#info200

This past autumn I took an introduction to Information Technology course (INFO 200). Led by Professor David Stearns, the curriculum included topics that centered around design thinking, user research, software user interface design, and more. At the start of the quarter, each student was assigned to a group of four, with whom we were to work, cooperate, and execute with through to the end of the quarter.  Every week in lecture a new topic was introduced (as listed below), alongside an assignment that each group would need to complete as a part of the many components to our projects.

Essentially, we were to come up with an "information resource”. Broad as that may sound, the only requirement was that it utilized some sort of “technology” (again, broad) to connect people with the information they need.

The Team

My group consisted of three other gentlemen, Koki, Gavin, Wynston, and myself. After the initial ice-breaker and lighthearted introductory jokes, we discussed potential topics we could focus on. Initially, this was difficult to decide on the spot - we didn't understand the core concept of the project yet and we had to make an important decision within the week, if not during this current class session. After a few moments to think, ideas started to flow.

The Process

The brainstorming phase started out slow and simple; ideas grew off of ourselves, college students, our problems, situations around campus, and other small scale thoughts.

I'd caught on to the ideas that other groups were throwing at each other and they seemed quite similar to ours, so I decided to switch gears. "Let's list some groups of people that are under represented or in some type of disadvantage in our society and see what we get." Believe it or not, our list grew from college students with poor Wi-Fi to hungry homeless people and elderly unemployment. We ended our first session together by identifying team member roles: myself as group leader, and Wynston as moderator - but with our fast growing dynamic, the establishment of these roles was quickly forgotten.  With our new team, we were set to create a problem statement for the stakeholders our project would focus on and build our project from there in the coming weeks.

Group Problem Statement

Topics in Information Technology (INFO200)

Information, Technology, and Society

Design Thinking

User Research

UX AND Interaction

Software User Interface Design

Designing Accessible Systems

VR/AR/MR Design

Designing Secure Systems

Data Modeling and Encoding

Information Architecture

Data Science

Data Visualization

Information Privacy

Intellectual Property

Digital Money

AI & Autonomous Robots

Your blogs on Posterous are now about two weeks old.  Google Search will eventually find your posts and index them.  But can you wait?  You want traffic to your blog now (November) so you'll have something interesting to write about by December 10th.

You can speed this up in several ways.  First, take advantage of the auto-posting to other social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook.  This way you'll get links of your posts out to the world that is indexed (e.g., Twitter feeds).

Second, you can write a blog post about interesting blogs of your friends and include a link to their posting.  Courtesy says reciprocate.

A third way is to submit a site map directly to Google Search.  The method suggested here (not sure if it works) requires a little knowledge of html.  Give it a try - here are the instructions.

I personally think auto-posting to Facebook, Twitter, etc. is easier and more effective to get traffic for the short duration of this iProject.  You can also twitter or facebook your friend's most interesting post.  Although search traffic is nice (and there should be some), you have to begin by getting noticed.