CST 300 - Module 3

For this week, we finalized our Industry Analysis essays and started thinking about a topic for our papers about ethics in tech. We also made progress with more OLI activities that centered around different workstyles. Reflecting on last week's post about study strategies, I also made an effort to take notes as I read about the different ethical frameworks, instead of just reading. This helped me to determine which sources will work well for my ethical paper as well.

OLI & Ethics

The OLI activities this week were mainly centered around our particular workstyles. I learned that I lie somewhere between a "Get It Done" and "Get It Right" workstyle. While I do place a lot of emphasis on doing things correctly and utilizing a systemic approach, I also tend to move quickly and do well making decisions under pressure.

We also read about the general idea of ethics and the different approaches for deciding if an action is ethical or not. Learning about the different ethical frameworks was very interesting to me. As technology progresses we have a lot of responsibility to make sure that we are making ethical decisions when utilizing its power, but there's not always a clear answer for what is ethical. The perspective we prioritize makes a big difference. For our discussion, we talked about Edward Snowden's decision to release classified information that proved the NSA was spying on the American people. If you view this decision from the perspective of rights ethics, you might think that he did the right thing by doing what he could to restore an American's right to privacy. However, if you consider his duty to his job at the NSA, he made the wrong decision.

Code of Integrity

Integrity is important for any student, not just those in the computer science program. One of the obvious ways to maintain integrity is by always making sure that the work we submit is either our own, or cited correctly. This is important for multiple reasons. For one, if all we do is collect code or work created by others, we aren't really learning anything for ourselves. What do we offer if we are just acting as a collector? We also would hope that other people are citing our work when using code that we have written. 

What a Computer Science Student Needs to Know

I thought this article was very interesting and brought up a lot of topics that I may not have considered studying on my own. On my CSCI journey so far, I have made an effort to learn different languages, for example, C++, Python, Javascript, ARM32 and Java. I was glad to read that this well help me in the long run. One of the things that I definitely need to focus more on is computer architecture. While I have taken a course on the subject, it's definitely not something that I feel like I understand well and if I want to write efficient code, I should absolutely get a better grasp of it. Adapting programs for different operating systems is another area that I should put more focus on. Overall, I will definitely be coming back to this list over time to make sure I'm checking as many boxes as possible before I head into the tech industry.