Portfolio updates and resource management

By Erika  |  March 1, 2010 Posted in Resource management  |  Comments (0)

I’m doing a major clean up of my course files (notes, PowerPoint presentations, assignments, articles, images, etc.) and am simultaneously updating my portfolio here on the site. I’ve added several projects that I am currently working on. Some of these projects are in work and therefore I’ll add them at a later date.

Together Screenshot

"Together" resource manager

In my quest to find a decent program that helps me organize my course resources, I stumbled upon “Together.” It’s a resource manager application for Mac OS X and comes with some nifty features. There is an option to import the content from a URL and save it directly to a PDF file format. The PDF is then placed in your resource library. Another nice feature is the extra tab slider that attaches to the edge of your screen and slides out letting you instantly search your library and make quick notes.

Together seems great for my needs. I can sort all my course resources by “course” whereby I divvy up the files in folders according to quarter and course name. I add all relevant files in each course folder and tag resources (PDF articles) with a tag labeled “resource.” I then created a “Smart” folder (similar to iTunes Smart folders) that aggregates all files tagged as “resource.”

These two ways of organizing my course resources allows me to search for files contextually by quarter and course name, as well as non-contextually using the Smart folder for my resources that span across all courses.

Rochester, NY

By Erika  |  September 1, 2009 Posted in RIT  |  Comments (0)

I’ve officially moved into my new apartment in Rochester, NY. I made the 10-hour trip from central Virginia with my family. I’ve been here for five full days and am getting used to my new location–I drove around town a few times and today I rode my bike a few miles on the Lehigh Valley Trail. The trail runs along the Genesee River which intersects the Erie Canal a few miles from my apartment. The trail is great because it takes me about 4/5 of the way to RIT so I won’t have to ride my bike on busy roads.

I start classes at RIT next week on the 7th. Two of my three classes start at noon and the third is on Thursday nights at 6pm. I’ll be taking 12 credits (4 credits each) each “quarter.” They call the sessions “quarters” instead of semesters since there are four sessions: fall, winter, spring, and summer, although I’m not required to take courses during the summer quarter. My courses this semester for my degree in HCI are:

  • Foundations in Human-Computer Interaction
  • Research Methods
  • Programming for the WWW (using PHP)

Even though I don’t have classes this week I have two orientation sessions, one on Wednesday and the one on Thursday. I’m really looking forward to the orientation meetings because I’ll get to meet other graduate students, especially IT graduate students.

Reflecting on my work at J&J

By Erika  |  August 9, 2009 Posted in Johnson & Johnson  |  Comments (1)

I’ve worked on several different projects over the past two and half months at J&J:

  • Learn SharePoint
  • Migrate eUniversity to new SharePoint site
  • Modify and create medical website dashboards
  • Create Diversity SharePoint site
  • Create a second department methodologies SharePoint site
  • Conduct project research–emerging markets in various countries (affinity analysis, etc.), professional education of surgeons (internal and external benchmarking), postoperative care for joint replacement

Many of the classes I took in the ITI program correlate with the work I’ve completed at J&J:

  • Management of Technological Organizations
  • My independent study with Claire–using a survey to conduct research
  • Social Informatics
  • Database Systems (in Ireland)
  • Information Systems (in Ireland)
  • Application of Research in Information Technology

When a team in the department is working on a project and wants to share information such as documents, meeting dates, and team availability, I am able to create a new SharePoint site for the group based on their specifications. The “Management of Technological Organizations” was a very helpful course, because it provided me with a general overview to understanding the dynamics of knowledge that can be captured in collaborative technology. This course was a good starting point to understanding some of the theory behind sharing information and knowledge in a corporate setting, while the internship was a great way to complete the circle by putting into practice the various theories I had learned. Two examples where teams needed knowledge sharing capabilities online are team sites where information would be shared among various departments in J&J.

My independent study with Claire was also very helpful for my internship. With my internship I conducted a survey of several undergraduate classes to understand how students learn about different majors. In conducting the survey, I had to analyze approximately 250 open-ended questions. This work was very similar to “affinity analysis” I did for survey results from J&J employees about markets in various countries. I had to sift through about 10 survey responses with 30+ open ended questions to figure out the similarities that existed between responses. These similarities were then used by a team to create new J&J business practices.

Learning about social networks in Social Informatics was helpful to the research I conducted on healthcare  social networks. Understanding the context of social networks, that people are bound up through the practice of using networks on the Internet, helped me discover networks I would not have otherwise considered. While websites like Twitter and LinkedIn are obvious networks that people use to communicate with one another, other not so obvious networks also exist. People could also use electronic databases to share best practices through visual and textual means.

Database Systems, Information Systems, and Application of Research in Info. Tech. were by far the most useful for my internship. Because I worked with SharePoint, I was able to put my database knowledge to good use. One feature in SharePoint allows a person to open a list of data (set of records) in Microsoft Access. Without my knowledge of databases and using Microsoft Access, I wouldn’t have known how to manage information in SharePoint, because sometimes situations required exporting a list of information to Access. When I had to change all the variants of a location in a list of people from “U.S.,” “United States,” or “USA” to “United States of America,” I had to change a large amount of records at once. To accomplish this change, I opened the list in Access and went down a column and replaced all the variants to one version. Without my knowledge of databases it would have taken me much longer to learn how to navigate the program and understand the structure of the data in the file.

The Information Systems course I took in Ireland was one of the most useful courses for my internship. It greatly expanded on some of the theory I learned in Management of Technological Organizations, by covering in more detail the business logic behind different types of information systems such as strategic information systems, transaction processing systems, decision support systems, executive information systems, enterprise portals, and expert systems. The course also covered in detail dashboards, key performance indicators, and OLAP technology which I found aided my work on the medical website dashboards in SharePoint.

The Applications of Research in Info. Tech. was also one of the most useful courses for my internship. Before I took this course I didn’t give much weight to the importance of data, statistical analysis, and visual representations of data, such as graphs and charts. One key insight I took away from this course was the fact that data and its visual representation are a very powerful tool. I’ve worked with data and charts in Excel and SharePoint a lot since I started the internship. I’ve created dashboards in SharePoint and linked them to Excel sheets containing further dashboards and data, proofread Excel sheets for mistakes, and working with Excel data in general.