Teamwork! Using A Contract To Increase Contributions Among Team Members In Undergraduate MIS Group Projects.

This paper describes many of the issues arising in properly assigning credit and ssessing contributions to team projects in undergraduate MIS classes. To alleviate this problem, the authors demonstrate the use of a team contract, where guidelines for work are jointly assigned both by the instructor and the team members themselves. The use of this contract has increased the success of teams in the classes where they are used. Future research on the contract and teamwork is described

Editorial: Announcing the Department of History of IS in the Communications of the Association for Information Systems

This article introduces the new Department of History for the journal Communications of the Association for Information Systems

Examining the Effects of Organizational Procedures and Policies on Appropriate Computing

Internet access for knowledge workers has become much more commonplace in the last 3 years. Along with the benefits of the Internet access come potential problems, including productivity loss and improper usage. Many companies today are trying to sell software solutions to control knowledge worker usage of the Internet, enabling managers to organizationally govern the Internet usage of employees on a constant basis. The author examines the overall effects of procedures, policies and computing solutions for eliminating the productivity vacuum in organizations with respect to Internet usage and presents a model of effects of information monitoring relating to worker outputs. Proposals for a field test of the model are include

RECALLING OUR LEGACY AND HELPING US INFORM OUR FUTURE: DOCUMENTING THE HISTORY OF IS EDUCATION

This document is to discuss the new History of IS section within Communications of the Association for Information Systems, and discuss the need and opportunities for publishing papers covering the history of IS education in this section

Chasing the Next Fad: The Changing Nature of the IS Discipline

This research explores the changing nature of the IS discipline by focusing on academic job ads over the last 18 years to, in turn, show how we are preparing our students for jobs in the IS field. Three time periods are examined to see what topics were in need for IS departments. As expected, the skills requested have changed over time, but even with a current focus on “analytics”, skills such as Data Warehousing and Systems Analysis and Design are still in demand

Concept Maps and Information Systems: An Investigation into the Assessment of Students\u27 Understanding of IS

At the end of a four-year undergraduate program, it is often difficult to capture the knowledge of the graduating students. The use of mental models, specifically concept maps, can aid in the assessment of this knowledge at a conceptual level. Concept maps provide a visual representation of conceptual and relationship knowledge within a particular domain. Students in a senior-level, undergraduate class were given an assignment of creating conceptual maps of Information Systems. These maps were coded and analyzed for their “coverage” or conceptualization of the sub-field of Telecommunications. The analysis included both quantitative and qualitative assessments as well as comparisons across students’ maps. Preliminary assessments have indicated that there is a fairly large degree of overlap between maps, though a full analysis is not yet complete

The Importance of Cognitive Fit in Mobile Information Systems

This study extends the range where cognitive fit theory (CFT) has been tested. We replicate on a mobile device the original Vessey and Galletta [1991] study to see if the theory holds in the same way, and we find approximately the same results. However, when we extend the experiment to include common additional tasks to find its relative importance, we find CFT to not be nearly as important as other human-computer interaction concepts like crowding and text entry. The experiments conducted are explained, and the importance of this research in future context is also discussed