Reference no: EM132171668

Week One - Ethics and ePortfolios

Overview

In this first lab, you will set up your online ePortfolio, which you will use throughout this course (and others), and add your first entries to it.

Learning outcomes

K2. State the uses of emerging technologies within key industry contexts; K3. List major information systems that support business organisations; K7. Recognize the impact of IT on broader societies;

S2. Review a range of information system applications;
S4. State and reflect on legal and ethical concerns relevant to IT;

Task Details

Task one - ePortfolio

Mahara is the University's ePortfolio system. Your ePortfolio is an online space where you can share your work, keep one or more learning journals, upload files and more. In this course, you will need to edit and maintain your ePortfolio a number of times, and you may need to in other courses as well.

Set up your ePortfolio

To get started, open a web browser

Your lab computers will have Google Chrome, Internet Explorer or Microsoft Edge installed - any of these is fine.

You should also open the Mahara "How to" page in a new browser window or tab.

Follow the "How to" instructions to Login and Update your Profile (it's ok if you don't have a photo right now, but put one up when you get a chance!)

Creating a Journal entry

From the menu, select Content and then Journals. You can maintain multiple Journals in your ePortfolio, so create one just for this course by choosing Create Journal. Label your Journal with an appropriate name, for example ITECH1100. You can choose to add a description if you like.

Add a new Journal entry by clicking + New Entry.

Ethics - Self Reflection

In the lecture, we discussed three ethical frameworks, Deontology, Utilitarianism and Virtue Ethics, and you were asked to consider which of these three resonate most with how you think about morality and ethical behaviour.

Using your own words, write somewhere between 100-200 words on which of the three frameworks makes the most sense to you. You may also search online for other systems of ethics that you might prefer.

Some ideas to help you write if you're having trouble:
- What makes this framework appealing?
- What is it about the others that you don't like?
- Would you be willing to listen to somebody using another framework?
- Explain each framework in your own words;
- Describe something positive and negative for each one;
- If one or more appeals to you, explain why; if none do explain why not;
- Justify your choice as best you can based on your experience, perhaps refer to an example in your life where you've faced a moral dilemma and how you responded to it You

Make sure you save your work. You might wish to write your micro essay in Word first, and then copying into Mahara, in case you accidently close the browser.
Being able to write short, well-reasoned documents is a critical skill in IT and other industries.

Creating a new page
You can submit your Mahara work through Moodle, but only if your content is in a Mahara page.
Luckily, it's reasonably easy to add content from your Journal to a page. You should be aware that, depending on your assignment, any work on a page submitted to Moodle will be locked until it has been reviewed by your tutor. This means you might choose to only include a single Journal entry so you can continue to add other entries to your Journal.
From the menu, select Portfolio and then Pages, and choose + Create page.

Spend some time exploring the page creation screen - in particular, investigate the Edit layout tab, which allows you to choose a different content structure for your work.

Add your Journal entry to the page
Once you have chosen a layout you are happy with, you should add your Journal entry, by dragging a + Journal entry onto the page somewhere. Choose the entry you created earlier.
We will submit this to Moodle later, as there is another task to complete first

Task 2 - Contribute
There are two goals for this section - firstly, you will get a taste of contributing to a software or knowledge project online, and secondly you will gain some experience with the FedUni library web site. Your specific task is to improve a Wikipedia article by adding links to other pages.

Sign up to Wikipedia

Wikipedia is perhaps the single largest collaborative project ever, and in this task you will contribute to improve its quality.
Anybody can contribute to Wikipedia, even anonymously. However, it's best to sign-up so that your contributions can be attributed to you.

If you already have a Wikipedia login, you may use that instead of signing up again.

1. Visit wikipedia to go to the English-language Wikipedia

2. Click the Create Account at the top of the web page to create your own Wikipedia account. Choose a username, a reasonable password. Entering your email address is optional but is the only way to recover your account if you forget your password. Complete the CAPTCHA security check by entering the text, and click the Create Account button.

3. Once your account is created, if you wish you can follow the built-in contribution tutorial by clicking the large Edit a suggested article button which appears. Following this tutorial is enough to complete the rest of this laboratory and skip to Task 3

4. Alternatively, if you already have an account or want to tackle a slightly simpler task, this link will take to you a random page which other Wikipedia editors have decided doesn't link well to the rest of the encyclopedia.

