100-200 words
1. It is important that as an IT professional, one finds ways to keep up with emerging technology and best practices in the field. There are many publications and online sites that offer articles and forums for exploring technology trends.
An article in eWeek by, Chris Preimesberger, Trends to Expect in Business Intelligence, Big Data in 2015 – See more at: http://www.eweek.com/innovation/trends-to-expect-in-business-intelligence-big-data-in-2015.html#sthash.pZkMozyX.dpuf – asks the question,
“How are we going to harness all this information, and do it efficiently, so that the IT we use pays us dividends?”
Do you think these trends will impact businesses you know?
http://www.eweek.com/
2. Some years back, when our daughters were school aged and before I was teaching, our local school district undertook a long term planning process called “Shared Decision Making“. Individuals from various stake holder groups participated in this process. There were people representing the office staff, maintenance department, teachers, administration, community and parents.I was one of the parent participants. The facilitator was hired from outside of the district, enabling him to be an impartial leader. This group met many times, tasked with revising the District Mission and Vision statements, Learning Outcomes, and several other tasks. Our initial meeting focused on working together as a team ( I reflect on that experience often when talking to students about teaming). Our decision process was by consensus….which meant that we all had to come to agreement that we ‘could live with the decision’. Often when dealing with opposing views, it was this concept of what could you ‘live with’ that made the difference. If one person could not ‘live with’ a decision, we had to work on the concept or wording until everyone could live with it.
http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/sept92/vol50/num01/Shared-Decision-Making-Works!.aspx
In your life, what examples of decision making have you participated in or observed?
3. Back in the early 1980’s I freelanced for an advertising agency outside of NYC. The owner was a family-orientated man and when he learned that my husband and I planned to move to western NY with our three daughters, he was quite concerned that they would be bereft of any educational and cultural input:) So he gave us a Commodore 64 as a gift for our family – something to keep us connected to the ‘real’ world. Of course, I loved it! Instead of packing up our moving boxes, I spent hours learning the computer. Eventually, we had to pack that up so we could get on with the boxes.
Once upstate, which was not as isolated as my former employer might have expected, we all enjoyed the Commodore 64. In fact, it still sits in our attic, under the Atari and 5.5″ floppy assortment we collected. I actually used Turtle and LOGO for some of my college courses toward my teaching degree, with print outs on a dot matrix printer. When Internet service first became available, it was dial up in our area and we purchased our first Gateway PC…What a thrill that was to connect on the Internet! Many of my colleagues were using AOL at that time.
Now several computers later, I have an HP Touch Smart with Windows 7 and lots of gadgets:) Recently, I purchased a touch screen laptop with Windows 8.1. With all of these new devices and apps, the idea of using a dial up service is hard to imagine.
What brought you to IT and computers?
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