Time Management Articles

For those not in CST300, this assignment involves going to this site, reading at least the first 5 articles, and talking about 3 things we learned.

In reading those articles, I learned that a little effort goes a long way, if structured right. With good planning, good preparation, and the right mindset, it takes very little time to get things done. I also learned that procrastination is much more dangerous than I previously thought. I've been learning that for myself lately, because I tend to procrastinate. This website lists it very clearly though. The third thing I learned is that a to-do list helps. I've had some experience with this in my own life, but I still don't use to-do lists as much as I probably should. Hmm, I should make a note of that. "Todo: use to do lists more." Hope I remember to check this to do list.

Class Summary, Sept 20

This assignment is about what I learned in class on September 20, 2007 (last Thursday).

In this class period we started out by talking about online classes. Next year, some web design courses at CSUMB will be available online. The plan is to make the courses available every semester, but to trade off so that they're available in a classroom one semester, and available online the next semester. This would also probably make the materials easier to update for the next semester, since the materials for each course don't have to be updated for the Fall->Spring date shift, just the 2007->2008 date shift. This is a small thing, but it'd be a whole lot less work for somebody.

There are about 70 web design courses being offered right now, and they plan to do this with 10 of them initially, and see how it works out. CSUMB's goal is to have 12k students, and have 4k of those take classes online only.

We moved into time and stress management. The general conclusion was that we should prioritize school over work, because the average salary almost doubles for people with degrees.

Convey's Time/Task Management Matrix was mentioned. It doesn't sound too useful to me, but here it is.

	Urgent	Not Urgent
Important	Crises Pressing Problems Deadline-Driven Projects	Prevention Planning Relationship Building Research
Not Important	Interruptions Email Phone Calls Meetings	Trivia Busy Work Time Wasters Pleasant Activities

We went into more detail about time management, but I'd rather talk about the speakers. Bobbi Long, Mike Machado, and Ken Wanderman talked to us today. Well, I'm not sure if Bobbi talked to us. I think she had a class she had to be in. She does graphic design though, mostly posters and logos.

Mike works in the ITCD lab, teaches the Intro to UNIX class, and is part of an ad-hoc network research group. He's also the guy to talk to if we're in the Tmac program and want some software. CSUMB has a deal with Microsoft to let us use most of their products for free. Unfortunately, Microsoft Office isn't part of this deal. Ahh well. Mike also to us about MySpace, a personal storage server each of us can get access to if we email him about getting an account. I don't think this is useful for storage - it's only 600MB, flash drives are cheap these days, and most things can be uploaded to Gmail. It will be useful for my programming projects later on. It has PHP and MySQP set up, so once I learn about those things I can put up demonstration pages on my MySpace.

Ken deals with the M in Tmac - the multimedia. It's called "interactive media" these days, but the concept is the same. It involves video, text, moving images, and, most importantly, interactivity. There are a lot of uses for multimedia - instruction, gaming, recreation, advertising, social interaction, etc. All you need are web design skills, some programming, and graphic design ability. Writing skills help too; I've seen tons of advertisements on the web that I wouldn't admit to making, had I made them. People who can work in this area are highly sought after, especially for flash animation.

Personal Time Survey

For those not in CST300, this assignment involved completing the personal time survey and posting it here.

1. 8 X 7 = 56 Number of hours of sleep each night
2. 1 X 7 = 7 Number of grooming hours per day
3. 2 X 7 = 14 Number of hours for meals/snacks per day - include preparation time
4. 2 X 5 = 10 Total travel time weekdays
5. 1 X 2 = 2 Total travel time weekends
6. 2 Number of hours per week for regularly scheduled functions (clubs, church, get-togethers, etc.)
7. 2 X 7 = 14 Number of hours per day for chores, errands, extra grooming, etc.
8. 3 Number of hours of work per week
9. 16 Number of hours in class per week
10. 14 Number of average hours per week socializing, dates, etc. Be honest!
11. 138 Now add up the totals
12. Subtract the above number from 168 - 138 = 30

"The remaining hours are the hours you have allowed yourself to study."

Study, and do homework. An estimation I've heard is that you have 2 hours of work outside of class for every hour in class, including study time and homework. I'm in class for 16 hours a week, 16*2=32, and I've got 30 hours "for studying." With all my homework, I don't have much free time. I don't know how people can go to school and work too!

Class Summary, Sept 13

This assignment is about what I learned in class on September 13, 2007 (last Thursday).

