, texting and reading email. At work, people text during meeting. Users are always connected with each other through their device. As the author stated, this technology has made the them “alone together”. Face to face conversation teaches human patience, and converse with ourselves. Sherry Turkle found in her research that people uses social media for automated listeners. Thus having companions. She believe constant connection will only make a person more lonely, and created a plan. To teach people about the value of conversation, homes need to have “device-free zones” for parents to talk with their children, or work environment, with employees. This will have them to listen to everything without the interruption of social media.

 

Nexus 5’s Manual

Nexus 5 is a phone that was released by Google almost a year ago. Two things that surprises me as I went through the manual. First, I noticed was that there are only 18 pages. Secondly, there is no table of content. That surprises me because the Nexus 5 is a smart phone. To me, I have no problem using this device because I am accustomed to their products. However, there should be more instruction for new user, such as how to navigate around the phone’s interface, and features.

The manual uses pictures and icons to illustrate the physical buttons of the phone. Once again this can be confusing to some users.

Screen Shot 2014-10-07 at 6.58.47 PM For example, under the power symbol. It looks like an sd card, or a sim card.

After the basic introduction of the phone. The manual goes on to how to safely use the phone. They use second person narration to list the safeties, so everything is straight to the phone, and sound like it is speaking to you.

Overall, this manual is very simple. There’s not much information. People that are used to using Google’s interface should not have a problem. However, other users may find it difficult. New users will have to use the phone for a while to become comfortable with it

Download (PDF, 375KB)

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Online Identity

I’ve read an article in regard to the topic “Online Identity” on huffingtonpost.com 37 Percent of Employers use Facebook to Pre-Screen Applicants (Article). A survey was conducted by a job listing website CareerBuilder. Research data was gathered by Harris Interactive in February and March of 2012. They asked more than 2,000 hiring managers if they use social media to prescreen their applicants, and, if their findings affect the candidates. It shows 37% of the hiring manager use social networking sites to predetermine their candidates. The managers state they check the applicants to see if they present themselves professionally. While some wanted to learn if the applicant qualifies for the job. However, some companies have a practice of asking applicants for their user and password to log into their accounts, which does not limit only to social networking website. That started a debate of privacy invasion. A reason provided for their action is, they want to conduct a background check before offering employment in a public trust position.

I have a Facebook account that does not allow anyone besides my friends to read my information. I don’t accept friends whom I do not know. I don’t want anyone I don’t know looking through my information because I am afraid of identity theft. Especially when logging onto bank accounts. Most of the login security questions require answers to “what city was your elementary school”. That kind of information can be found on social network.  Online identity does reflect upon your true self, because most people feel comfortable hidden behind their computer, and they express themselves thoughtlessly. So when applying for a job, potential employers may find something they dislike on your social network, and it’ll affect your employment success rate.

I keep my online presence low because I don’t like telling people my life activity. So when I googled myself I only found my facebook account, which is set to private. I don’t think its ethical to base people’s promotion or employment on their online social life. But, I do understand, so I am not against it, because employers should know the type of person they are hiring, or promoting. Anything online is considered as open information, which can be obtained by anyone. However, no one should be allowed to ask for login information.  If employers or hiring managers can’t find anything on that candidate, their employment should not be affected.

 

Article in HuffingtonPost.com

Samson’s Education Reflection

During my job search, many of the job requirements and responsibilities listed scare me. I felt my education in New York City College of Technology, or Citytech for short, isn’t preparing me enough.  To me, my college courses are only teaching us the basic of our materials. I could be wrong because I haven’t worked in my field. However, I’ve done research on the requirements needed for information technology related work. It seem to me, people tend to use programs and have skills more advance than what I am being taught. I do understand it is not the college’s fault because sometimes the professor decided to teach the material they want.

My first computer security class was more of a terminology course. The professor was trying to get us to familiarize the type of viruses, and their origin.  Which is normal for the basic of our lecture. However, throughout the semester, I felt I didn’t learn much. We spend most of our time talking about work ethic. Toward the end of the semester, we have to do our own research project and present it to the class. Luckily, that was only applies for my computer security course. My other module course was practical, which I prefer.  We set routers, firewalls, and security protocols. I learn from hands on.

