Although I will be graduating this spring, there were various activities that could’ve helped me in the past.

During the first couple of weeks of class we went over mind maps; how to create them, organize them, and discuss them using a logical flow. I only wished that my English professors for ENG 2100, 2150, and ENG 2850 had used this type of method for organizing our notes. But this is not only useful in English classes, but also in History, Psychology, and essentially any class where you could map out a diagram that helps explain the notes taken. Speaking of notes, while reading the Filter Bubble I began taking notes similar to how it was shown in class with three columns (People, Companies, and Ideas). This was a great deal of simplicity and extremely easy to take notes with, being that you can glance over certain ideas and say to yourself “Oh I remembered that” and to easily be able to connect the people to their ideas mentioned or companies that they own or work for. The mind maps are like databases to me, and the notes we take prior to creating the mind map are the raw data. By using the notes I was able to create a mind map and was able to understand the different ideas mentioned in each chapter much better than if I only had the three columns of notes.

The second thing I learned from this class was how to update and edit a wiki. Prior to this class I have never edited a wiki – I only knew how to access them via over the internet. Last semester I took a web design class and our end of semester project was to create a website about a made up jazz band. If I had the knowledge of using wiki pages I could have created one for my fictional jazz band. Perhaps I could’ve put in a link that would re-direct the users to the wiki page with all sorts of information about the band. I would’ve hoped that having this knowledge in that class, I could’ve created not only a website, but also a wiki in order to give my work greater credibility like as though it was a real band. I was a bit surprised too that in all of the CIS courses I have taken, not one ever involved the use of wiki’s; whether it being creating them, or using them, and I am glad that I had the exposure to this type of web 2.0 technology in our class.

Last but not least, I learned how to query databases in a more “proficient” manner. This I will never forget as I will most definitely be using this skill in the future when I work full time. But in prior classes such as those that I have taken for my Psych minor, I only used Google to search for information (for countless research papers, especially the capstone class PSY 4012) and I never used Baruch’s databases as every time I used it, it was as though all of the results that came back were irrelevant. Prior to the class I thought I knew how to search quite well, but after learning about wildcards, truncation symbols, and grouping terms with parentheses, it’s was as though I became 100x more knowledgeable in researching. Rather than having 4000 results returned from a search, I learned how to narrow it down to under 10. Let me also just also say that BPL 5100 would not have been the same if it wasn’t for Mergent Online. Thank goodness for this database! And for those who will be taking BPL 5100 I highly suggest you take advantage of this database. I only wish that I took this class as a freshman at Baruch, and compared to a lot of other required core classes that must be taken, I believe this class would be more useful than a handful of them. It only makes greater sense that students are exposed to learning how to use databases before they go off to write research papers, prepare for a debate, and etc…

The one thing I wished we had covered in this class was information security. I think being able to use information and organize and interpret it is vitally important, but the security of it is just as important. Privacy concerns were a major theme we discussed throughout the semester, and I believe that the security and safety of our information goes hand in hand with ensuring our privacy in the digital world. I am not very familiar with information security, I only know little about SSL (Secure Socket Layers) and learning about information security would help us reassure ourselves that our information won’t be passed on to information brokers. Information security sounds like common sense, but in reality, I think there is so much more to it than just for example: setting your privacy on Facebook to be “only for friends.”