Three Design Principles for eCommerce Curricular Initiatives

University educators, particularly those in schools of business, face a dilemma in adapting their curriculum to e-commerce. Some schools have created new degree programs while others have opted to infuse existing courses with e-Commerce topics. Given the strong demand for e-Commerce education among students and industry, balancing speed with a strong end state plan is necessary for effective curricular change. This essay overviews the main issues in steering these changes

The Process of Creative Destruction: Using IT to Craft a Learning Organization in Business Education

This research-in-progress investigated these questions via directed changes in course design, conduct, culture, and technology. It further explored how new course designs can experientially give students process skills for thriving in network-based learning organizations. The data are drawn from a rich case study of an actual MBA course that attempted to change the learning culture through extensive use of Lotus Notes

Final Report of the Indiana University Cyberinfrastructure Research Taskforce

The Cyberinfrastructure Research Taskforce met during the 2004-05 academic year to consider Indiana University’s (IU) needs for shared cyberinfrastructure investments. In particular, the charge to the taskforce asked scholars to focus on needs that could help support a doubling of IU’s externally funded research by 2010-2011. This report to the IU Vice President for Research & Information Technology conveys 10 specific recommendations. It recognizes both current progress in cyberinfrastructure development while also proposing new directions for cyberinfrastructure needs and opportunities. In summary, the recommendations affirm a continuity of investment in the core IT infrastructure that is the foundation for advanced cyberinfrastructure. Developing deep capabilities for serving the complete research data lifecycle emerged as a clear and pervasive theme across many disciplines. The recommendations provide guidance for storage capacity; data movement across networks; collection, annotation and provenance; and data publishing, curation, and custodianship. The taskforce advocated “continuing without pause” renewed investment in IU’s High Performance Computing (HPC) systems and visualization facilities and strongly advocated HPC as a competitive necessity for data-intensive scholarship. Beyond the technology investments, the taskforce gave considerable analysis to scholars’ needs in making productive use of cyberinfrastructure. The taskforce recommends investments in an array of subsidized and chargeback consulting services, complexity-hiding interfaces, and training programs that each are discipline-facing in their orientation rather than a homogenized one-size-fits-all. Finally, developing and sustaining advanced cyberinfrastructure will be impossible with only university sources of funding. The taskforce strongly advocates aggressive partnerships and leadership at the state, national, and international levels to compete for all forms of external funding to continue incremental evolution of IU’s cyberinfrastructure. The report itself provides many more details beyond these recommendations. Diverse scholarly endeavors are evolving their use of cyberinfrastructure in different ways. Nevertheless, the themes and specific recommendations presented here represent a resounding consensus view across these disciplines for the shared cyberinfrastructure needs of IU’s scholars

DO SEQUENCE AND CONCURRENCY MATTER?: An Investigation of Order and Timing Effects on Student Learning of Programming Languages

IS educators often struggle with curriculum issues including timeliness and completeness of the curriculum. While model curricula suggest that programming courses should be a part of an IS undergraduate degree, little guidance is offered as to the order and timing of these courses. A longitudinal survey of students in programming courses was used to assess whether sequence or concurrency explained any variance in perceptual performance measures. Sequence of programming courses did not hinder student performance, and concurrency actually improved performance for Visual Basic. Insights from the study provide guidance for curricular design issues regarding the sequencing and timing of programming courses

Why Unizin?

The formal launch of Unizin begins an exciting new chapter for Digital Education and a path for universities to shape our future. We have been fortunate to be among the many who have shaped the ideas that form Unizin, and our institutions are among the earliest universities to join. Our goals and purpose in endorsing Unizin are simple: As professors and members of the academy, we want to support faculty and universities by ensuring that universities and their faculty stay in control of the content, data, relationships, and reputations that we create. As we look at the rapidly emerging infrastructure that enables digital learning, we want to bias things in the direction of open standards, interoperability, and scale. Unizin is about tipping the table in favor of the academy by collectively owning (buying, developing, and connecting) the essential infrastructure that enables digital learning on our campuses and beyond

Wetland resource evaluation and the NRA's role in its conservation. 1. Resource assessment

