Week 3

 This week's post is broken up into 4 parts:

Part 1: Visit Time Management and Study Strategy Websites

The "Time Management Tips" page has several really helpful tips to help manage my time. This last week has been rather rough as I'm wrapping up my Calc 2 class--my last lower-division course before I'm solely devoted to CS Online. Time management took a back seat to evaluating priorities.

 

This page however has a handy calculator to help you plan out your regular activities, or as a precursor to developing a schedule, at least see how you spend your time. Additionally, there is a template for creating a study-hours-needed calendar.

 

There are also 5 points or mantras that I can follow to help me develop bad habits, and avoid activities that would enable procrastination. Of all these tips, there is the ABCs list of tasks that lets you plan out how to prioritize tasks. This is particularly relevant to me this week, since I've been burnt out trying to juggle both Calc 2, my full-time job, and CST300. I need to get started on a system like this while times are good so I don't have to also spend time familiarizing myself with how to plan out the system while I have my hands already full.

Part 2: What I've Learned This Week: Ethics

I'm particularly intrigued by this assignment. I've never had to write a paper on any sort of ethics topic before, surprisingly. I'm curious to see how my topic proposal will be viewed. I do already have a bias on the topic going into it, but think it will be intriguing to argue both sides, plus it is something I'm interested in learning more about from the other side--the justifications and statistics that support the opposing argument.

 

 Learning about the different ethical theories is something I hope to carry outside of this class, for instance when I'm interacting with other people, when I think about my relationships with them, and how I interpret their decisions and actions. I watch a lot of news as well, and assuming I can retain this info or at least refer to it easily, I think I will be viewing a lot of current events through a different lens.

Part 3: What Every Computer Science Major Should Know

 This week's reading (https://matt.might.net/articles/what-cs-majors-should-know/) discussed several topics I am familiar with and can confidently say I'm comfortable discussing (discrete mathematics, programming languages, technical communication, etc), and several others that sound made up to me at this point (cryptography, Unix philosophy). To this extent, there are several topics I am particularly interested in learning more about (operating systems, UX design, parallelism, etc) and can directly foresee them being beneficial to my career and the position in particular I have in mind with my current employer.

 

This is a very handy list loaded with references that seem to contain additional tools. I'm going to make a point of it to return to this list next week and investigate some of the topics that seem scary to me, some that intrigue me, and some that I consider myself familiar with, but just to make sure I'm on the same page.

 

As requested, here is a link to this week's journal entry: Taylor Farner's Week 3 Learning Journal Entry. 

Part 4: Code of Integrity

 The code of integrity is vital to ensuring that if we all put in the effort, we can earn our education properly. If you're stuck, so you look to see someone else's solution, you are more likely to copy their work in some way or at the very least increase the chance that you will fail to learn the topic on your own.

 

Coming from a literary arts background, I am familiar with how plagiarism can rear its head when you are interpreting works of literature, but when it comes to coding, I get a little nervous--I have to imagine that there are only so many ways we can all skin the same cat. That being said, I'm assuming I will start to see the nuances of developing code and making it ones' own.

 

The code is also important for holding oneself personally accountable. If you bend the rules once to take a short cut, you will find yourself taking the easy way out again. The same can be said of your classmates--helping them take the easy way out isn't doing them any favors either. They will not learn the proper way of conducting research and implementing their own strategies.