BA271 - Information Technology in Business
Winter Term, 2006
Overall course learning objectives: First, you will learn to use a computer as a partner in everyday managerial
tasks like preparing presentations, building websites, and managing transactions.
Then, collectively, we will begin conversations about how multi-user business
computer systems differ from using personal productivity software. To do well, you will need to practice
hands-on activities on a computer, and you will need to learn about the issues
faced by businesses as they adapt to new technology. To earn an "A", you
will have to show us first-rate computer-usage skills combined with an ability
to think clearly and write well.
Announcements:
March 17, 2006: I want everyone to fill out a quick Wiki Mentoring
on-line survey. The survey should take only about five minutes to complete. The
survey will do two things:
- Help determine how many points your Wiki Mentors should receive for
their efforts.
- Help me decide whether to include this activity in BA271 next term, and
if so, how to modify it to make it more effective.
I want to receive a 100-percent participation rate on this survey. To
accomplish this goal, I will require you to complete the survey before taking
the BA271 Final Exam. Thus, if you want to save time during the final exam, I
recommend completing the survey BEFORE you arrive to take the final exam. To
learn how to take the survey, please look for an individualized message that I
sent to your business email box.
March 14, 2006: I did not sleep well last night. I pride myself on
being open and fair in how I grade. Nonetheless, numerous students have accused
me of being unfair in how I evaluated the first five points on the Wiki Mentor
activity. I went home last night knowing that in the classroom discussion of
this activity, I had lost the hearts and minds of many students.
As long as people can believe I have been unfair, they will not examine their
own actions, and they will not feel compelled to participate. After all, if the
process is unfair, why not boycott it out of principle? I do not want this
outcome. It simply is too important for you to learn about how collaborative
processes work in the Information Systems field for me to give you any excuse to
duck out of this activity or blame me for your lack of involvement.
I am not the ultimate recipient of your Wiki Mentoring ideas: your
peers are. For this reason, I've decided I should not determine any part of
your Wiki Mentoring score. Instead, I will create an on-line survey for each of
you to complete. You will complete this survey sometime after Friday at noon but
before you take the final exam. The survey will ask each of you to evaluate how
effective your mentors were. I will ask simple questions that cut to the heart
of whether you actually helped them. Questions like: Did your second mentor
provide timely feedback about your Wiki Plan and Draft Wiki work? Did your third
mentor have an effect on how you completed the overall Wiki activity? Thus, your
Wiki Mentoring score will be determined by whether your colleagues found your
mentoring ideas timely and useful
Finally, based on conversations that I have had with a few of you, I know at
least a few students never read the Wiki Mentor activity closely enough to
understand its requirements. For that reason, I have included another copy of it
here. Please read through what it asked you to do. Think through whether you
took this important task to heart. Ask yourself whether you approached this task
in an honorable manner.
================================
Wiki Mentors
Learning Objectives
While completing this activity, you should:
- Get a better sense of what other people are doing to the
BA271 Wiki.
- Provide a real service to three of your peers by giving them outside
advice and perspective on their Wiki Plan and
Draft Wiki activities.
- Discover that giving useful advice and mentoring ideas to someone else
pays unexpected dividends. (What can I say -- I'm an optimist! --
Dave Sullivan)
Requirements
Go to the Wiki Mentor List to
determine who you should mentor. For each student you are to mentor, click on
their mytalk page to read their Wiki
Plan and Draft Wiki ideas. Use their
Contributions page to look at the actual changes they have made to the
BA271 Wiki. (Note: if they are making changes
to another wiki, then you will need to follow the links in their Contributions
section of their mytalk page to determine what they have done.)
After you have used these pages to collect ideas about what each
student has done, add a new section to their mytalk page titled, "Mentoring
ideas from Username" where you insert your actual ONID username in the section
heading. Inside this new section, put a subheading titled, "Ideas as of Date and
Time" where you insert the actual date and time. Under this subheading, write
your suggestions and advice.
When you return later, add a new subheading for your comments with a new date
and time. Put each new subheading at the top of your Mentoring section, so that
older ideas get pushed down. Thus, I am asking you to create a blog-like list of
mentoring ideas inside each of three mytalk pages. If the last few paragraphs
made little sense, my recommendation is to look carefully at the images shown
below.
Figure 1: Each student's User Contributions page shows a complete list of the
entries that user has made to the BA271 Wiki.
Figure 2: By clicking on the Diff link in a User Contributions page, you can
see a side-by-side comparison of what an individual entry changed.
Figure 3: This shows how to add a blog-like set of mentoring ideas to a
student's mytalk page.
=============================
March 8, 2006: Several students have asked how to document their
contributions to public wikis. I just finished writing instructions for how to
do this. So if you will be making contributions to
Wikipedia,
WikiTravel, or some other
publicly available wiki, you should read
these instructions that are
at the end of Draft Wiki activity.
