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March 29, 2006
Web 2.0
MSNBC has a new article on the meaning and importance of Web 2.0 here. According to the article,
"In the broadest sense, the Web 2.0 moniker captures the renewed exuberance (perhaps irrational) in high-tech circles. There are so many start-ups, in fact, that inventive observers of the newly crowded business scene have taken to mashing all their logos together in one colorful and jumbled image, then posting their work to Flickr for others to appreciate."
Here's one example from Flickr:
source: http://flickr.com/photos/stabilo-boss/101793493.
The MSNBC article has short, snappy descriptions of a few of these companies: Digg (users, as editors, vote to promote the importance of news); Plum (a convenient way to combine all of the files and resources you have about a topic (good for research?)): Sharpcast (synchronize all of your electronic gadgets); Prosper (lenders compete for consumer loans up to $25,000); Mercora (you be the DJ -- create your own show and send it to up to five radio stations, worldwide); and others.
I keep thinking about Harry Dent (search this site for Dent) and his two waves of technology. Although, this movement seems like an early Dent-1 wave and not a mature Dent-2 wave. We'll see...
Posted by DavidK at 06:17 AM | Comments (0)
March 28, 2006
MIS Capstone Course
This past week I learned about the experiences of the University of New Mexico as they revamped their MIS course to make it a senior level capstone course. They removed the teaching of Excel or Access tools from the class and
"... changed design delivery for the introductory MIS course from a traditional “nuts ‘n’ bolts” orientation coupled with personal productivity software coverage to a standalone, integrative case study approach."
Laurie Schatzberg at UNM describes their goals, strategy, and experiences in an article she published for the Information Systems Education Journal in September, 2003. Her article includes a survey of the MIS courses at 21 institutions. It sounds like UNM is quite pleased with the result, but understands that the course at this level cannot serve as a feeder course for the IS major. They are considering modifying an existing 'tools' oriented course for that purpose. Laurie can be reached at Laurie@mgt.unm.edu.
Posted by DavidK at 06:17 PM | Comments (0)
Firefox Bug Breaks Up Couple ...
According to the bug report here,
a Firefox problem causes the demise of a relationship. Well, actually,
wasn't the rift already there and the Firefox bug just exposed it?
Or???? Make sure to read the comments. You have to love open source!
Posted by DavidK at 06:15 PM | Comments (0)
A Model for IS Literacy
Nik Hassan of the University of Minnesota in Duluth has been exploring the question of IS literacy for sometime. This past week, he sent me a copy of a paper that he has submitted to the AMCIS Conference in Acapulco this August. I was especially drawn to a literacy model in his article:
source: Nik Hassan, University of Minneosta, Duluth, Used by permission.
This model seems awfully familiar to me -- I'm thinking it might help me understand what I've been trying to do in the classroom for many years. In the 'Perform social practice' box, I try to introduce some sort of a problem, some need, some task that a future business person will need to accomplish. An example might be creating the hardware/software budget for a department.
Now, in order to create that budget (or in his terms, perform the social practice), I need to be able to apply a set of symbols ... here, those symbols might be to understand the relationship of CPU, amount of main memory to workload. Note the phrase is Apply symbol system. I need to not only know what CPU, main memory, and workload are, I need to be able to apply them to the social practice (make the budget). In parallel with that application, I may need to manipulate technology ... here that technology might be to use a spreadsheet so as to be able to construct the budget in such a way that I can input workload and determine the budget particulars. The final result is an emergent element of IT literacy.
Note, too, the feedback loop. The produced budget enters the realm of social practice and presumably is evaluated against some set of criteria. I assume that's what he means by Control (though I may be mis-construing his meaning). In the classroom, the instructor (or group members) provide the control. And, of course, multiple trips through the loop provide greater feedback and greater confidence in the application of the symbols and the manipulation of the technology.
I like it and, as I said, it seems intuitively familiar.
Hassan has also written on the importance of diversity in defining IS literacy here.
Lots to think about!
Posted by DavidK at 06:05 PM | Comments (0)
March 23, 2006
Another Laptop Theft
An employee of Fidelity investments had his/her laptop stolen on March 15; it held data on 200,000 retirement accounts, including name and social security number. According to MSN:
"It is unusual to have so much information on one laptop, Fidelity spokeswoman Anne Crowley said, but the computer in question was brought to a business meeting by a team of employees. "
Apparently not unusual enough. Why in the world would anyone need data on 200,000 customers at a meeting? Why take the risk? Must have been a long meeting.
Posted by DavidK at 07:45 AM | Comments (0)
March 22, 2006
Large Section Group Management
Gerard Klonarides at Florida International University uses a number of innovative ideas in his large (175) introductory MIS class. One of them concerns group management.
During the first class period he selects 6 students to be directors for the class. These directors are students with prior IS, project management, or other business experience. Gerry says the position is known as one with useful authority and he has prior students come to the first day of a new class to promote their friends for a director slot.
He then has the remaining students form groups of 4. "Meet the person sitting next to you, if you don't already know them. Now, turn around and meet the two people behind/in front of you. Form a group of 4." He then has each group select a manager. The group can select the manager in any way they want. For a typical class of 175 students, he'll have 42 groups. He says he can do this in 4 minutes or less.
