NEW TECHNOLOGIES OF INFORMATION APPLIED TO TEACHING
Information Technologies – computers, networks, communications devices, and the software that runs on them – have become fundamental business tools. For better and for worse, the rate at which new information technologies are being created and adopted by businesses is not only rapid but also accelerating. As a result, one of the fundamental challenges that many managers and executives face today is deciding which emerging information technologies to invest in and at what point to make that investment. Some of the forms that this investment might take are purchasing and deploying the technology for a company’s internal use, partnering with another company to produce complementary products or services, and/or deciding whether to invest in companies that are developing promising new information technologies.
In this course we introduce a structured qualitative framework for evaluating emerging information technologies and apply that framework to a variety of up-and-coming technologies.
When you have successfully completed this course you will have:
Mastered a general methodology and framework for evaluating emerging information technologies, with an emphasis on evaluating their applicability to solving problems in your business or industry as well as new challenges and problems that they introduce.
Applied this methodology to evaluate and better understand a variety of current emerging information technologies – what they do, the problems they solve, and their costs (both direct and indirect).
Acquired the ability to apply this methodology to future information technologies that are relevant to your specific career and industry.
We will cover the following technologies in the course. Depending on student interest and background, we may add additional technologies to this list. Let me know if you would like to cover a topic that is not listed here and we can try to work something out.
Collaboration, communications, communities, and publishing on the web
Wikis
Blogs, podcasts, etc.
Social networking systems
Web 2.0 (consumer space)
Enterprise 2.0 (intra- and inter-enterprise)
Utility computing
System virtualization and grid computing
Software as a Service (SaaS)
Web Services
Web Services Standards
Service Oriented Architectures
Mash-ups
Search
Searching web pages
Search-based advertising
Search within the enterprise
Searching beyond web pages
Digital Media and Digital Assets
Core concepts, technologies, and formats
Digital Rights Management (DRM)
Tracking and locating people and things
GPS
RFID
Geographic Information Systems
Information Security
A managerial perspective on information security
Emerging information security technologies
Authentication
Encryption
Disaster recovery
Emerging Networking Technologies
WiMax
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)
In addition to the primary objectives listed previously, the coursework, research, and exercises should help you develop the following skills and capabilities:
Sifting through large quantities of (possibly conflicting) information to determine the critical and salient aspects and issues of a new information technology.
Evaluating the validity and sources of information that your research uncovers on emerging technologies and interpreting what you read and discover accordingly.
Separating hype from realistic projections of a new technology’s promise.
Improving your ability to succinctly and effectively demonstrate a new information technology, its benefits, costs, and key attributes.
This is not a technology strategy course. The bulk of the course is a hands-on, tactical look at a variety of emerging information technologies. That said, students are encouraged to think creatively about how these emerging information technologies might be applied to create value and solve difficult business problems. Likewise, it is not a quantitative investment analysis courses. Rather, it introduces a structured qualitative approach to evaluating emerging information technologies that complements quantitative investment analysis.
PART II
NEW TECHNOLOGIES OF INFORMATION APPLIED TO TEACHING
Conference delegates are introduced to the issues of what an electronic documents are and how they should be managed in the age of the Internet. Results of several federal government committees on electronic document management are discussed. It is argued that daily exposure to the Internet is profoundly altering fundamental ideas of what a document is. The speakers and issues for the conference session are then introduced, using the results of an on-line, open source search.
Mr Worthington is Special Adviser for Internet/Intranet Policy, with the Australian Department of Defence and Immediate Past President of the Australian Computer Society. Tom wrote the ACS Communique on IT higher education in 1998, launched the ACS/PAGE on-line postgraduate program in December 1997 and was a steering committee member of the Discipline Research Strategy for Information Technology.
Tom is a member of the Australian Computer Society, voting member of the Association for Computing Machinery, member of the Internet Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers Computer Society. He is a member of the Council of Standards Australia.
Information Age magazine lists Mr. Worthington as one of the 10 most influential IT&T people in Australia in 1998. His work since 1994 has been on the policy and practice of implementation of the Internet, including appearances before three Senate hearings. He established the first web home pages for the ACT Government, the Special Broadcasting Service, Australian Information Industry Association and the National Press Club.
What is an Electronic Document? - Who Cares?
In 1995, I spent several months chairing a federal government interdepartmental committee (1) of library, records management, IT and archivists experts on the issue of electronic document management.
· Documents are recorded communication with recognisable structure, on any medium, intelligible without further processing except for presentation on screen or on the printed page. Not all documents, however, are records in the archival or legal sense.
· Records are recorded evidence of agency or individual functions, activities and transactions. To be evidence a record must have content, context and structure, and be a part of a record-keeping system.
In the end I was less than clear as to what was an electronic record versus an electronic document. Since 1995 I have stopped worrying about what the difference between a document and record is or what an electronic document is. I just use them.
My operational definition for a document would be "a collection of information assembled for viewing by a person". These documents, in electronic format, need not have a long life-span. They can be assembled for one viewing and then destroyed. The components of the document can be from widely dispersed and diverse sources. The authors of the components of a document are not necessarily involved in the creation of the document. This may sound strange and exotic, but it is the every day reality of on-line electronic document management.
Almost all my correspondence these days is electronic mail (e-mail). Each day I receive about 100 messages and send about 20. To handle this volume, I use a very disciplined approach (11) to e-mail. More sophisticated e-mail management tools would help with this, but I make do with what standard e-mail and file managers provide.
Now I only get about two or three pieces of paper mail a day. This is after three years of asking people to e-mail me (and threatening not to do business with them if they didn't). I only need to send a piece of paper mail about once a week.
In place of written papers and slide presentations, I use the web. This includes defence and interdepartmental policy work. For security reasons some material is not on the Internet, but is in the same format on intranets.
Every day I do web searches for policy material, send out requests for comment on drafts and download material from other from review. Occasionally I even do travel web pages in a high technology tourist series (12).
This daily exposure to the Internet has profoundly altered my idea of what a document is. The documents I create are composites of links to other documents from diverse sources. They incorporate graphics from servers around the world and contain links to, and are linked from, documents in other places. These documents evolve during the life of a project. There are multiple expressions of the same document (such as the web page, for-print and slide-show versions of this document). Paper documents seem ephemeral and insubstantial in comparison. The concept of a piece of paper with marks on it being a real document now seems a bizarre idea.
Hopefully by the end of the day we might have some more answers, or at least some more questions about what electronic documents are.
But first to see how electronic today's speakers really are; my first step was to do a web search and weave some information about them into this document. Here are some of the items I found on-line with a few minutes searching.
