Friday, September 30, 2011

Assigning Papers

Most of the classes I teach are in graduate programs.  As part of these courses I often assign research papers of varying length.  The graduate students are accustomed to writing these papers and have become quite proficient at locating sources, outlining, writing, integrating sources and revising.  The papers provide a means for the students to practice and demonstrate their ability to synthesize knowledge into new meaning.

This week I assigned a research paper to my undergraduate students in a database modeling class.  I asked them to read an article on participatory sensing technologies and consider the ethical implications of the use of these technologies.  When I returned the graded assignments today I asked the class (mostly juniors) how often they receive assignments where they are asked to write a research paper.  To my surprise, outside of their general education courses, nobody had received a writing assignment.

Teaching undergraduate computer science courses we often focus on developing technical skills and our assignments are mostly the production of technical deliverables.  Our college is also good at assigning team projects and presentations to develop teamwork and oral communication skills.  While we provide opportunities to develop technical, problem solving, teamwork, and oral communication skills, there seems to exist a gap in opportunities to develop our students as skilled writers.

I would like to see us increase the use of written assignments.  They are more challenging to grade but they offer opportunities to develop skills the students will need to have beyond graduation.  In the age of email, texting and the informalization (is that a word) of our written language, our students need to practice the more formalized and deeper thinking art of writing research papers.

Thursday, September 29, 2011

I Think I'm Ready Now

Over the past two years I've been toying with the idea of purchasing an e-reader.  Initially, I was ready to take the leap and purchase the original Nook but by the time this product finally became available Apple announced the launch of the iPad and I ended up purchasing the original iPad (I do not regret this decision).

After using the iPad for about 18 months now, I found it is good at a lot of things but not as an e-reader.  Also, over the summer I purchased several books to read and now am faced with the issue of what to do with these books.  I'll want to refer to these books later but I don't want to store them.  An e-reader would solve this problem.

After convincing myself of the need for an e-reader this summer I then decided to wait to see what Amazon would offer in response to the latest Nook offering.  Yesterday I found out.  The new Kindle Touch is what I was looking for and seems like a good response to the Barnes and Nobel Nook but is it better than the Nook?

Should I buy the Nook or the Kindle?  This will be a difficult decision since I am locking myself in with one vendor by doing so and will be reliant on the availability of titles by the single vendor.  Locking myself in with a single vendor makes this an even scarier decision than I first thought.  Maybe I'm not ready to purchase an e-reader yet.

Thursday, September 22, 2011

Good Time to be in IT

Here we go again!   Back in the late 1990s the demand for skilled IT professionals overwhelmed the supply.  This resulted in bidding wars for highly marketable IT skills, frequent job hopping, and improved respect for the profession.  Based on recent activities it looks like we might be heading toward another shortage of IT workers.

Over the past few months I have been frequently contacted by employers interested in our graduating undergraduate and graduate IT students.  There seems to be a swell in hiring and these employers are having difficulties finding people for their open positions.  Fortunately, our graduating students appear to be prepared for the skills these employers are looking for.

It's good to be in IT again.

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Is Technology Good or Bad?

I'm finishing up Carr's book The Big Switch.  In this book Carr discusses the migration to the "world wide computer" and the social and economic repercussions from this change.  The world wide computer refers to the Internet and all of the web-based applications and services available to businesses and consumers.

The book was published in 2008 and is surprisingly on-target in forecasting the adoption of software as a service and the centralization of computing resources.  However, I feel Carr is particularly pessimistic on the social and financial implications of migration to the centralized Internet services.  Through his recent books (The Shallows, The Big Switch, and Does IT Matter?) Carr seems to take a more controversial approach in promoting the negative affects of computer technology.  Perhaps this pessimistic approach is a good way to create controversy (and sell more books).

On the other hand, Weinberger wrote Everything is Miscellaneous and is a prominent advocate for everything Internet.  Weinberger is an advocate of computer technology and seems to take an optimistic approach to the advances Carr warns us about.  Perhaps, like myself, Weinberger is partially blinded by a love of technology.

So, is technology good or bad?  Who is right?  Is Carr right that advances in computer technology will be detrimental to our society or is Weinberger right that these advances will help further our society?  Both authors have valid and contradictory points.  I would love to hear a debate between these to authors; it would be valuable to hear these deeply passionate and knowledgable scholars carry out a discussion weighing the pros and cons of computer technology.

