Grandon Gill

ISM4300 AND THE CASE METHOD

Grandon Gill, Professor in the Information Systems and Decision Sciences (IS&DS) department at the University of South Florida’s College of Business, looked over his course syllabus for Ism4300 and sighed. The structure of the course was going to be radically different from anything his students had experienced before. Before the course got too far along, he needed to be sure that students understood the requirements and felt personally invested in the class. But was having them discuss a case about the class itself a reasonable way to accomplish this? He sure hoped so...

CLASSROOM RESPONSE UNITS IN HUMAN SEXUAL BEHAVIOR

Dr. Marilyn Myerson, Associate Professor, Department of Womens Studies at the University of South Florida (USF), was facing a difficult decision. Over the past semester, she had been pilot testing a classroom performance system (CPS; a.k.a audience response systems) in her WST2600 (Human Sexual Behavior) undergraduate class. Initially, she had been very excited about the technology. The way it was supposed to work, every student would bring his or her personal infrared remote control (pad) to class. The instructor could then use the installed CPS system to perform a variety of tasks, such as:

CHEATER, CHEATER, PUMPKIN EATER: DEALING WITH CHEATING IN A LARGE CLASS

Barb Warner, an Instructor in the Information Systems and Decision Sciences (IS & DS) department at the University of South Florida (USF), pondered the difficult situation. Warner’s academic dishonesty policy was very explicit. She had detected two projects submitted by students in her ISM-3011 course that were copies of each other. Her policy was that both parties were to receive disciplinary action. Kathy begged not to lose the points and insisted that she didn’t cheat. She claimed she had done all of her own work. Warner confronted Bobby Busted, owner of the other copy, and he made the same claim.

Case Study of a Complex Informing System: Joint Interagency Field Experimentation (JIFX)

The Joint Interagency Field Experimentation (JIFX) event, organized by the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), is conducted 3-4 times a year at various locations. The four day event can be characterized as an informing system specifically designed to facilitate structured and unstructured communications between a variety of parties—e.g., software developers, inventors, military and civilian users of various technologies, academics, and agencies responsible for identifying and procuring technology solutions—that frequently are constrained in their informing activities in more restrictive venues. Over the course of the event, participants may observe technology demonstrations, obtain feedback from potential users, acquire new ideas about their technologies might be employed and, perhaps most significantly, engage in ad hoc collaborations with other participants. The present paper describes an exploratory case research study that was conducted over a one year period and involved both direct observation of the event and follow-up interviews with 49 past participants in the event. The goal of the research was to assess the nature of participantimpact resulting from attending JIFX and to consider the consistency of the findings with the predictions of various theoretical frameworks used in informing science. The results suggest that participants perceived that the event provided significant value from three principal sources: discovery, interaction with potential clients (users) of the technologies involved, and networking with other participants. These findings were largely consistent with what could be expected from informing under conditions of high complexity; because value generally derives from combinations of attributes rather than from the sum of individual attributes, we would expect that overall value from informing activities will be perceived even though estimates of the incremental value of that informing cannot be made.

To Grow or Not to Grow, That is SloPro

Jon Lund, a mechanical engineer with a hobby building mobile applications for the mobile device community on the new Apple App Store, had just hung up the phone with his brother-in-law after discussing what to do next. His company, started in his spare time, was now two companies with several different partnering relationships all bootstrapped from the early successes his apps had had in the marketplace.

Plagiarism and the Class Project

Just nine weeks before, in late August 2013, Gill had challenged his students with a new class activity. The purpose of the activity was to take a debate research assignment that he had been using for nearly a decade to the next level. In addition to presenting the debate in class, the students would be taking the research that they conducted in preparing for the debate and transforming it into book chapters. The ultimate objective: to attain a level of quality that would justify publication of the book under the auspices of the Informing Science Press. To achieve this ambitious goal, Gill had instituted a systematic peer review process. In addition to presenting or writing part of a chapter, each group would be responsible for reviewing the work of other students and providing constructive feedback.

Mobile Application Development Strategy at Vology

John Dionne, Director of software development at Vology, one of the fastest-growing companies in the Tampa Bay area, had been thinking hard the last few days about different options for developing mobile applications. While he was proud of his existing application portfolio and the way his team supported the company’s business, it seemed that all everybody – customers, suppliers, even internal employees – wanted from him was mobile apps. And this had been driving most of his thinking and research the last few weeks.

IMAPBOOK: Engaging Young Readers with Games

Glenn Smith, Associate Professor in the College of Education at the University of South Florida (USF), pondered the challenge presented by the need to transform his research into a marketable product. For more than two years he had worked with doctoral students and his wife, Mieke Caris, to develop a platform for embedding games into online books. Classroom testing in the Netherlands and elsewhere had demonstrated the efficacy of the approach. The next step required was commercialization, without which the benefits of using the technology could not be realized on a broader scale.

LEE-EN CHUNG: SHOULD I HAVE A WEBSITE?

Lee-En Chung, the owner of Ivy Ventures, Inc., smiled mischievously as she made this comment. The conventional wisdom was that every business needed a website. Her business—a one person construction consulting firm—had done very well without the web. Instead, she had always focused on building relationships. By doing so she had managed to succeed in a heavily male-dominated profession, developing her own unique style in the process. She laughed as she told the story about the pink plastic skin that covered her laptop keyboard and coordinated with her cell phone. On the practical side, it kept out the dust of the construction sites that she visited nearly every day. But the color served an equally important role. None of the workers she dealt with would consider even touching—much less walking off with— anything that pink! In other words, form and function complemented each other perfectly.

SELLING EBOOKS TO THE HOME SCHOOL MARKET

John and Helen Farrell faced a major turning point in their business. For the previous 6 years, their consultancy had been developing content for the clients of a major broker, making them a business-tobusiness (B2B) supplier. Originally, that content had been dominated by traditional media types, such as DVDs, audio books, and printed materials. Subsequently, their focus had gradually changed to mobile devices. Recently, however, health issues, a weak economy, and competing educational commitments had forced them to terminate the relationship, at considerable personal expense. Without that captive marketing relationship, their business had become far more risky. On the other hand, if they were successful, the potential for profit was correspondingly greater.