Welcome to CISS 100 – Introduction to Computing and Information Sciences. If you are starting your studies in computing I believe you have chosen the correct path as you want to be on the correct side of the digital divide… which I think will continue to widen.

To illustrate our present disruptive environment consider the following from an email from Jack Shea of EMC Academic Alliance…

When Clayton Christensen examines the impact of disruptive innovation on established companies, he notes that by the time a new threat to a company is recognized, it is too late. The new competitor gains a substantial foothold, and because of the existing mindset, past success, and sunk costs, the established leader is caught unaware. For example, for the newspaper and magazine industry, the process of disruption has been described as being gripped by a digital riptide. The ferocity of this riptide includes Newsweek being sold for $1 in 2011, and the sale of the Washington Post for $250 million and the Boston Globe for $70 million, when just a few years earlier these newspapers were valued in the billions.

We are living through the Information Revolution that will have as a disruptive place in history as any previous societal/cultural revolution (e.g. industrial revolution, etc.). Recall the industrial revolution where entire professions went away (blacksmiths, farmers, etc.).  The Industrial Revolution took place over 200 years whereas the Information Revolution will take place far quicker citing the emergence and rapid maturation of Big Data & Analytics, Embedded Computing & Robotics, Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence and the Internet of Things/Everything (IoT or IoE).  All of these things will replace both manual and knowledge-based labor. Maybe most importantly, you are in precisely the correct curriculum to ensure your future.

Continuing on, I actually believe the Information Revolution will have a bigger place in history as new technologies and revolutionary events are happening daily.  Just have a look around at the Egyptian Revolution sparked by Facebook, the Hudson River plane crash whose news broke far better and faster on Twitter than CNN which itself had revolutionized correspondence covering the Middle East wars.  Consider that it has recently been asserted that the 1st person to live to 200 years old has already been born.  Consider IBM just stored a single bit on 12 atoms where the present state of the art is 1 bit on over 1 million atoms.  Putting this last item into perspective, consider a cell phone with 150 terabytes of data (or in layman’s terms ~ 100,000 movies on your cellphone).   The list goes on and on and changes emerge each day.

Course Introduction

I direct you to ciss100.com navigation information below and the CISS 100 course introduction in Lecture Module 1 (LM1) complete with a video introduction (See menu at top of page and when you expand Lecture Modules you will see Lecture Module 1. Mousing over (rolling over item with cursor),  LM1 will allow you to see submenu items including the syllabus).

Site Navigation

First, recall that you can search any Web page using ctrl-f in  Windows/Linux/Chrome and command-f in Mac OS.  Also, the search site functionality (in right panel) works very well but it is not indexing/retrieving the attached documents at this early juncture.

Top Menu Tabs (see above)

Reveal a sub-menu system with a “mouse rollover” (i.e. place cursor over the item).  For example, a mouse rollover of “Lecture Topics” reveals “Course Intro & Syllabus”, “Architecture & Hardware”, etc.  I will order these according to where they are covered in the course and by convention, I will denote these menu navigation sequences using arrows (e.g. www.ciss100.com => Lecture Topics => Course Intro & Syllabus).  Note,  browsers can handle elements differently so these menus may not display all items within your screen size.  To resolve this you may have to scroll down, use ctrl – or ctrl + (control key and hypen/plus sign held down together and in Mac replace ctrl with command/cmd) or even try a different browse to see all menu items. 

Lecture Modules 

The LM menu system is essentially a necessarily evolving textbook as CIS texts are out of date the moment they are printed.  Now if you mouse rollover the sub-menu items you will see that many of them have additional sub-menu content (e.g. “Course Intro & Syllabus” has submenu items => “Syllabus”, “Contacting your Professors”, etc.).  Please note the “Intros” contain content that introduces the topic further explored in the submenus.  With this basis, the top-level Lecture Topics menu items are essentially chapter introductions for the submenu system that would be chapter sections.

Linux Labs 

The LL menu system has everything you need to perform the CISS 100 Ubuntu Linux Labs.   We perform the first labs using the HVCC Virtual Desktop Interface (VDI) environment and move to the VMWare desktop virtualization environment for the advanced system administrator labs and Final Project.

Discussion Boards

The DB menu system contains the CISS 100 Discussion Board (DB) topics however please note the DBs take place within the College’s “Blackboard” (BB) Learning Management System (LMS).

CISS 260 Internship 

This menu item provides information for the program’s Internships.

Advisement & Transfer

This menu system provides general advisement information for new, existing and transfer students, transfer agreements with 4-year institutions, course outlines, CIS course availability by semester to assist with your scheduling, and general searchable advisement information in layman’s terms and is a must-read to navigate through an undergraduate curriculum.

Right Panel Widget

Contains Site Search, Subscriptions, Social Media Connections, Multilingual Translation, Emergent Topics and other content as it evolves

The Emergent Topics archive up to date emergent topics and technologies (daily Business, Information Technology, Society news of the day).  These articles can also be accessed by subject through the tags.  In the lower right quadrant of the page, you will see the most common tags however to see a complete listing please choose the emergent topics menu tab.

 

Lastly, if you have an idea to improve this site please let me know.

Thank you,

Prof James G. Looby – Computing & Information Sciences