We had two speakers today: Andrew Coyle and Pat Watson. Andrew's specialty is designing dynamic websites. He says that most websites these days are database-driven, and I think that's true for "big" websites. John Doe's fan page for the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie isn't backed by PHP and MySQL, but all of those web 2.0 sites we talked about in the 300L class surely are. Andrew suggested we read magazines, blogs, and newsletters to keep up with what's happening in the tech world. I think that's a great idea; a lot of the conversation starters I know are from Gmail's Web Clips. He specifically recommended the e-newsletter Good Morning, Silicon Valley, and I've added it to my Gmail's Web Clips. It should provide some interesting information.

Pat Watson is on the digital art side of computers. He showed us some examples of digital media from others' classwork. He says forensic visualization is a good field to get into. I've heard that before, and it makes sense. A visualization of a crime scene is a powerful thing, because a lawyer can use it to explain to the jury how a crime happened. It is common knowledge that visual aids help with that kind of thing, but 3d visualizations are much more helpful because they can be manipulated and pictures can be taken from other angles. Justice isn't the only field improved by 3d visualization, there are many others. Medical procedures benefit greatly from 3d models, both for the doctors as they work, and for medical students to better understand the situations they'll be facing.

Pat also told us visualizations are useful for 3d tours. He showed us a 3d tour of the future library, and it looked very impressive. Some realtors put up 3d tours of houses instead of inviting buyers to come see them. I don't think I'd like such a tour, because I'd rather see the house myself and look for problems. Still, a 3d tour would give me a good idea of what a house is like, and it would probably make me more interested than I would be otherwise.

Eric Clinger also spent a few minutes talking about our Individualized Learning Plans. He's going to go over those with us in 1-on-1 meetings. We all signed up for such a meeting. We can also drop in if we have any problems/questions/updates concerning our ILPs, but if we're going to take more than 10 minutes of his time we should schedule a meeting.

Interesting (and unplanned) fact: excluding this sentence, this class summary has the same word count as the last one.

My Weekly Schedule

Yep, it's here. I've got lots of free time on Saturdays and Sundays. Unfortunately, I've also usually got homework for Math, Spanish, and CST 300L due Sunday night/Monday morning.

You'll need a Google account to view it, as it's a Google Document. I got the idea to do it like this from Phillip Wessels.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pW4UTAoRL6v_zVK3fHG4dWA

Edit Sept 26: I've updated this to include Anime Club, and tagged it as week4 because it's mentioned as an assignment for that week too.

Study Strategies and Habits

For this assignment, we are to go to read adprima.com/studyout.htm and reflect on the strategies/tips described.

This site has some good info, and a few tips that I don't think would work so well. Overall through, it's got a lot more good info than bad. Like it says, it's ranked high on Google, and it's used by many schools, so it has proven itself useful to many people already.

One of the things it describes that I am weak with is making every hour count. I'm great at finding a distraction, whether it's Youtube, Facebook, or just an interesting Wikipedia article. So far in my academic career I've managed to get along alright; it's interesting living by the skin of my teeth. I find that I work best under pressure. I hardly ever turn things in late because I'm just slacking off, I know my limits and when the deadline is approaching I get to work. Still, working hard earlier and having fun later would be a safer way to do things.

Another thing I'm weak with is outlining textbooks. I've never depended heavily on books in my academic career, and I don't expect to. If a teacher teaches differently from the book, I don't need to learn from the book because that teacher's assignments and tests are going to be different from the book's instructions. If a teacher teaches straight out of the book, I don't need to learn from the book because the teachers already taught me that material. I'll certainly review it as I complete my assignments, but by that point it's stuff I already know and thus I'm not learning anything completely foreign to me.

My one great weakness is examinations. I just plain suck at them. It's because I work slowly and carefully, which is great for homework, but bad for timed things like tests.

My grammar and punctuation is strong. I guess I got it from my mother. She used to be an English teacher. She reviewed all my papers when I was younger, and now I always try to have perfect grammar. I often play around with sentences and rewrite them until they sound splendid, especially for important papers.

My lecture notes are great too. Well, they're great for me. I'm good at getting the main idea from both books and lessons, and then distilling that onto paper as a few lines of notes, when everybody around me is writing down exactly what the teacher said / wrote on the board. That never helps me! Say it takes a teacher 30 minutes and 3 pages of notes to make the entire class understand an idea. That teacher certainly doesn't need 3 pages of notes to remind himself/herself how it works, and once a student learns the idea the student won't either. I learn during class, and take a few notes to remind myself of the concepts. To somebody else, my notes will mean nothing, but if they ask me I'll be able to explain it in great detail from those notes.

