Term Paper on "Personal Application"

Quoted Instructions for "Personal Application" Assignment:

The purpose of the Session Long Project in Touro University classes is to give you the opportunity to explore the applicability of the Module to your own life, work, and place in space and time, and to experiment with the Module to see how the otherwise academically rigorous presentation of a topic may, with more or less work and/or trauma, become "up close and personal". This is done in a number of different ways -- sometimes cumulative papers, sometimes practical hands-on experimentation with a tool of some sort, sometimes reflections on a place of work or life. The common thread is personal application, aimed at demonstrating a cumulative knowledge and understanding of the course's material.

For this course, the Project will take the form of encounters with online tools and resources of several forms. Each Module will feature some website to visit, occasionally some tool to download and experiment with, or some demo to experience, in search of enlightenment about the kinds of resources available to IT professionals in our increasingly information-rich but sometimes painfully crowded professional community. It's almost inevitable that for any given Module, some of the class members will already have had experience with the "tool of choice"; when it happens to you, please resist the temptation to lay into the faculty with a claim that we're not teaching you anything new; we assure you that even if it's known to you, it is NOT known to a good many of your colleagues, and they'll be glad for the lead. If you do have such experience, regard it as a minor gift of time from the Powers in charge of Session Long Projects; the write-up will be a piece of cake for you. You can use your spare time to dig further into another site or tool, or even to use the Threaded Discussion forum to share your experience and evaluations with your colleagues.

Many online sites, when we encounter them, will require you to enter a name and an email address by way of registration; if this bothers you, try using a pseudonym and a convenience free email account from Hotmail or Yahoo, or just try some other one. All they want is a place to send a password, generally. It is also possible that you will receive follow-up inquiries from sites that you have visited; if this concerns you, please read our policy note on this issue.

It is essential that if you are going to download anything from the Internet, that you have adequate virus protection and anti-adware/spyware screening on your systems. In fact, it's so essential that if you haven't been through the exercise of checking out your protections, you must take the steps described in this note immediately, before carrying out any of the Project assignments for this class.

Each Module, then, you'll be directed toward some resource; your task will be to enter and/or use it, form some conclusions, questions, and ideas about its possibilities, and to write up those thoughts for our review. The general format for the write-up is found here. You'll be assessed on the degree of effort and enthusiasm you appear to invest in the exercise, the accuracy of your descriptions and the salience of your conclusions, your ability to generalize and to place the tool in a context of both the material for that Module and other similar sorts of tools from other sources , and the degree to which you involve yourself in making this a useful part of your education. All the good stuff, in short!

If you work in an area subject to security clearances and regulations, you may want to review our policy on assignments and national security.

So -- that's the general SLP strategy. If you have questions at any point about what to do or how to strategize your exercise, please contact your instructor for illumination. You can always come back to this explanation if you need to.



For Module 1, your assignment is to become familiar with the professional support website called the Strategic Management Club Online. In their own words,

"We cordially welcome all graduate and undergraduate business policy and strategic management students to the Strategic Management Club Online (SMCO) This user friendly web site provides strategic planning tools, templates, links, and information that can help you analyze cases and prepare professional-looking reports for class. The SMCO web site is designed to "save you time" in doing case research, preparing matrices, and even job hunting *****“ activities often engaged upon in a business policy class."

When you are reach the site:

Look over the blogs, the news stories, and the background information. Follow up links that interest you. In general, become familiar with its contents.

Look over the career links. Anything interest you? Any interesting themes there?

These resources are free to you, but they cost something to assemble and maintain; someone has to pay for it, and it's usually advertisers. Look over the commercial links on this site. See what's being offered, and to whom. Think about why they're paying for the privilege of putting their names in front of you.

Then write your review. The format for this review is as follows:

summary description of its structure and purpose

its overall "look and feel" and apparent target audience

what the site does and does not give you,

why you will or will not find it a useful addition to your professional resources list,

what you might go back there for,

what you hoped to find but did not,

links there that you find helpful to follow up

any other things about the site that you find salient and worth noting to others

bottom-line evaluation of its value to you

The last point is very important. Be honest and direct; your assessment is helpful to you and to others. If you don't find it helpful, say so and why, and try to explain what you would find more useful in its place. But also do try to remember also that your education isn't yet finished, that things you don't understand now and don't yet see the value of may turn out later on to be relevant and useful, and that the site's creators may know more about the topic and the profession than you do yet.

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