I.T. Department News
IT Department Forms Student IT Club
The IT department recently formed the IT Club for its students. The IT Club is envisioned to strengthen camaraderie among IT students by providing activities that will help them improve their skills in technical areas relevant to the IT field. Aside from the usual peer teaching wherein higher level students teach their lower level brothers difficult topics in various IT courses, the IT Club also plans and conducts seminars and workshops on new technologies which could help them become more aware about the developments in information and communication technologies.
As the first major project of IT Club this academic year, the club organized and held the Information Technology Week last December 6 to 10. (see related article) The IT Club is currently led by Said Al-Riyami, a diploma level student specializing in IT. The NCT IT Club's website is www.nct-itclub.com.
IT Club Celebrates The Success Of The First Internet Week
IT Club led by Said Suleiman Al Riyami, spearheaded the first Internet Week in the College. The week-long event started on the 29th of November until 3rd of December with the theme "My Internet, Part of My Life".
As a string of individual events, there was something for everyone. IT students were treated to symposium, open forum, debate and hands-on activities that range from internet techniques and skills to using the internet to earn profit. The different activities were organized by senior IT Club members.
The Internet Week started with the symposium on "Web 2.0 Technologies" led by Mr. Mani, Mr. Sivakumar and Mr. Sathya, all from IT department.
Another remarkable event that took place during the Internet Week was a hands-on workshop where participants were given tasks to try and experience how to use the internet for effective searching, downloading of books and videos, online banking and much more.
The closing ceremony was attended by no less than the College Dean, Asst. Dean for Academic Affairs and the HOS for IT. The Dean praised the students for organizing a successful event.
NCT is now a CISCO Local Academy
Nizwa College of Technology has signed an agreement with Cisco systems through Higher College of Technology - Muscat, the Regional Cisco Academy, to become a Local Cisco Academy.
This agreement will benefit the NCT students through the integration of Cisco modules in the Enhancement Training Program and the acquisition of new equipment for setting up a Cisco Laboratory in the college which will be used for giving extensive hands-on to students to make them more aware about the networking concepts.
The academy program requires training and certification of networking instructors and as part of the requirement, three staff members of the Information Technology department attended the Certified Cisco Academy Instructors (CCAI) training sponsored by the Ministry of Manpower held at the Cisco Regional Academy in Muscat from April 5 to 30, 2008.
The CCAI training included the following four modules: CCNA Discovery 1 - Networking for Home and Small Business; CCNA Discovery 2 - Working at a Small-to-Medium Business or ISP; CCNA Discovery 3 - Introducing Routing and Switching in the Enterprise; and CCNA Discovery 4 - Designing and Supporting Computer Networks.
Mr. Rodel Antonio, Mr. S.Rahda Rammohan, and Mr. Syed Muqtar Ahmed successfully passed the online and skills exams given on the completion of the CCAI modules. They are now eligible to sit for CCNA International Certificate Examination and are now acknowledged Cisco Networking Academy Program (CNAP) instructors.
New Software Lab
A new software laboratory was formally launched by the IT department at the start of Semester 3 of the current academic year (2007-2008). The software lab, officially known as IT304L, is located at the second floor of the IT Building and will be used in conducting computer laboratory classes for IT specialization courses.
The lab consists of 24 DELL Optiplex 755 computers with Intel Core Duo 2.66GHz processor, 1GB RAM, 120GB HDD, DVD+ Rewritable Drive, and 14" LCD Widescreen Display. The said computers were installed with different application programs needed by the IT students which include MS Office 2003, BlueJ, PHP Triad, Visual Studio, ICDL Testing Software, AutoCAD 2006, Borland C++, SwishMax, Context Editor and Visible Analyst.
DIMS Selected Best IT Project
The Distributed Inventory Management System (DIMS), a web-enabled project from a group of students in Diploma level, bested the other seven finalists to emerge the winner in the selection of the Best IT Project for the first semester of academic year 2007-2008. The group responsible for the development of DIMS is composed of Amal Al Kalbani, Badria Al Ghawi, Basama Al Subahi, Halima Al Farsi and Nawal Al Gafri. They are supervised by TV Sathyanarayana.
The DIMS is web-based application software created using PhP and MySQL, and is primarily to be used by laboratory technicians in the engineering department to easily manage and maintain the list of equipment and tools in different laboratories and workshops. It can also be used to easily search for the required tools and equipment of different students, as well as for easy record-keeping and tracking of borrowed tools and equipment. Likewise, the DIMS is envisioned to help the technicians store, process and disseminate the information about the laboratory equipment and to provide accurate reporting of available equipment in the laboratory to be used for projects and experiments.
The other seven finalists from a total of 22 projects completed in the first semester are: Staff Information System, School Registration System, Feedback System, Online Examination, Online Advisor, Discussion Forum, and E-Advisor. Aside from the Best Project certificates, the student winners each received a 120GB external hard disk, while the supervisor received a 160GB external hard disk from the College Administration as tokens for a job well done.
The Best Project event is part of the celebration of the annual Cultural Week of the College, and serves to give recognition to exemplary work done by students in different departments. Similarly, Best Project awards were also given to outstanding projects in Engineering and Business Studies departments.
IT Department Sponsors IT Security Seminar
The IT Department sponsored a seminar on IT Security for its students las May 28 at the College Multi-purpose Hall. Mr. CRV Ganesh, the Chief of Operations of Global Technology Innovation, served as the resource speaker in the said seminar. Aside from being the COO of Global Tech, Mr. Ganesh is also a certified IS Auditor and IS Manager. He had been staying in Oman for more than 15 years, working in different areas of IT and IS.
In his speech, Mr. Ganesh emphasized the importance of software engineering and its relevance to security. He discussed and enlightened students about the important areas of IT Security, such as asset security, information and database security, and security in IT governance among others. Mr. Ganesh also talked about various standards and practices being followed by organizations in implementing IT Security.
After the speaker's talk, a short forum followed wherein both staff and students asked Mr. Ganesh questions relevant to IT security and communications. The activity ended just before 1 pm. The HOD of IT, Mr. Sami Mustafa attended the seminar and introduced the guest speaker, while Mr. Suryanarayana acted as the activity coordinator-facilitator.
Mr. Ganesh capped his day at NCT by taking a tour of the ETC and the IT department. /junlontok
ICDL Courses Now Underway
The College has started offering ICDL courses to the foundation students starting this semester. Although this project is led by the IT department through its ICDL coordinators Mr. Nani and Mr. Said, the full implementation of the project was made successful through the cooperation of the English Language Centre and the Educational Technologies Centre, with the solid support from the College top management. Other academic departments also participated in the implementation by sharing their computer laboratories for the use in ICDL classes.
Currently, a total of 1,440 students are taking the ICDL classes. Necessary user accounts, as well as relevant software are installed and configured so that students can maximize their learning and ensure their passing of the exams. Fine-tuning of the equipment, including the acquisition of a dedicated server is currently in the process to ensure the high-standard implementation of the project.