There were also a few weird tips in that list. The first is just a grammar issue, but I thought it was funny enough to mention. "Never study within 30 minutes of going to sleep." Due to the ambiguousness of the word "within," this could mean "Don't study for 30 minutes before going to sleep," or "Don't story for 30 minutes after going to sleep." Personally, I try my best not to have studying dreams.

Another weird tip was, when taking an exam, start by writing all the material you know on the subject. This really wouldn't work for me, because I'm always pressed for time on exams anyway, but it seems like a weird tip in general because usually the only time you forget things is if they're in short-term memory, like when you've been cramming, and this site argues against cramming before tests.

To summarize:

Areas in which I'm strong

• Getting the main idea
• Using correct punctuation and grammar
• Taking lecture notes

Areas in which I'm weak

• Making every hour count
• Outlining textbooks
• Taking examinations

Ideas that are strange

• Never study within 30 minutes of going to sleep
• Test taking - the memory dump

Class Summary, Sept 6

This assignment is about what I learned in class on September 6, 2007 (last Thursday).

We had three speakers today: Rosalie Strong, Kevin Cahill, and Young JoonByun. Rosalie's specialty is Instructional Design, which means designing the training modules that are used to teach people things. She has designed training modules for all kinds of things, from school topics to working with nuclear reactors. She's the person we should go to if our Capstone is about solving educational/training problems, developing new skills, or changing behaviors.

Kevin Cahill is a website designer and a nature lover. I think his hobby works well with his profession; both involve art. He's the guy to go to for anything about websites. I personally might visit him if I have website-design-related questions outside of class, since it looks like he knows how websites work from the inside as well as the outside. He talked about making websites look the same across different browsers, and I know that's a huge problem in the world of web design. I know the field well enough to know that he really knows his stuff.


The third presenter was Young JoonByun, and I think it odd that his last name is two names concatenated. He talked about programming. His presentation was definitely the least flashy, but I don't think that made it boring. I want to work in the field of programming, so his experience is probably most relevant to me.

Both Kevin and Young talked about something besides their work here, which I thought was interesting. Kevin said we should all take a nutrition class. That's weird, but it makes sense in a way. I took a health class in my previous college, and it had some very good info. Young talked about the new Computer Science major opening up, and I'm quite happy he did. For one thing, I'd heard about it before, but Young clarified its purpose. For another, this tells me that Young is a great guy to talk to if you're interested in programming - he'll tell you useful things that you probably didn't know.

Lastly, I learned how to start a blog on Blogger. That was a small part of the class, but I think it was important. I knew I didn't know how to do it before I went up there, and I knew I'd fumble with it and probably be pointed in the right direction by my classmates. Eric told us that anybody could start a blog with 5-15 minutes trial and error. I was trying to be the example of that.

ILP Review

For this assignment, we are to go to portfolio.csumb.edu and choose two portfolios to read carefully. By random selection I chose the year 2006, and I looked at all the profiles there. Of those, I think Jennifer and Imelda have the best looking profiles. I choose them.

I like both of these. I think they both work well to deliver their content, and they are both fine products. That said, I like Jennifer's more than Imelda's. Imelda concentrated more on having a nice, neat, compact portfolio, whereas Jennifer used as much room as necessary to describe the courses, its requirements, and her results. Jennifer's is very spread out, and a somewhat more compact design might have been better, but I think Imelda went too far with compacting it.

Still, both are fine portfolios, and any information that you need is easy to find. I specifically chose these two because they initially looked good. I'd rather not look through bad work, and I bet teachers don't like to either. Some of the other portfolios looked too flashy, too disorganized, or too plain. There's nothing wrong with a plain portfolio, but people like me are more likely to choose the ones that look good without being garish.

Employers are going to look for that kind of thing too. I think either of these people would be proud to show employers their portfolios; they are both fine works.

Learning Pathways

For those not in CST 300, this is an assignment where we look at the pathways to graduation and choose which one we feel best fits our career goals.

I think the 2.5-year one is best for me. I'm taking my last few General Ed classes this semester, so if I focus on my major for the next 2 years I should get it done.

In terms of focuses, I still plan to do the programming focus, or "Software Design" as it's called.

I'm not certain I'll do the Tmac degree at all though. I'm hoping to go into the new CSIT degree YoungJoon talked about.