March 6, 2006: I want some help to guide my thinking about who should
receive a wiki award. I also want to
encourage everyone to participate in the social activity of providing a
nomination. To make this easier, I built a simple
on-line survey to collect nominations. Anyone can earn five
points for taking the time to follow this link and submit a nomination.
Nominations must be received on or before March 17th at noon.
February 27, 2006: The majority of BA271 students have stopped
attending Monday evening at 6 p.m. lectures. In one sense, I think this is a
good sign: it means I’ve organized activities well enough so they feel
comfortable using other sources of information.
This evening’s lecture will discuss two topics of interest: how to complete
the Wiki Plan activity and how to do well
on Thursday’s Query Quiz. I expect the
lecture will be of value, and I recommend attending.
February 26, 2006:
I’ve spent the entire
weekend doing my best to make the
Wiki Activity clearer and
more understandable. Along the way, I decided to break it into many smaller
parts to make the entire activity easier – and I’ve cancelled the Access #4
assignment. Please read through the entire
Wiki Overview
page to understand why I've made these changes. You should also know that I have
made major changes to the
lecture schedule and
graded
activities pages for the rest of the term.
February 21, 2006: Due to emergency repairs on equipment in the main
steam plant, ALL steam services to the campus will be shutdown on Thursday
between 6 a.m. and 5 p.m. There will be no regular class on Thursday in Bexell
324 -- I will be in Bexell 324 from noon to 6 p.m. for an extended help session.
Bring a coat or sweater and any questions you might have – there will be no
presentation.
The help session instead of regular class is to compensate
for the 2-hour midterm exam.
February 20, 2006: I spent a good portion of the weekend thinking
about the Wiki Contributions activity,
and I spent several hours today revising its instructions. My goal: make
it as easy to do and understand as possible ... but it remains inherently
challenging to provide creative and original contributions to a wiki -- partly
because most people have little experience with this sort of collaborative
effort, but also because quality writing requires interesting ideas along with
healthy authoring and editing skills. Along the way to lighten everyone's
workload, I cancelled the Peer Review activity that I had intended to go along
with the Wiki Contributions activity. I also postponed the due date of this
exercise until Monday of dead week.
February 8, 2006: Microsoft Producer has not been publishing the peer
reviews reliably for students. This caused me to reconsider the entire Website
Peer Review activity. I want people to focus on providing each other with
quality ideas about websites -- and I do not want students struggling with an
unreliable program. For this reason, I revised the
Website Peer Review activity's
instructions to make it much simpler. The revised instructions use Microsoft
Producer only to record video clips, and it no longer is used to create a
combined movie. I'm hoping this late revision will make life easier for nearly
all students, and I apologize for changing things mid-stream. I had no way of
knowing how unreliable Microsoft Producer would be this term.
February 7, 2006: I've completed the instructions for
the Website Peer Review activity.
Last night in the evening lecture, I described the general ideas behind this
activity, and today in Bexell 324, we will work through how to do the necessary
steps at a computer.
February 6, 2006: I postponed the due dates for the
Website Peer Review and Textbook activities back to Monday the 13th at noon.
February 1, 2006: I concluded the Prerequisite
Exam had confusing instructions about how to calculate Salaries. As a result, I
went back and re-graded everyone’s Exam, looking to see if the initial score was
too harsh given how confusing that portion of the instructions was. This effort
resulted in adjusting the score for 57 students. Typically I adjusted the score
upward by 2 points.
If you were one of the 57 students, then you should have received an email
message from me with your revised score.
Even if you were not one of the 57 students, this process may affect you.
This process raised the overall median score in class from 41 to 42 points.
Thus, if your score was below 42 points, then I will automatically boost your
score to 42 points before using it to calculate your course grade.
I’m hoping this message makes sense … but if not, feel free to inquire about
how we graded your exam.
-- Dave Sullivan
 January 30, 2006: The Treasure Hunt assignment has been
graded, and I sent out email messages about it. The median score was 22 out of
22 points; the average score was 19 out of 22 points.
January 25, 2006:
We finished grading the Prerequisite Exam, and I sent everyone an email message
with personalized information about the results. The overall graph showing how
people did is shown to the right.
January 23, 2006:
- I strongly recommend attending the Career
Symposium this Friday in Bexell Hall. It starts at 9:30 and goes
until 2:30 with a host of quality speakers and sessions. This is one
of the best ways to begin networking with recent graduates.
- I've booked the following two guest
lecture speakers to come and talk to us in Gilbert Hall 124 about using wikis at
OSU:
- Rich Holdren, OSU Vice Provost for Research, January
30th.
- Curt Pederson, Chief Information Officer, Oregon University System,
February 6th.
January 6, 2006:
I asked OSU's Central Web Services to create a wiki for the class. You can see
the result at the BA271
Wiki.
December 16, 2005:
I will use this web page to make announcements throughout the term.
Please check this page whenever you arrive at the BA271 website. You are
responsible for checking for new announcements at least once a week.