Next, he has each group manager report to a director ... there will be a total of 7 groups per director. (I'm not sure how he does that part.)
Each director has a number from 1 to 6. Each group has a three digit number, the first digit of which is the director's number. Thus, the first group for director 1 is 101, the second group is 102, up to 107. The highest numbered group is 607. In this way he knows immediately who the director is for each group.
Every class period, he does some group exercise. The students in the group prepare written evidence of their group's work and their manager turns it into their director. The directors record the group's work along with the names of the students in the group that day. (Hence, the directors are also taking attendance.) I'm not sure whether the director's grade the work, but they might. I'm also not sure what's in it for the directors ... but given that students compete for the job, there must be some reward.
All of this sounds very intriguing to me. I hope Gerry will fill us in on the specifics that I missed.
I also think it works. Walking across campus with him last week, quite a number of students went out of their way to say hello to him!
Posted by DavidK at 05:01 PM | Comments (0)
Something to Do in Your Next Curriculum Meeting
Score the meeting's IQ!
Posted by DavidK at 04:24 PM | Comments (0)
Who Owns the Internet?
A fascinating article and great maps on who owns the Internet at Ben Worthen's blog. The following graphic from his site shows about almost all the routers on the North American backbone. (He says there are 134,855 of them.)
source: http://blogs.cio.com/node/209.
"The colors represent who each router is registered to. Red is Verizon; blue AT&T; yellow Qwest; green is major backbone players like Level 3 and Sprint Nextel; black is the entire cable industry put together; and gray is everyone else, from small telecommunications companies to large international players who only have a small presence in the U.S."
He has a much bigger map with labels here.
His conclusions are that, while AT&T and Verizon are the two biggest owners of the core, they do not own enough to be worried about a monopoly. Read the whole article. Very interesting!
Posted by DavidK at 06:09 AM | Comments (0)
March 14, 2006
MIS in Amsterdam
This week, TeachingMIS received an email from Jan van Wieringen, a fellow-MIS professor who teaches MIS in Amsterdam. Here is his email, with minor translation clarifications, in full:
"I teach MIS at HES Amsterdam, a university-like professional education Business School in Amsterdam, Netherlands."During the past 4-5 years I digitized my whole course, and I must say that it has become rather successful in the last 4 years. Results are better and better each semester and the efficiency is very high. Students love the subject now and are eager to get very high results."The whole course is intended for students of Commercial Economics (Marketing - our CE-department) and our International Department, hosting many students from the USA, the UK, France and China. Nowadays, nearly 90% like this subject very much."Though it is always a problem to give an exact definition of MIS, "my" MIS consists of
- Website building with Dreamweaver through on online coursebook
- SPSS, taught online with Viewlet Builder (works excellent)
- Making and evaluation of Online Surveys (website + SPSS) with createsurvey,com
- Ecommerce through on online course book with many links
- Principles of MS Visio
- SQL with MySQL
"I use many IT-techniques to make the whole program interesting and nice to learn."Principles of my approach are:
- Divide all learning material into small bites, that can just be learned in one or two days
- Organize small exams about each week, which keep the students working; this is done with MC-questions in WebCT
- No repeats for any test: just do it and learn only once!
- If small projects are insufficient, the students have one week to to improve it. I don't accept insufficient work
- All results are immediately available on line
"In Dutch schools there is a tendency to work not harder than required to pass a year. So 55% is sufficient, but I now see students going for 90%-100%, which is quite unique. This is the only subject they want to work for. If you would print the coursebook Ecommerce, you'll get some 150 pages. No one ever had a comment on that. My subject requires learning every week!My whole program, also partly written in English, is available at www.hesit.com"Just watch and ask any question you want!""
Wonderful to have input from a European colleage. Thanks to Professor Wieringen for sending it!
Posted by DavidK at 07:58 PM | Comments (0)
Microsoft Taking Some Risk?
Is Microsoft taking a big risk? Maybe -- the new version of Office
dramatically changes the menu/toolbar interface that's been around since the
early Macs. You can find a description of their design goals here.
Also, here's a blog
that illustrates the interface for the common Office applications. It also
shows the new command tabs and contextual command tabs. This could be
interesting. The question is, "Will it be enough for legions of
relatively satisfied Office 2000 and Office 2003 users to upgrade?"
I still wouldn't want to be Steve Balmer in these interesting times!
Posted by DavidK at 07:52 PM | Comments (0)
Becker and Moran Start Yahoo Group to Boost CIS Enrollment
Jack Becker of the University of North Texas and Matthew Moran, author of the
IT Career Builder's Toolkit, have started
a Yahoo group entitled Boosting CIS Enrollments. You can find their site here.
One of the goals of their site is to create the CIS Program Marketing
Toolkit, which is a set of materials "... built with the assumption that many
instructors do not have the time to market their school's CIS/MIS program or are
unsure where to start. It will be a compilation of the ideas, strategies,
and tools from the discussions here and from other sources." I hope
their site takes off. Please take a look.
