In the Beginning..........

I have five binders, each 3 inches thick, laid out surrounding me as I begin my reflection on the course IRLS672 - Introduction to Applied Technology. I'm going through a 12 page printout I made of the course dated 5/16/2008. I wish you could take a peek inside my brain and tell me what it looks like. In three months, I've installed Ubuntu server, a linux operating system, into a shell of a computer I'll call Ubu and hooked up a KVM switch. I can connect to a virtual machine. I hardwired Ubu to a router and configured an IP address for it so the internet is now accessible on Ubu. I know how to ping. I can write a little XML. I know alot about technology plans and project management (but carrying it out is a different story). I created a ERD and tried to understand normalization. I know it refers to tables and setting them up correctly. I can use Webmin as a GUI to create tables as well as write command scripts to do the same thing in MySQL. I've created a working PHP script. All of this I can do now--things I never thought I could in the beginning.

How far I have come---I had worked with html and a little sgml before taking this course. The only thing I knew about linux was that it was an operating system. I had never heard of Ubuntu. I didn't know linux had different "flavors". I didn't know how easy it was to connect to a virtual machine. To tell you the truth, I didn't know virtual machines existed. Even though I have a lot of factual knowledge behind me now and obtained some new, technical skills, I can't really say my thoughts about digitization has changed that much. Maybe I don't really understand how everything works together yet. Maybe that's the reason why I need to take the rest of the courses in this program. Sometimes, what we see on the surface appears quite simple. It's what lies beneath that contains all the complex parts and until we really "dig in" do we realize how all those complex parts fit together. Looks like I'm back at "The Beginning....."