MIS Society (http://www.csusm.edu/missociety) just had its first event of the Spring 2009 semester. Still excited and waiting for the videos and photos to share, just wanted to thank all the officers for their hard work to make it happen.

In the event, the guest speaker, Mr. Steve Romeo, and the other guests from MIS advisory board constantly mentioned the word passion. Yes, what is passion?

Looking back my student life, I used to have some passion and actively participate in student organizations just because I loved it. But gradually, reality hits me when I need to pass the TOEFL and GRE exams. I have to find a good supervisor and start a good research topic. Then find a job to resolve my visa and green card issue…. Start teaching and try to do the best I can so as to be able to sustain my job. But where is my passion? Thinking back, I have to admit that I love teaching, I love interacting with my students, I love it when my students learn things. I’ve been always enjoying the Tradeshow of senior experience. I enjoy attending the senior experience presentation, observing the improvement of the students from when they just entered the college taking BUS 304 and struggling for those basic statistics concepts. Literally, the changes are huge, and I was part of forces making the change happen. How great!

After getting home from the event, I am still too excited to fall asleep. I looked my album one more and found some photos I took from college, when I was a student officer in charge of the departmental athletic union. We just won the cup of “John Ma”. God, that was also a great memory to remember. I wish the officers will feel the same level of pride after the event on Thursday!

http://www.csusm.edu/missociety/
Way too cool to be a website I had ever imagined. !@#$%%^&&*

This semester, I had planned to take a rest of senior experience after supervised four teams last semester. Though it was an interesting experience, it is a lot to take in for a semester. But this semester, due to some reason, I have to supervise another four teams again! Luckily, I got great students and interesting projects. And now it is the time to show off their accomplishments.

Team 1 (indexed based on the order of presentation): APT. Marketing analysis in telecomm and electricity industry on their training needs.(from left to right: Me, Caleb Groff, Eric Gerza, Steve Blume (sponsor), Sarah Miller, Matt Walsh, Michael Blume (sponsor)

Team 2: La Provence Bakery on the new Zino cookie marketing strategy. (From left to right: John Muse, me, Katrina Caspelich, Bobby Graves (sponsor), Darren Buonaguidi, Eltron Jaraicie)

Team 3: LifeCal.com – A feasibility research on the business idea of college calendar sharing. (From left to right: Derek Van Gompel, Mike Schwaab, Amanda Haddock, me, Tanya Miranda, and Arisa Isayama)

Team 4: Ready America for production manuals and cost analysis. (From left to right, Jessica Tran, Robert Sirrine, Stephanie Kozak, me, and Linh Phuong)

Interesting. Mouse (actually the computer mouse) is already 40 year old. It’s birthday is Dec 9, which is also a famous Chinese day for students movements. It is considered as one of the greatest IT inventions of all time.

Even more surprisingly, every since it was invented, Logitech has already sold 1 billion (!) mice one week before it’s 40th birthday. Can you imagine anything that has been produced a billion? Maybe only a few? anyway, I think it is pretty amazing.

Here is an interesting link shows the evolution of Apple mouses. Cute. http://vectronicsappleworld.com/macintosh/mouse.html

Just learnt about the case about Julie Amero, (wiki-link) which was pretty shocking to me. A Connecticut middle school teacher, Julie Amero, was substituting for another teacher. While she was browsing the Internet, her computer was suddenly hacked and displayed pornography content.

She went out of the room to find IT help, and therefore the content were left exposed to middle school students. She reported to the principal about the incident as well.

However, it ended up like this: she was sued and the IT demonstrated how she should have prevented this from happening. After a lengthy trial, she finally gave up the fight and decided to settle. Her teaching license was revoked as a consequence.

Obviously, it doesn’t sound fair to most of the people who first heard about it. Though the media might have been bias on amplifying how innocent she was, it should not be completely her fault. So what should we learn from this case? I think the case should be analyzed from the stand point of the following parties:

1) a school teacher who might have encounter the same situation

2) the IT support who should have taken care of the security

3) the administration who will respond to that kind of incidence

4) the parents whose kids are in that school

Well, I am thinking of keeping my thoughts secret because I will use this as a case study for my class next semester. But if you would like to comment, please feel free to do so.

Just read about this article titled “Online divorcee jailed after killing virtual hubby” (link) which strikes me a lot. More and more people are so drawn into the virtual world that they couldn’t define the boundaries. BUZZ report had discussed the issue of whether killing an online character should necessarily lead to a real world jail time? How much damage it really is when it comes to online killing? and what about the “irresponsible” virtual hubby? 

This got me to thinking: how should we define and regulate behaviors in the virtual world and how much we should punish a person of a wrong-doing in virtual world (not including the malicious attempts to store people personal information via online social). Will look into some of the researches and see what I can come up with.

Tuesday I received an group email from a former CRECer with the photos they have taken during the INFORMS meeting this year. What a great gathering! Almost everyone else were there except me! This makes me regret even more not going.

After fighting with just a little bit upset, I did a little PS to add myself so that I can stick to the CREC family. Enjoy.

I was teaching the binary numbering systems in the MIS class and some of them really got into this 0-1 thing. I was so amused by the excitement in the classroom. What is even funnier is that Zonia, one of my students, found from a cartoon on how little kids play with those binary numbers. She gave a copy of the cartoon to me and I couldn’t help but to put it here.

Finally, we get people to start this long-waiting student club — the MIS society. We had our first kickoff meeting Thursday Sep 19, 2008. The president has been elected as Richard Morris. Casey Davidson was elected as the treasurer, adam Glavinic the web master, and Wendy Babu the secretary. It was such an exciting moment and we are looking forward to the upcoming events. — Me, Professor Fang, will be the first Faculty Advisor of this promising society. Soooo honored.

The photo is all the founding members of the society. From left to right: Elton Jaraicie, Adam Glavinic, Wendy Babu, Richard Morris, and Casey Davidson. 

I have registered a group at linkedin for all the students claiming an MIS/HTM major at Cal State San Marcos and all those who have graduated with an HTM major. An invitation has been sent out too all those who was in my class and I still kept the email (sorry about that, sometimes we use WebCT mail so that I couldn’t track your regular email account). So, if you haven’t been invited, please go to linkedin.com and find out the group. If you have been invitied and joined, please refer this group to all the students/alumni you know. Thank you all very much. 

Btw, Professor Yi Sun is going to be the active manager for this group. We will post new activities, career opportunities, and all the new information. You can also find linkedin is a great website where you can request reference letters from us, networking with your colleagues, and find your potential employers! Go everyone!