This is the Wetland resource evaluation and the NRA's role in its conservation: Resource assessment report produced by the National Rivers Authority in 1995. This R&D document provides a strategy for the assessment of the wetland resource of England and Wales. As a first step the report defines wetlands in their UK context. The following working definition is suggested: Wetland is land that has (or had until modified) a water level predominantly at, near, or up to 1.5 m above the ground surface for sufficient time during the year to allow hydrological processes to be a major influence on the soils and biota. These processes may be expressed in certain features, such as characteristic soils and vegetation. The report also summarises a hydrotopographical classification of wetlands. The report then develops a strategy for the establishment of a wetland resource Inventory based on a geographical information system (GIS) as a means of storing and manipulating site data from across England and Wales

THE EFFECTS OF RESTRICTIVENESS AND PREFERENCE FOR PROCEDURAL ORDER ON THE APPROPRIATION OF GROUP DECISION HEURISTICS IN A GSS ENVIRONMENT

This research examines two research questions. First, does restrictiveness (i.e., the manner in which use of group resources is limited or channeled) (Silver 1988, 1990; DeSanclis et al. 1989) influence group performance and member perceptions as measured by decision quality and satisfaction? Second, does the composition of a GSS supported group in terms of individual preference for procedural order (PPO) (Putnam 1979) influence group performance and member perceptions? 7\u27his research tests and extends the Adaptive Structuration Theory (AST) (Poole and DeSanctis 1990). AST argues that GSSs are a social technology through which groups may choose to faithfully or ironically appropriate GSS structures. The PPO construct was also examined in this research. The PPO construct suggests that individuals enter group work with predispositions for particular work habits. For instance. High Procedural Order (HPO) individuals prefer planned, sequential patterns of organizing task activities and will seek to structure activities by sending procedural messages while Low Procedural Order (LPO) individuals send fewer procedural messages and prefer a cyclical ordering of activities. We suggest lhat a group member\u27 s PPO may be an important source of contextual structures for the appropriation processes described by AST. A laboratory experiment was conducted to evaluate the impacts of GSS- and facilitator-based restrictiveness on group processes and outcomes. The independent variables in this study were restrictiveness and the group\u27s PPO composition. Twenty-eight 5-member groups composed entirely of all HPO individuals (fourteen groups) or all LPO individuals (fourteen groups) were randomly assigned to either a restrictive or nonrestrictive treatment. The restrictive treatment was operationalized by activating three sources of restrictiveness: user-based training, facilitator-based process guidance, and GSS-based (via a level-2 GSS - VisionQuest™). The nonrestrictive treatment did not specifically impose any form of restricliveness. The comprehensive heuristic was a modification of Dewey\u27s (1910) reflective thinking process. The $OB Policy Task. a hidden profile task (Stasser 1992), was developed and used for this experimenL This task is designed so that information from all members is essential for identifying the dominant problems and for finding a jointly acceptable solution. In tenns of decision quality. an ANOVA found no significant difference between groups in each of the treatment conditions; however, the trends in the data are suggestive and imply that I-PO groups in the non-reslrictive condition tend to produce better quality solutions (F = 1.594. p = 0.219). Further. a one-way analysis for groups in the non-restrictive condition across the PPO dimension approached significance (F = 3.0846; p = 0.105) and suggests that groups composed of LPO me:nbers performed this task better than groups composed of }IPO members, Results for satisfaction (Green and Taber 1980) indicate that I IPO group members reported greater participation in the discussion (F = 12.27, p = 0.001), that they were more satisfied with their group\u27s solution (F = 10.94, p = 0.001), and that they were also more satisfied with the process than were LPO members (F = 6.61, p = 0.011). No significant difference was identified for participation in terms of the restrictiveness treatment; however, groups in the restrictive condition were more satisfied with the solution (F = 5.78, p = 0.018) and with the process (F = 6.43, p = 0.012). In terms of qualitative results, the facilitators noted that groups in the non-restrictive treatment generally could not or chose not to appropriate the heuristic. Even when groups requested the GSS tool specified by the heuristic, they often misappropriated the heuristic or the GSS. These preliminary results are intriguing and suggest that PPO is a useful construct for understanding how group members appropriate and react to GSS technology and structured heuristics. A better understanding of the intlicacies and differences in this appropriation process in the various conditions will be gained Lhrough a detailed examination of the decision-making process adopted by each group