Final Thoughts

In the beginning of this course, I didn't know much about servers, I had never heard of MySQL, and I had heard of Linux but had never seen it. I also never new about project management. I think I have learned a lot from this course though. I understand better how technology works, how it has to be thought out well and planned for, and how important it is to know the language so you know what's going on. My perspective has changed on digital management. I knew that a lot of work went into it, but not exactly how much and how much you need to know and understand. It is a little intimidating. I sometimes wonder if I can make it through the certificate. It was a really difficult class for me, but I'm glad I took it. I'm feel like I have learned a lot, and things are now clicking for me. The whole LAMP thing finally completely clicked for me. That was cool. I actually enjoyed MySQL and would like to be able to use it better. And the PHP assignments help me to understand how it works with MySQL.

Week 12 Readings

The Cervone articles were great. “Project risk management” was simple to understand and went over how to address risks before they come up and what are the usual risk factors that occur in digital library projects. I thought that these were really interesting. It was really helpful to put things in to risk categories. It then went over what sorts of steps to take to assess and control risks. It was an easy article for beginners. If I were more advanced, I might want more detail in steps to take. “Standard methodology in digital library project management” was also helpful to me. It went over why a structured methodology is important in structuring the project environment. He specifically talked about PMBOK. After reading the long PMBOK material, and then reading this, it was helpful to read someone else going over and kind of summarizing the process. I think that these last two articles would be helpful even if you weren’t doing a digital library project. In "How not to run a digital library project," he begins talking about project management and librarians getting glazed eyes when it is mentioned. He says many librarians do not come from backgrounds that use project management, especially if they are from humanities and social sciences backgrounds. I was a literature major, and I never heard of project management so it was scary to me at first and seems overwhelming when reading about it. I like how he goes over the things to not do in a sarcastic way. It made it interesting. “ Making Decisions: Methods for Digital Library Project Teams” also useful. It showed how to break down decision making and how to make a decision. I like how in all of his articles, he takes something that can be pretty complicated and intimidating, and lays it out in a simple and helpful way.

SQL Versus Other Topics

Learning SQL was easier for me than most of the other topics. Of course, I am no good at it right now, but I'm sure I can get it with a lot of practice. It at least made sense to me, and I understood what was happening in the videos and in the assignment. Data modeling last week was harder for me, especially the joining together of two tables that had multiple relationships. This made a little more sense this week when working with SQL. I also has some difficulty with the join function. It made sense in the lecture, but then in the videos I became confused. I then looked at the W3Schools and it helped. SQL was a little harder for me than XML. I was scared of XML, but it really isn't bad. Since I know some HTML, it helped. The hardest topics were things dealing with the server and networking and learning all of the new terminology. I am a lot more comfortable now entering commands in the command line though. Although I will still have to look most of them up to make sure I'm doing it right.