IT & keeping current

Alex Zimmerman sharing with SBCTC on Vimeo.
Hello, my name is Alex Zimmerman,
I am a one of the few “Staculty” members at Everett Community College. This means I am a full time IT Specialist by day and part-time faculty member by night. Currently I am writing a book for my class IT 101 – Introduction to Information Technology. This class is a overview of various different topics ranging from computer hardware to networking and programming! Every week has a new subject, linking to what was taught the week before. Since the class content is so broad, I didn’t want to have my students pick up a book for each subject. Finding a ready-made book to fit all the class subjects was not possible, the few I did find for specific subjects weren’t able to keep current. As Information Technology is a very fast paced industry most of these books are borderline obsolete by the time they are published. The “Survey of Computing” book is currently in a working “beta” and I have tentative final release scheduled at the end of fall quarter 2014. It is my hope to make this book free to all those that want it, under the Creative Commons ShareAlike license to reuse/update/modify as they see fit so they may also make their own custom courses maximizing their teaching effectiveness.