Slowly but Surely

Plodding Along

Hard to believe I'm closing in on the mid-point of my first semester here at DTS.  It's been a great experience thus far and I think it's safe to say my expectations have been exceeded.  While it's a lot different than a traditional classroom setting, I really like this task-oriented style of learning and I've definitely gotten comfortable with the flow of the course.  I'm slowly but surely plodding along, however, I've got some work to do over the next two weeks.

Module 6 Progress

Module 6 is easily my favorite thus far.  It's been a healthy mix of learning and research with a twist of creative license.  I put about 16 hours into the first learning activity, but that is more by choice than it is out of necessity.  Since I have about two weeks to submit the first activity, I took the opportunity to expand my skills using Logos and to fire up Gimp just for fun.  I was happy with the result and submitted the activity yesterday.

I spent a lot of time familiarizing myself with Logos.  I definitely learned a lot about using the software and I'm starting to get comfortable with doing some basic research.  One of the coolest features of Logos is that when you copy text from a resource, it automatically creates a footnote reference for you.  That really came in handy as notes were required for this assignment.  Additionally, you can create a bibliography straight from the Logos resources you are citing.

Unfortunately, I learned all of this on the fly, so I lost some time re-researching my materials.  For the next learning activity, I'm going to try to design my Logos layout so I can capture everything in-situ.  By keeping everything in one layout, I should be able to streamline my research and make short work of my report.  We'll see how that goes.

Additionally, I picked up a copy of "A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Thesis, and Dissertations" by Kate Turabian to help me begin to learn the proper way of formating footnotes and bibliographies.  While this isn't necessarily needed for BE101, it will be necessary for other classes at DTS and I figured I might as well start learning how to do this.  Logos does make this a lot easier, but not everything I'm pulling in can be found in my Logos library.

It is my hope that I'll be able to wrap up the second learning assignment by this weekend.  That will then put me a full week ahead and then I can start cranking out Module 7. 

Logos is Heavy

I'm really starting to like Logos and I'm getting familar with using the various features of the software.  But one thing I don't like is that this software is seriously heavy.  It's carved out about 30Gb footprint on my laptop hard drive and that could be a problem for me down the road.  Because it's still growing!

Hey Logos, how about giving me an option to install my library on my home network drive?  That would be nice...

Halfway There

Thus far, I've had no major issues with my BE101 class and as I mentioned, I'm quite pleased how things have gone.  I still have a lot of work ahead of me, but I'm impressed at how well the course is organized and set up.  The time commitment per module has been very comfortable and I've been moving at a pretty steady pace.

I'll have plenty of feedback to offer at the end of the course, but so far so good.  And I have to be pleased with my performance thus far.  If I can keep my head down during the second half, I hope to be looking at an A+ or A for this first sememster.  Little difficult to say for now as I'm not entirely sure what is in store for me over the second half.  You'll have to tune in to find out...