The courses provided by Citytech qualify us for most of the job listing, but not enough to make us effective in the working environment.  The lectures only scratches the surface of the material, and the rest and advance technique needs to be self-taught.  For example, the ad (Example Job Application) wants the candidate to be fluent in the Linux/Unix operating system.  The college does provide a course for Linux/Unix. However, there’s a limit on how much one semester can teach us. So, we will have to download and use the operating system in our time to use in order to be fluent with that operating system. For the job requirements, there wasn’t much expectation listed on communication skill, but I assume companies want someone to be fluent in english and go straight to the point.

I do believe college courses should prepare students for future career. Education’s purpose is to prepare students for their step toward society, and put their skills into use for their job. The courses required in Citytech for graduation are very flexible. Such as, a student is required to take biology, when the student is pursuing the computer security. The flexibility of that design is, if the student wants to change from security field to either science major, or medical technology. The student doesn’t have to retake those course. But it waste time for those that are trying to go straight for their field. I believe there should be options for students to not take a certain class.

Searching through other CUNY colleges. Their offered courses for information system are similar. Yet, it has a specific set of skills that are broken down, such as cryptography for computer security. I believe those are very important lectures that are not provided in Citytech. For City College, I looked up their computer science program because for the “Information System” it is an MIS degree. That major requires more math course than Citytech. For Baruch College, the business focused college. It is expected that their computer program are mainly focused in business, like focusing on spreadsheet, and formulas. Therefore, I feel Citytech’s courses are generalize, while other colleges are focused toward that one major.

 

Queens College

City College of New York

Baruch College 

Hunter College

Brooklyn College

Job Search

In my job search, I’ve look through about twenty job ads. I used only one website. (www.careerbuilder.com). On the drop down menu I went into the “information system” category. It shows many available jobs for information system, however, not all of it seem like what it is suppose to be for. One of the work’s description was “passing out papers and relaying messages”. I double checked to see if i was in the right category, and yes, i was. I learned a little from that search. Always ask for the job description, because some times the employers might have put up an ad looking for something, but not at the right category or field.

So, I did find some ads which the description matches my field. Some of the job offer seem to be looking for a technician. The employer is looking for someone who is able to install, configure and maintain building printers, install software programs, and install hardwares. I felt something is off. then i remember the search “information system” is too broad. There are many fields within “information system”. Anyway, this job description did include some responsibility that is in the security field, which is in my module. However, the wage is ranged from $15 – $17. It seem quite low for the amount of work listed. because I’ve checked other ads and some included the wage. and it ranges from $20 – $30 starting from first year. Luckily for for the lower salary ad, it doesn’t require previous job experience.

The ads that belong in the security field of ” information system” seem hard to get into, because of the requirement. The line “To be considered for this position, you must minimally meet the knowledge, skills, and abilities listed” scares me. especially the word “minimally” and it required 6 years of experience. For a person whom just graduated from college may not be able to be accepted by this company. Most of the company ask for experience in Linux/Unix, taken and is IS certified and conduct ongoing periodic reviews, and work in fast pace environment. The listed requirements besides the working experience is expected. Linux/Unix is free and consider as the safest operating system, so companies tend to lean toward it. Certificates is also expected because technology is constantly changing, thus the users must stay up to date. Almost all technicians have to work in fast pace because employees must do their work.

The education I received in City Tech module classes seem very basic. I have a feeling that when I start working, i will need to go online and look up on how to do certain things. Throughout my first module computer security class, we’ve talked about the concept viruses. Some of my second and third module class seem to repeat its lesson from the prerequisite. However, not everything is useless, i did learn from those class. But, its just not what i had expected. When i get an internship, that should be when I would know what is need and required of me. If i have anything I need to learn. I can ask for my associate’s help, or go online. Like what most of the people in my module class tell me, go online for help and don’t rely on the college to teach you everything.

 

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About Me

Hi everyone, my name is Samson. Sorry about my late post. As you all know, I am currently attending City Tech. This will probably be the my last semester for a bachelor, that is if, I can get an internship. I hope its not too late. A little about my interest, I enjoy playing games, meet nice people, and watch movies/shows. Over the summer, i went to China for about two months. In China, it was really hot, but enjoyable, because I met some really nice people. For this semester, i plan to get an internship. If i can’t, i will try to get it for this winter and graduate.

My strength is willingness to learn from my mistakes. So hopefully, i will be able to improve my writing through other people correcting me. My weakness would be procrastination. Which is my biggest weakness. I don’t enjoy writing because when i write, i always think of reports and homework. Unfortunately, i think this course will have a lot of writing and homework.

Samson G.