Unit 6 Discussion Board

Course Reflection

Primary Response

ThienSi Le

CS875-1602C-01

Futuring & Innovation

Dr. Imad Al Saeed

 (14-June-2016)

     In Unit 6 Discussion Board on the topic of the final discussion, students are required to feedback what has been learned from this course of Futuring& Innovation. This piece of writing will reflect on learning materials and respond to three questions below.

     The course CS875 introduces the concept of Futuring and Innovation of developing the skills in future through a variety of techniques and introducing formal methods of innovation and diffusion of innovation. The course offers a unique opportunity for students innovatively to improve or propose a socio-technical plan for collaboration between humans and technology in organizations or society. 

(Source: Adapted from themes.com, 2016)

1. What were the most compelling topics learned in this course?

     In general, the course covered the primary concepts of Big Data on many subjects:

futurists’ vision, new technology trend, decision-making group, think tank methods, scenario plan and traditional forecast, serendipity, exaptation, and socio-technical plan.  

     The compelling topics that were learned in this course probably are new technology trend (NMC, 2016), serendipity (Cyran, & Gaylord, 2012), socio-technical plan (Long, 2013). I had a chance to create a blog to post many documents, and make a video on the socio-technical plan on socio-media networks. The course gave me a chance to understand how important the interaction between people and technologies is in many fields such as technology, economics, and society (Trist, & Bamforth, 1951). It also emphasized how a socio-technical plan and system make a great impact in society. The choice of focus on Big Data Analytics becomes sound when I have the opportunity to work on several projects on humans and technical problems and meet skillful professionals with great experience.

2. How did participating in discussions help your understanding of the subject matter? Is anything still unclear that could be clarified?

     Discussion board participation is also another good way to communicate with classmates, to build a strong relationship, especially making a social media network connection for a supportive community.

     Participation in discussions has many benefits to students. Some benefits are:

    1. Sharing knowledge, thoughts, and ideas.

    2. Understanding the current issues, in-depth topics in both business and academics.

    3. Emphasizing the existing trends in many fields to predict the future direction.

    4. Up-to-date the state of CS and IT with vision in the future.

    5. Learning from the instructor and among classmates on many subjects.

    6. Clarifying the ambiguous issues for good judgment.

    7. Deliberating the extreme boundary problems for planning and strategy.

    8. Distinguishing what is right and what is wrong for appropriate decision-making.

    9. Learning mistakes among students (including this student) for improvement

    10. Discussion participation in this course is also one of the many ways to prepare for

the road ahead.

     Participating in discussions helped this student to convey the knowledge under other students’ view. This student learned from the other fellows who might have more work experience in some certain fields, especially in the group discussions on many subjects with priceless information exchanges. Discussion participation did enrich this students’ experience on what people think, know or perform on the subjects.

3. What approaches could have yielded additional valuable information?

     In a review of the summative objectives, several concepts are provided throughout the course. The knowledge obtained from information about

     - Articulating the social (human) impact of change within an organization

     - Developing a social-technical plan for your organization

     - Identifying organizational structures that support and hinder future changes

     - Making informed predictions on industry trends and future directions

 all prepare students for the work ahead. 

     Developing the good socio-technical plan is a major task in this course. However, some suggestions that may yield additional valuable information are:

     - Finding fund and support from related authorities

     - Scheduling all tasks and sizing the works

     - Designing a new socio-technical system that includes hardware and software

     - Testing the socio-technical system

     - Releasing and deploying it

     - Maintaining the system and training people who use it  

     - Supporting it to fix technical problems and issues.  

     - Collecting problems and fixing them

     - Re-spin the processes to improve the system

     In summary, the CS875 is an excellent course. It covered many significant topics. The study work is reasonably demanding. This student felt there was a lot of pressure to meet the deadline of the individual projects and primary or peer responses. A lot of technical reading and thinking about the topics, scholarly articles, and journals, especially on new concepts’ applications, were required in the course. Finally, all hard works pushed this student through the course with the gaining of great knowledge under his belt. Notice that the instructor (Dr. Imad Al Saeed) of this course CS875 is very knowledgeable in many topics such as scenario planning, think tank methods, socio-technical plan, etc. His teaching is remarkable. His guidance on Individual Projects was helpful, reasonable. He is particularly careful in grading students’ works throughout this course. 

     Thank you and wish you & family have a great break!     

REFERENCE

Cyran, P. & Gaylord (2012). The 20 most fascinating accidental inventions. Retrieved May

16, 2016  from

http://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/2012/1005/The-20-most-fascinating-accidental-inventions/Matches

Long, S. (2013). Socioanalytic methods: discovering the hidden in organisations and social systems. Karnac Books.

New Media Consortium. (n.d.). NMC horizon. Retrieved from http://www.nmc.org/nmc-

horizon/ 

New Media Consortium. (2016). NMC horizon report: 2016 higher education edition

wiki. Retrieved from http://horizon.wiki.nmc.org/

Trist, E. L., & Bamforth, K. W. (1951). Some social and psychological consequences of the Longwall method. Human relations, 4(3), 3-38.