Journal Entry, Week Ten

Journal Prompt: Which of your peers' topics resonated the most with you? Link to their blog rather than mention them by name, in your post. What did you find interesting, useful, or intriguing about their research? What are you likely to do, to follow up?

There were a lot of my peers topics, papers, publications, and presentations that resonated with me.  Here are links to the blogs of some of my favorites:

I loved the way that Rob Lowe used survey's to conduct his research and his paper that he wrote was absolutely perfect for his intended audience.  He did such a great job keeping the information easy for anyone to digest.  I was very impressed with his work and his passion for keeping people safe on the internet.  Check out Rob's blog.

Damien Buschbacher's topic off 5G was one that sounded like a very dry topic to me, but Damien's enthusiasm for the subject really got me interested in the possibilities of future technologies that may be possible with the implementation of 5G.  Contrary to my previously held beliefs, this turned out to be a very interesting subject matter.  Check out Damien's blog.

Lastly, Kristine Bacon's blog is beautifully designed and her topic, "How does gaming help people cope with PTSD?," is an area of research that can be very helpful for sufferers of PTSD and for treatment of PTSD.  I thought her topic was very original.  Check out Kristine's blog.

I would love to see any of these blogs continue with future research and would be interested to learn what other information their research would turn out with more time to research their topics.

Progress Report, Week Ten

My progress is good.  All of my blogs are up-to-date, my paper is turned in, my presentation is done, my publication has been distributed.  Now I am just waiting for the reviews to come back on my paper, so I can make any revisions, and also to finish any upcoming reviews for my peers. 

I feel that I have covered the most surprising thing I have learned in my research on a couple other blogs, so I will cover one of the most surprising thing that I have learned about myself.  I have always been interested in digital forensics and in social media separately.  Social networking forensics is not a field I have considered before, but now I could see it as an interesting career option.

In the future, I may use this information to help me obtain a job in the field.  Also, a question that Rich had asked me, prompted me to think about what type of certifications there are in this field, and a quick search turned up a McAfee Institute certification for Certified Social Media Intelligence Expert (CSMIE).  I will definitely be looking into what other certifications and/or degrees are required for this field.

Journal Entry, Week Nine

Journal Prompt: Discuss the benefits and challenges of collaboration

There are many benefits to collaboration, and there are some definite challenges.  I will outline what I see as the main benefits and challenges of collaboration.

Benefits:

·         Collaboration Takes Advantage of Different Perspectives – Taking advantage of different perspectives can help to come up with different solutions to problems that you may not have thought of on your own.  Another benefit of different perspectives is that every person sees things slightly different and brings a different knowledge base and skill set.  This is especially true for project management and in the IT industry.

·         Collaboration Breeds Creativity – Same as with having different perspectives allows for more creative ideas to be exchanged.  Teams that collaborate well together will encourage creativity whether it be in advertising, graphics, writing code, creating new software and solving problems.

·         Collaboration Brings Democracy to Decision Making – When collaborating on a project, it gives everyone a chance to have a voice, especially when you compare it to a top-down approach.  In a top-down approach, decisions are made at the top and passed down to the levels.  It does not really give the people on lower rungs a voice since they are just doing the tasks they are told to do.

  Challenges: 

·         Conflict within Collaborative Groups – I’ve heard somewhere, at some time, that “wherever there are groups of two or more, there will be conflict.”  It is inevitable and it will happen.  However, conflicts can be managed with good leadership.

·         Collaboration May Result in Longer Decision Times – For the simple fact that you have many people working together, it may take longer for decisions to get made depending on how well everyone communicates and the tools they use to collaborate.  Communicating often can cut down time for decision making.

·         Collaboration May Have Higher Cost – Ideally, collaborative teams will provide an organization with a quicker turn out which will lower costs for them.  Unfortunately, things are not always ideal. Conflict, scope creep and longer decision times can make a project take longer than planned.  If you have a large collaborative team, expenses can rise quickly.

http://www.brighthub.com/office/collaboration/articles/73856.aspx

Progress Report, Week Nine

At this point in my research, I was gathering the last bit of my information.  I was really struggling with finding pictures that I could use in my report.  There is not a lot of data collected on social media forensics that I could find, so I spent a lot of time looking for good images.  Unfortunately I did not get a lot of good hits.  The pictures I ended up going with were logos for social media sites.  I think these logos looked good in my paper, as well as in my brochure that I made.  This is the point where I started freaking out a little bit.

Lab Activity, Week Eight

Interesting Highlights:

Some interesting highlights from my last post comes from the processing of social media.  First of all, I found it interesting that the judges decide how much access to grant to the accounts.  I guess when I think about that it makes sense, since in a standard case, they would have to issue a warrant to access information anyway.  I just assumed that when there was social media evidence to be found, they just got the passwords or cracked into it.  The information I found on how access is granted is direct access where the user has to give over the password and the requesting party has open access to the account, the next method of access is an in-chamber review where the judge goes through the evidence to determine what is relevant, an attorney’s eyes only review which is similar to an in-chamber review only the attorney does the leg work to find relevant data, and a third-party subpoena that is issued to the service provider.

Ways to Prepare for Presentation:

Since this journal entry is slightly overdue & I have already given my presentation, I will be speaking in hindsight about what I could’ve done to better prepare.  The first thing that I would’ve done differently to better prepare for the presentation would have been to film myself ahead of time to be able to watch myself back and see where I could make improvements.  Watching back the presentation that I did in class, the two things that I need to work on most is, as Paul put it, “the excessive use of umm…,” and my confidence.  To combat this, I think that it would mean just a lot more practice, maybe even in front of a “test” audience.  Overall, I felt good about the presentation and that it was one of the best presentations I had given to date, but I still have a lot of work to do with public speaking.  One thing I forgot to do before the presentation is a power pose.  I am sure that would have helped too.

On another point, I think that whoever teaches this class in the future may want to consider doing presentations during week 7 or 8.  I found the Q&A with my peers, and the feedback that they provided to be very helpful, and they brought up points that I had not previously considered.  There were several points that they brought up that I incorporated into my paper.  Not only would having the presentations earlier on in the quarter allow for valuable feedback that can be used in the papers, it would also keep people on track with their research as they will have to have everything prepared to present.  Lastly, it would spread out the big projects and avoid having to do several big projects in the last couple of weeks.  

Link to presentation:
https://olympic.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Podcast/Syndication/8d43ee13-72ee-45bb-81de-b82a7142e996.mp4