Welcome to CISS 100 – Introduction to Computing and Information Sciences. If you are starting your studies in computing I believe you have chosen the correct path as you want to be on the correct side of the digital divide… which I think will continue to widen.
To illustrate our present disruptive environment consider the following from an email from Jack Shea of EMC Academic Alliance…
When Clayton Christensen examines the impact of disruptive innovation on established companies, he notes that by the time a new threat to a company is recognized, it is too late. The new competitor gains a substantial foothold, and because of existing mindset, past success, and sunk costs, the established leader is caught unaware. For example, for the newspaper and magazine industry, the process of disruption has been described as being gripped by a digital riptide. The ferocity of this riptide includes Newsweek being sold for $1 in 2011, and the sales of the Washington Post for $250 million and the Boston Globe for $70 million, when just a few years earlier these newspapers were valued in the billions.
We are living through the Information Revolution that will have as disruptive place in history as any previous societal/cultural revolution (e.g. industrial revolution, etc.). Recall the industrial revolution where entire professions went away (blacksmiths, farmers, etc.). The Industrial Revolution took place over 200 years whereas the Information Revolution will take place far quicker citing the emergence and rapid maturation of Big Data & Analytics, Embedded Computing & Robotics, Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things/Everything (IoT or IoE). All of these things will replace both manual and knowledge based labor. Maybe most importantly, you are in precisely the correct curriculum to ensure your future.
Continuing on, I actually believe the Information Revolution will have a bigger place in history as new technologies and revolutionary events are happening daily. Just have a look around at the Egyptian Revolution sparked by Facebook, the Hudson River plane crash whose news broke far better and faster on Twitter than CNN which itself had revolutionized correspondence covering the Middle East wars. Consider that it has recently been asserted that the 1st person to live to 200 years old has already been born. Consider IBM just stored a single bit on 12 atoms where present state of the art is 1 bit on over 1 Million atoms. Putting this last item into perspective, consider a cell phone with 150 terabytes of data (or in layman’s terms ~ 100,000 movies on your cellphone). The list goes on and on and changes emerge each day.
I direct you to ciss100.com navigation information below and the CISS 100 course introduction in Lecture Module 1 (LM1) complete with a video introduction (See menu above and when you expand Lecture Modules you will see Lecture Module 1).
First, recall that you can search any Web page using ctrl-f in Windows/Linux/Chrome and command-f in Mac OS. Also, the search site functionality (in right panel) works very well but it is not indexing/retrieving the attached documents at this early juncture.
Top Menu Tabs (see above) will reveal a sub-menu system with a “mouse rollover” (i.e. place cursor over the item). Example, mouse rollover of “Lecture Topics” reveals “Course Intro & Syllabus”, “Architecture & Hardware”, etc. I will order these according to where they are covered in the course and by convention I will denote these menu navigation sequences using arrows (e.g. www.ciss100.com => Lecture Topics => Course Intro & Syllabus). Also note these menus may not display all items within your screen size so you may have to scroll down to see all menu items.
The Lecture Modules menu system is essentially a necessarily evolving text book as CIS texts are out of date the moment they are printed. Now if you mouse rollover the sub-menu items you will see that many of them have additional sub-menu content (e.g. “Course Intro & Syllabus” has submenu items => “Syllabus”, “Contacting your Professors”, etc.). Please note the “Intros” contain content that introduces the topic further explored in the submenus. With this basis the top level Lecture Topics menu items are essentially chapter introductions for the submenu system that would be chapter sections.
The Linux Labs menu system has everything you need to perform the CISS 100 Ubuntu Linux Labs. We perform the first labs using the HVCC Virtual Desktop Interface (VDI) environment and move to the VMWare desktop virtualization environment for the advanced system administrator labs and Final Project.
The Discussion Board menu system contains the CISS 100 Discussion Board (DB) topics however please note the DBs take place within the College’s “Blackboard” (BB) Learning Management System (LMS).
Emergent Topics is a blog and contains up to date emergent topics and technologies (daily Business, Information Technology, Society news of the day). These articles can also be accessed by subject through the tags. In the lower right quadrant of the page you will see the most common tags however to see a complete listing please choose the emergent topics menu tab.
The Advisement & Transfer menu system provides general advisement information for new, existing and transfer students, transfer agreements with 4-year institutions, course outlines, CIS course availability by semester to assist with your scheduling and general searchable advisement information in layman’s terms and is a must read to navigate through an undergraduate curriculum.
CISS 260 Internship provides information for the program’s Internships.
Right Panel Widget contains, Site Search, Subscriptions, Social Media Connections, Multilingual Translation, 10 most recent Emergent Topics and other content as it evolves
Also note that each page has Print/PDF save functionality at the bottom of the page.
ADA Resources – You may or may not see a Blackboard left panel item titled “ADA Resources”. This contains materials restricted to students with identified disabilities (i.e. have registered with the College’s Disability Resource Center).
Lastly, if you have an idea to improve this site please let me know.
Prof James G. Looby – Chair Computing & Information Sciences