In the end, we cannot simply say technology is good or bad.  However, the arguments offered by Carr and Weinberger offer additional insight and force us to consider the impacts these technologies have on us.  It doesn't matter whether you agree with Carr or Weinberger; each author forces us to see the relationship between technology and society and makes us think about this relationship.

Friday, September 16, 2011

Love/Hate Relationship with Academic Technology

Now that our academic year is underway I can begin to realize the fruits of my labor from the time I spent this summer preparing my classes.  In my undergraduate Database Modeling course I have implemented online quizzes in our learning management system (LMS).  Using these quizzes, the students are able to assess their understanding of the readings through the online quizzes they take outside of the class.  The quizzes are setup as multiple choice questions that are automatically graded by the LMS and reported to the grading function.  The LMS allows us to make the quizzes available outside of the classroom and auto removes the need to manually grade the quizzes (I can now simply review performance on the quizzes to identify any trouble areas for the class).

While this process appears to provide great time savings and contributes to the students' exposure to the course materials, it has proven to lead to some additional challenges for the class.  Unfortunately, the web-based LMS does not take into account differing perspectives on how to operate the quiz functionality.  As a result, many students have struggled in completing the quiz and have become locked out of the quiz.  I end up hearing from several students during the quiz that they cannot submit their quiz and I must go back in and reset their attempt so they can access the quiz once again.

In addition to the challenges with the quiz functionality, it has also come to our attention the LMS has an error in grade calculation under certain conditions.  This leads to the faculty reporting incorrect grades (lower than the actual grade) and resulted in a lot of frustration by the faculty and students.

The academic technologies such as LMS were designed to improve student access to the course materials and facilitate learning outside of the classroom.  Most of the time, these systems are successful.  However, when they are not, they create extra work for the students, faculty, and staff and leave everyone questioning the value of the technology.

I don't blame the vendors over these issues.  Vendors gain larger market share by the volume of functions included in the software and not by the rigorous quality built into the system.  Vendors are incented to add additional functions more than they are to spend the time/resources to ensure all functions are error-free.  We as consumers of these systems must place more demand on software that operates without any issues than to push for more functionality.

I still love to incorporate new technologies to increase my effectiveness in the classroom.  However, at times, this leads to additional frustrations and additional work.  I think the frustrations we experience as a class can also be a valuable learning experience to these students as they move into the workforce; they will now see, firsthand, the results of software anomalies.

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

My New Toy

Yesterday I presented a workshop on project portfolio management at our Rochester, Minnesota campus.  I used this workshop opportunity to try out a fancy new tool I came across last month.

Prezi is a different type of presentation software that allows the author to conceptualize the presentation in a non-linear manner and use movement between ideas to emphasize the connections between these ideas.  Rather than constructing one slide at a time, this tool allows the author to create different content frames, create the content objects within the frame and then develop a path through the different objects.  Using this approach, I'm able to conceptualize my presentation in a more organized manner and use motion to emphasize points and connections within the presentation.  Also, since this is a SaaS application and stored on the Prezi server, I'm able to easily share the presentation with others.

My description of this tool may be lacking but you can see how I used it in my workshop presentation or by going to the Prezi site.  The tool is note polished as other presentation software but I really like the new approach to presentations.

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Efficiency and IT

I came across an opinion piece today by Thornton May about IT and its association with efficiency.  The author described a wonderful analogy of the application of Frederick Winslow Taylor's efficiency studies for the manufacturing processes and how IT was applied in a similar manner to make organizational information processes more efficient.  In this article, the author was expressing the need for IT to be applied for innovation efforts rather than simply as a means for improved efficiency.

I can relate to the association of IT to "Taylorism" from my experiences in the industry.  IT often represents change and those impacted by this change often resent the source of the change.  Similar to the resentment described by May toward Taylor, the IT field also faced similar resentment.  IT has been known to wreak havoc with legacy processes that were well established and comfortable with employees in the organization as well as displace workers due to varying levels of process automation.  IT has also become so efficient that information is so readily available that we now have new problems such as "information overload".

While Taylor's practices and IT are both intended to improve organizational performance, we must be sure we apply efficiency techniques in a manner to provide value and be cognizant of the implications the changes.  These revelations are not new but we must be reminded of the past so that we are not to replicate our mistakes in the future.

Skills to Look for in Project Managers

Today I read a brief article describing the eight skills to look for when hiring an IT project manager. The headlines caught my attention...