Posted by DavidK at 07:50 PM | Comments (0)
One of the Most Unusual Programming Books --- Ever
Some of the developers I know are extolling the virtues of a new programming language called Ruby. I'm not sure about the language, but this is one of the most original programming books to come along in a long time!
Posted by DavidK at 07:48 PM | Comments (0)
March 06, 2006
Enterprise Application Integration in the U.S. Military
McDonald Bradley Corporation (Herdon, VA) has played an important role in the U.S. military's Horizontal Fusion project. According to John Sutton, Senior VP of their Advanced Programs Group, the military recognizes that it has the same problems with stovepipe systems isolation as industry has. The goal of the Horizon Fusion project is to provide a version of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) over these separated military systems.
Mr. Sutton explained that the project uses XML Web Services as key technology and plans call for a central (and innovative) use of UDDI as well as the other web services standards (WSDL and SOAP). You can find an excellent summary and an informative tutorial here.
Posted by DavidK at 12:19 PM | Comments (0)
DoD Discovery Metadata System (DDMS)
Like all large organizations, the Department of Defense (DoD) has serious data integration problems. The DDMS is a standard for mapping local data definitions to DoD-wide metadata. Here's a key chart from page 15 of DDMS standard:
Source: http://www.afei.org/news/ddms.pdf, page 15.
The idea is that knowledge workers would be able to submit queries (upper right hand of diagram) expressed in terms of the metadata and those queries would be translated into properly formatted queries expressed in local database terms. An ambitious and important goal!
Apparently, however, the project has fallen on budgetary hard times. Just like every other organization, it's hard to get management (in this case Congress) to fund infrastructure. There are no immediate, key benefits from this system. Sure seems like a good idea, however, and important for the future.
Posted by DavidK at 12:12 PM | Comments (0)
RFID and Korean Buses
Professor Chang Koh of the University of North Texas (Denton) studies innovative applications of RFID. He recently attended the RFID World 2006 Conference and reports on the use of RFID to coordinate bus transportation in Seoul, Korea. Seoul, which has a metropolitan population of at least 15 million in a geographic area roughly 2/3 the size of Dallas, supports 10,000 buses, operated by 60 independent local companies.
To bring order to the potential chaos, the buses have recently been equipped with RFID devices that periodically report the buses location (from an onboard GPS) and number of adult and child occupants on the bus. A central agency accesses this data and allocates buses to areas depending on traffic requirements. Additionally, marketers can access the historical data on the percentage of adults / children to plan advertising. One possible alternative is to provide online advertising that changes content depending on number and age of occupants.
Dr. Koh is developing a business case on this RFID application. If you want to know more, you can contact him at: kohce@unt.edu. Also, if you happen to read Korean, you can learn more about this system here.
Posted by DavidK at 12:08 PM | Comments (0)
Using the Parrot -- IT Hiring Exploding in Washington DC
Last Thursday I walked out of a Starbuck in Reston, VA, and saw a woman standing next to a parrot wearing a Superman jacket. (The parrot -- not the woman -- was wearing the jacket.) Hard to pass up a woman standing next to a parrot in a Superman jacket, so I asked her what was going on. It turns out she's an IT job recruiter and can't find candidates. She was looking for prospects in this very high-tech area at lunch time. "I found one qualified person on Friday, and he had a job by Monday." Top on her list: J2EE developers, .Net developers, database administrators, and database designers.
Posted by DavidK at 12:07 PM | Comments (0)
Evaluation Blackmail (Con't)
Last week, Ken Jones at Northeastern State University (in Oklahoma) and I were talking on the topic of evaluation blackmail. Ken asks his students to provide written comments explaining every mark they give him on his evaluations. Since he's begun doing that, he's noted that his evaluations have been more balanced, more realistic, and far more useful to him. "Marks alone, whether they're high or low, don't tell me anything. If they liked what I did, I'd like to know why. And, if not, I'd like to know that as well."
By the way, Ken is a great fan of Friedman's The World Is Flat and has prepared a learning guide for that text for use in his intro to MIS class. Anyone interested in that project should contact him at: jones013@nsuok.edu.
Posted by DavidK at 12:04 PM | Comments (0)
Another Watershed
Speaking of The World Is Flat, yesterday I was searching for papers on colored Petri nets. I searched through UW's various resources and found a paper that sounded just perfect for my needs. The abstract and keywords seemed right on. When I accessed it, though, it was in Chinese. And, the Web site on the Korean bus system, above, is written in Korean. How will English-only speaking people compete in a world in which leading papers are written in Chinese and Korean? All of this fits into Chapter 7 of Friedman's book.
Posted by DavidK at 12:02 PM | Comments (0)
Importance of the Right Word
One early morning a few weeks ago my wife asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I was still sleepy and pointed at my old watch and said, "I need a new watch. Why don't you go downtown and pick up one of those expensive and beautiful Rolodexes?" She laughed and said something about "You can take the boy out of the country, but not the country out of the boy."
Anyway, guess what I got for my birthday? Yup:
Isn't it a beauty? I didn't even know you could still buy a Rolodex. And, alas, I'm wearing the same old watch ... The brand name starts with T and not R, btw.
Posted by DavidK at 11:59 AM | Comments (0)