Now that the course is over...

I believe the take home message of this course was to open our eyes to web 2.0 and all of the things it can do. Before the class I had never heard of web 2.0 and therefore never heard of the applications and ways to use them. This class taught me to look at the internet in a new way. There are so many possibilities of what can be done with the web. For example, with mashups I never knew it could be so easy to create things like placing housing prices on maps.

Something that you could have tested us on was to ask us how we plan on using what we learned in the future. That could show if we really learned anything, and essentially what the take home message for us was. I think that how we will use what we learned in our future is one of the most important things to take away from a class

CIS Presents – IT Major/Minor

The IT major or minor are two fields of study that Bentley College offers. A few teachers spoke about this field and what it has to offer. IT is something that affects everyone’s life and this cheap ubiquitous computing is improving people’s life around the world. The CIS majors are among the most highly sought after students in the market with a salary ranging from $52,000 to $102,000. These students have been employed with companies such as IBM, KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers, UBS, and Deloitte Consulting. This career is about finding a successful job as a technology expert that can provide immediate value to their employer by integrating business and technology into business solutions. IT jobs can focus on application development, IT infrastructure, data management, and modeling with the intent to create high-value business solutions.

CIS Presents – Microsoft

A student representative from Microsoft came to our school and talked to us about Microsoft’s new program, XNA. XNA is a program that lets you create games that you can play on your Xbox. Doing this normally usually takes hours and hours of difficult coding. With XNA, all of the startup code you would normally have to write is already done for you and putting a game together is very simple. The representative also talked about his job with Microsoft and said the qualifications for being a student representative were that you had to be passionate about technology, outgoing, be a good presenter, and have an intermediate knowledge of .net and visual studio. The benefits were that he got monetary compensation twice a semester and a MSDN universal subscription worth $11,000 that give him access to all Microsoft programs. In addition, being a representative gives him a unique job opportunity because of all of his experience.

CIS Presents – The Financial Aid Podcast

With the internet evolving every single day, the Podcast has found itself becoming a very easy way to get yourself and your message out onto the internet. Chris Penn, the creator of the financial aid podcast visited Bentley College to talk to us about podcasting. Chris focused on new media and how each piece of media now has a specific function and process. With old media, people sat in front of analog devices and watched media passively. With new media, people can create digital works and distribute them to millions of people very easily. There is also a new aspect of participation that gives people the ability to influence the media that is presented to you. When you create a podcast, you have the ability to compete with huge record companies and news figures because all podcasts are broadcasted evenly. One of Chris’s last pieces of advice was creating your own brand. Everyone is the best at something, and once you figure that out you can create a brand about YOU, and distribute your message all over the internet.