Opening activities:
Begin by reading the course
syllabus and the other top-level web pages for the BA271 website. These
pages explain the course structure and have many ideas to help you make the
class a success.
- Spend time examining this website. Become comfortable with its
organization, read the rules in the syllabus, look at prior exams and
assignments, and think about my suggestions for "How to Succeed". Read the
rest of this page carefully.
- Learn about the College of Business computer systems by reading these
Computer Support pages
-
Accounts Overview -- How to use the college's user accounts,
email boxes, and file storage locations, and understanding business versus
ONID accounts.
-
Email -- How to use the college's Exchange email system or
the university's ONID email system, and how to forward email from one system
to another.
-
File Storage --How to store files or create web pages.
-
Remote File Access -- How to reach the college's file server
from off campus.
Using Email:
Oregon State University
gives every student in my BA271 class at least two email accounts on two
completely different email systems.
-
The College of
Business creates an email box for every student, faculty, and staff
member associated with the college.
-
The university
provides everyone with an ONID (Oregon State Network ID) account that
includes an email box.
-
You may have other
email boxes if you take forestry or science classes.
-
Finally, you can
sign up to use a third-party email system, such as
Yahoo Mail.
Since I do not know
which system you prefer to use, I must make a choice about where to send
email. Until last term, I sent all email to my students via their College of
Business email boxes. This made sense to me because I am a business
professor. Starting with last term, I decided to send some messages to
College of Business email boxes and other messages to ONID email boxes. This
made sense because I wanted to encourage you to forward mail so that you do
not have "dead letter" email boxes.
I do not care in the
least which email system you choose to use. Here is what I care about:
-
You should
understand the differences among email systems.
-
You should make an
intelligent choice about which email system will be your primary system;
that is, which email system will you actually open and use to check
messages.
-
You should have
messages forwarded automatically to your primary system so email from me
is not being delivered to a “dead letter” mailbox.
If you did not already
know about your various email boxes on campus, or if you want help learning
how to forward messages from one system to another — then you should read
the
Using Email help page in the College of Business website.
For whatever it is
worth, I use my Business email box (known as
sullivan@bus.oregonstate.edu) as my primary mailbox, and I have my ONID
and my personal mailbox (also known as
dave@sullishak.com) set to forward messages automatically to my Business
mailbox.
I sent everyone registered for BA271 a "Welcome to BA271" message on
Friday, December 16th. Verify that you
received this message. If you have difficulty finding and reading the
"Welcome to BA271" message, make sure you attend a help session, drop by
my
office, or send me an email message. Taking this class without being
connected to email properly would be like wearing sunglasses while driving
at night.
Buying and Selling a Textbook Online
I strongly recommend that you read and act on the ideas in the
Buying and Selling Textbooks Online page within
this website.
December 1: (This note was addressed to Fall 2005 students)
How to sell your textbook Microsoft Access textbook!
I decided to continue using the same Microsoft
Access textbook next term. Normally this would mean that you could go the
OSU Bookstore, and they would buy your used textbook. That won’t happen this
term for several reasons:
- I told the OSU Bookstore that I am unlikely to use
this textbook for Spring term 2006.
- I told the OSU Bookstore that I will
encourage next term’s students to buy their textbooks on-line.
- The
publisher, Course Technology, has come out with a new version of this
textbook, so there is little demand nationwide for used copies of this book.
Thus, the OSU Bookstore doesn’t want to buy a bunch
of used textbooks that are likely to sit on the shelf until they need to be
recycled.
Perhaps these issues are not important to you
because you have grown to love the book and want to keep it in your personal
library for handy late-night reading. Or perhaps you are independently
wealthy and do not concern yourself with the cost of mundane items like
textbooks. But for the rest of us, it would be nice to find a way to sell
this book for a healthy fee.
Here is a strategy that makes sense to me. The OSU
Bookstore has a new free service: they will let students place classified
ads to sell their textbook. You can go to
http://www.osubookstore.com/Textbooks_Used_Classifieds.asp and sign up to
sell your textbook. You simply fill in your email address, the ISBN numbers
for the books you want to sell, and your asking prices. If another OSU
student looks at the classified ads and decides to buy your books, he or she
will send you an email message. Then you can agree on a place and time to
meet to complete the sales transaction. This nifty system cuts out the
middle-man entirely: no broker’s fee, no shipping cost, and no
administrative hassles.
Why would other OSU students bother with this
system when they can simply go to the OSU Bookstore to purchase their
textbooks? I can help with this part of the process. Just like this term, I
will offer points to students who complete an on-line sales
transaction. To make sure next term’s BA271 students know about this
process, I will post clear descriptions of the process on the BA271 Home
Page. I also will send each student who is signed up
to take BA271 next term an email message describing all these ideas.
I hope by taking these actions I can help students
exchange textbooks in an efficient manner. I also hope you will use this
experience to help you identify similar ways to conduct business efficiently
as you move through your life and career.
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