5. Switch to Wikipedia's Edit tab
You should be using the Visual Editor. If you can't see it, edit your preferences using the Preferences link at the top of the screen

6. Select some text that, in your opinion, should link to another Wikipedia page. Click the Link button:

7. If the suggested article is acceptable, select it, otherwise you can search for a different article. Choose Done when you've selected a good link.

8. Add as many links as you think necessary. Note that you don't need to link every word in an article! Press Save Changes, and write a short description of your changes to finish. You have now contributed!

Task 3 - Document your contribution

Using your new Mahara skills, write a small (approximately 50 words) Journal entry about your contribution. Add it to the Page you created earlier.

And choose Add Submission. Choose your portfolio page from the list of Pages, and click Save Changes

Some ePortfolio submissions will lock your submission so you can't change it later. This lab submission is configured not to, so you can review and update your page if you like.

Show your work to your tutor if you'd like to get it marked off immediately.

Week 2 - Process Modelling

Overview
In this lab, you will use a diagramming tool to create process models.

Task Details

Preliminaries - draw.io

Draw.io is an online diagramming tool. It's relatively easy to use (with some quirks), and has built-in support for BPMN diagrams. You may use Visio or an alternative tool if you prefer.

- Navigate to draw.io in a web browser

After a short browser redirect, you should be presented with a screen like the following:
You can connect draw.io to a cloud provider to store your work. Your University email account should allow you to save using OneDrive; alternatively, you can choose any of the other options if you have an account. Beware that using Device will store your work only on the computer you're using.

- Choose somewhere to save your diagrams

Task One - Basic BPMN
The draw.io interface looks as follows:

The centre area is your canvas, this is where you will construct your diagrams.
Try drawing some shapes from the General section. With a shape selected, change the fill and outline (stroke) colours.
Use the delete key on your keyboard to delete elements once you've added them.

Adding BPMN symbols
Scroll down the toolbox panel (on the left) and check that you have access to BPMN symbols.

If these symbol libraries are not available, choose More Shapes... and add BPMN from under the Business category

Using only BPMN symbols, replicate the following diagrams.

You can create a new diagram for each, or create multiple models in a single diagram
Hint: add text to events by just selecting them and starting to type

Task two - Modelling

Consider the following process description (in English):
Morgan wants to sign up for an account on Doggobook, the world's third-best social network for dog enthusiasts. She enters her email address and a password into the sign-up form.

If her password is not long or complex enough, the Doggobook website asks her to try again with a new password.
Once Morgan has created a strong-enough password, she is granted access to the site. Doggobook sends her an email confirming that she's created an account.

We would like to create a model of this process to visualize the steps. It is up to you to determine an appropriate level of abstraction, but you should end up with at least two resources and at least three activities.

Task 2.a - Process boundaries

- What are the process boundaries? What event triggers the process and what are the possible outcomes?

Task 2.b - Resources

- What are the resources, or actors, in the process? Where are the handovers of control?
Hint: they will usually be on submission of a web form or display of a web page in a system such as this one

Task 2.c - Activities

- Identify the various activities that are involved in the process Hint: try to think of activities as verb noun pairs.

Task 2.d - Diagramming

- Create a BPMN swimlane diagram to model this process, using draw.io. Your model should include at least one branch and one merge - likely for repetition.

Task 2.e - Exporting / saving your work

- From draw.io, choose File / Export As... and choose PNG, to save your Doggobook signup process model as an image. The default export options should be fine for this lab. When prompted where to save your PNG file, choose Download and save the generated file into your documents.

If you have multiple models on your diagram, you can drag a selection box around your diagram first, and choose Selection Only and Crop from the export options.

PNG are raster graphics files. As we will see when we talk about computer graphics, vector files such as SVG are better able to represent shapes such as ours. Unfortunately, SVG files are unsupported by our ePortfolio system. They are supported by recent editions of Microsoft Word, with some caveats. To use draw.io SVGs in Word, select all text elements in your diagram and disable Word Wrap and Formatted Text before exporting.

- Create a new ePortfolio page for this lab task. Use a similar naming scheme to the one you used for week 1

- Edit your new ePortfolio page, and add an Image block. Upload the PNG file you created earlier, ensuring you check the rights declaration checkbox (see below)

Attachment:- Lab - Ethics and ePortfolios.rar