Week 1 Update

Hi Class,

It was great meeting you all last night.  I am really looking forward to working with you all this semester, and hope that last night gave a good overview of what we will be covering in the course.

To re-cap, the main takeaway from last night was that the IT discipline encompasses a multitude of technical areas such as desktop computing, networking, storage, system administration, security etc. Gaining exposure to these areas is crucial for the anyone working in the IT discipline such as IT Auditing.  In addition, we discussed that computer performance is affected by many factors and is not simply a matter of doubling you CPU to double your speed (Be sure to understand the factors and components we discussed).

Each week I will be posting an update like this recapping what we did in the current week and what will be expected from you for next week.  Please check the course web site regularly as this will be where all of my announcements and class discussion will be.

As I mentioned, I would like all questions for this class to be posted to the course website so everyone can benefit from the discussion. On the homepage you will see a number of discussion topics please feel free to post any questions to the appropriate category by clicking “Leave a Comment”.  As I mentioned last night, I will be traveling 9/1-9/5 with very limited access to e-mail, but will be checking the course discussion and responding whenever possible.  If you have an urgent matter please post to the Urgent category and I will respond to you ASAP.

For next week: 1) Purchase the textbooks 2) Setup your Azure account (Instructions) 3) Submit the Burd Ch 1 Research Problem 2 Assignment to me via e-mail before class next week. 4) Read Burd Ch 4 & 6

Next week we will be covering Computing Systems, where the main portion of the class will be building a computer!

Have a great Holiday weekend and see you all next Tuesday!

Pat