I am sad to say that I was about an hour late for this week’s class because I was at the hospital getting x-rays taken because I broke my finger playing football. From what I got out of the speaker from this week’s presentation it was more about Tweets. May I say that I am getting really tired of hearing about Twitter and all of its crisis management applications. Sure it is interesting, but I feel like this is all that this class has become for more than the last month. I feel like there are far greater thing that we could discuss besides Twitter every class period and a prime example is what my presentation is on tonight. Overall, the speaker seemed like a pretty interesting guy, but I wasn’t really interested in what he had to say about Twitter.
After the speaker had finished speaking we learned that we would not be presenting in class today. I was thrilled at this fact because we were instead given ample time to work on our final projects for this class. Apparently I missed an interesting beginning to the class where Professor Tapia bashed all of the students on the final project and explained to us all how bad we are doing. Because of this, we focused the most of the class trying to find out a new scope to the final project. The new scope that we have chosen for the project was to focus on the 911 dispatch center within the time frame of 24 after a natural disaster or terrorist attack in a heavily populated area. It took us most of the class to come up with this and then clear it with the professor to make sure that we were on the right track again.
I must say that tonight’s class was very dull for me because I ended up missing the speaker and I had an interesting speech to do that was skipped so that we could work on our group projects. My speech was on Geovisual analytics and crisis management. Some of the important tools that went along with this included the programs Arc GIS and Google Earth. I actually took a class last semester that dealt with visual analytics called SRA 478, in which we primarily learned how to use the program Arc GIS. I think that this will help me in the long run especially if I was to one day going into the crisis management field.
I didn’t think that today’s class was very interesting, but that may be because I missed half of it due to my broken hand. I think today made me realize that I want to get into a career later in life that involves using the program Arc GIS because it is very fun to use once you get good at it and also I feel that it has an impressive real world application. It makes me feel like I can go out and do some good in the world with this program to help people. At the link below you can find an interesting video on Arc GIS:
Jesse, you should not be sad about missing the first hour of class because the first 30 minutes we all got ripped a new one about our projects. Just like you I am getting really tired about hearing how Tweets do this and that. I am tired of learning about Tweets doing the same damn thing time and time again. We get the point that it works sometimes and sometimes it does not work. It can also be a problem with disaster response too, but it can also be useful. Oh man sounds like it is inconsistent so it should not be used. No wonder Twitter was only successful from the readings during the Japanese earthquake because it is a first world country not a third world dive.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I was thrilled that I did not have to present in class, even though I was more than prepared for the presentation I was going to give. It was GI Science and using it during disasters. I am very glad we were able to get more direction on the project since they all “sucked” well I say it is because there was a failure to actually prepare us for this project, it was just thrown on our laps. There was a lot of assumptions made that we knew what we were doing, but in the real world in the College of IST we don’t really learn that much in our classes. It is a lot of learning on your own and most people didn’t know what a Requirements Analysis was.
Monday’s class was very boring even though we got work done in our group. Thank god for a “work day”.
In my opinion, it is about time someone said the truth about twitter. I, like you am getting very tired of twitter. It seems to be the topic of every conversation. Yes, it is important that we use twitter and that we research the advantages and disadvantages but it does get old talking about it all the time. To sum up what we need to do with twitter is that we need to use it and we need to accept it. That’s it, nothing else. End of story! Also like you, I was very excited that we were not presenting tonight, mainly because I was suppose to be the leader, but furthermore, I was happy because we got a lot of time to talk with our group and get some extra stuff done. However, I mind as well speak a little about what I was going to present about just to expand peoples knowledge. The main topic of my presentation was about geotagging. Basically this is very important because what it does is it allows people to click on a simple icon on a map and it will tell you exactly what it is and where it is. Furthermore, it will also bring you to a webpage were it can and will give you more information about the place that you selected. It is also really important for people to support crisis mapping and everything that comes with it including the volunteers behind it. We were fortunate enough to get a presentation by Mr. Meier on this topic and he gave us great insight into the world on crisis mapping. He was great for information that the average person does not know about it. The only bad part was that he spoke to us over skype. it would have been better if he was able to speak to us in person, so it would have been easier for us to ask him questions.
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