New Bookmarks
Year 2001 Quarter 2:  April 1-June 30 Additions to Bob Jensen's Bookmarks
Bob Jensen at Trinity University

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For the full set of Bob Jensen's Bookmarks go to http://WWW.Trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob.htm
    (The full set is never up to date with the latest additions to my New Bookmarks.)
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Choose a Date for Additions to the Bookmarks File

June, and July editions will be infrequent since I will be in Europe.

June 4, 2001  

May 25, 2001     May 21, 2001      May 14 2001       May 4, 2001 

April 27, 2001     April 20, 2001     April 13, 2001      April 6, 2001 

 

Scroll down this page to view this week's new bookmarks. 

For earlier editions of New Bookmarks, go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm 

I maintain threads on various topics at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm 

Click here to search Bob Jensen's web site if you have key words to enter --- Search Site.
 This search engine may get you some hits from other professors at Trinity University included with Bob Jensen's documents, but this may be to your benefit.

Whenever a commercial product or service is mentioned anywhere in Bob Jensen's website, there is no advertising fee or other remuneration to Bob Jensen.  This website is intended to be a public service.  I am grateful to Trinity University for serving up my ramblings.

 

June 4, 2001

Bob Jensen's New Bookmarks on June 4, 2001
Bob Jensen at Trinity University 

You can change the viewing size of fonts by clicking on the View menu item in your browser. 

Scroll down this page to view this week's new bookmarks. 

For earlier editions of New Bookmarks, go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookurl.htm 

I maintain threads on various topics at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm 

Click here to search Bob Jensen's web site if you have key words to enter --- Search Site.
This search engine may get you some hits from other professors at Trinity University included with Bob Jensen's documents, but this may be to your benefit.

Whenever a commercial product or service is mentioned anywhere in Bob Jensen's website, there is no advertising fee or other remuneration to Bob Jensen.  This website is intended to be a public service.  I am grateful to Trinity University for serving up my ramblings.

On the Road Again!

There will be no weekly editions of New Bookmarks for the remainder of the summer.  I will be out of town most of the summer.  on extended (one is for six weeks solid) trips to Germany, Iowa, Maine, and Georgia.  Now and then Erika and I will be back home, but there will be mountains of things to do whenever I get back into my office.  (To be honest with you, I'd rather be locked in my office all summer.)  Occasional July and August 2001 editions can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book01q3.htm .

It is possible that I will not be able to process the thousands of email messages that will arrive while I am gone this summer.   Please don't think of me as rude.  Think of me more as an unhappy camper in crowded airports.

Since I am generally so busy during my out-of-town trips, I do not attempt to answer email messages while I am on the road.

Happy birthday to Erika (Her 39th +++???) on June 4, 2001.

Quotes of the Week

The next big killer application for the Internet is going to be education. Education over the Internet is going to be so big it is going to make e-mail usage look like a rounding error.
Chis Werry notes that this quote is cited by Thomas Friedman in "Next, It's E-ducation," The New York Times, November 17, 1999, p. A29.  (See the Werry citation below)

The number of online classes offered by universities and colleges has grown rapidly. In 1999 one in three U.S. colleges offered some sort of accredited degree online, and approximately one million students took online classes (13 million take traditional classes only)
Chis Werry notes that this quote is cited by P.J. Huffstutter and Robin Fields in "A Virtual Revolution in Teaching," The Lost Angeles Times, March 3, 2000 and Alessandra Bianchi, "E is for E-school:  Dot-com start-ups go to the head of the class," INC., Juley1, 2000.   (See the Werry citation below)

You guys are in trouble and we are going to eat your lunch.
Michael Milken, on the future of higher education

Dream as if you'll live forever, Live as if you'll die today. 
Author unknown

Forwarded by Dr. Digiovanni

Things to ponder this upcoming Memorial Day, May 28th from one Veteran to all others.

THE THINGS THEY CARRIED:

They carried P-38 can openers and heat tabs, watches and dog tags, insect repellent, gum, cigarettes, Zippo lighters, salt tablets, compress bandages, ponchos, Kool-Aid, two or three canteens of water, iodine tablets, sterno, LRRP- rations, and C-rations stuffed in socks. The carried standard fatigues, jungle boots, bush hats, flak jackets, and steel pots. They carried the M-16 assault rifle. They carried trip flares and Claymore mines, M-60 machine guns, the M-70 grenade launcher, M-14's, CAR-15's, Stoners, Swedish K's, 66mm Laws, shotguns, .45 caliber pistols, silencers, the sound of bullets, rockets, and choppers, and sometimes the sound of silence. They carried C-4 plastic explosives, an assortment of hand grenades, PRC-25 radios, knives and machetes.

Some carried napalm, CBU's, and large bombs; some risked their lives to rescue others. Some escaped the fear, but dealt with the death and damage. Some made very hard decisions, and some just tried to survive.

They carried malaria, dysentery, ringworms, and leaches. They carried the land itself as it hardened on their boots. They carried stationery, pencils, and pictures of their loved ones - real and imagined. They carried love for people in the real world, and love for one another. And sometimes they disguised that love: "Don't mean nothin'!"

They carried memories!

For the most part, they carried themselves with poise and a kind of dignity. Now and then, there were times when panic set in, and people squealed, or wanted to, but couldn't; when they twitched and made moaning sounds and covered their heads and said "Dear God", and hugged the earth and fired their weapons blindly, and cringed and begged for the noise to stop, and went wild and made stupid promises to themselves and God and their parents, hoping not to die. They carried the traditions of the United States military, and memories and images of those who served before them. They carried grief, terror, longing, and their reputations.

They carried the soldier's greatest fear: the embarrassment of dishonor. They crawled into tunnels, walked point, and advanced under fire, so as not to die of embarrassment. They were afraid of dying, but too afraid to show it. They carried the emotional baggage of men and women who might die at any moment. They carried the weight of the world, and the weight of every free citizen of America.

THEY CARRIED EACH OTHER

Memorial sites of interest on Pearl Harbor
     Remembering Pearl Harbor - National Geographic --- http://www.nationalgeographic.com/pearlharbor/ 
     America's Darkest Day --- http://www.coffeetablebooks.com/PearlHarbor/ 

Assignment Berlin --- Special Event 2 (Jensen), Saturday, June 23,  2:00 p.m., Humboldt-Universitat
Conference on Cross-Border Business Combinations and Alliances
https://rarc.rutgers.edu/aaa/berlinregform.htm 

 

Assignment as of May 27, 2001
For those of you planning to attend my session, please download the very rough draft of a working document called "Bob Jensen's Threads on Cross-Border (Transnational) Training and Education," --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm 

 

The Business of Borderless Education, by S.C. Cunningham, et al., (Australian Department of Education, Evaluations and Investigations Programme of the Higher Education Division, 2000).  Hard Copy ISBN 0 642 44446 3 and Online Copy ISBN 0 642 44447 1 --- http://www.detya.gov.au/archive/highered/eippubs/eip00_3/bbe.pdf 

 

Distance Education, by Marina Stock McIsaac and Charlotte Nirmalani Gunawardena --- http://earthvision.asu.edu/~laurie/mcisaac/distance.htm 

 

Added Assignment --- June 2, 2001
"The Work of Education in the Age of e-College," by Chris Werry, First Monday, May 2001 --- http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_5/werry/ 

There has recently been a mad rush by universities, venture capitalists and corporations to develop online courses, virtual universities, education portals, and courseware. The drive to develop a winning formula for commercial online education has fostered some unusual partnerships. This paper provides a broad overview of some models of online education that have been developed by commercial and academic institutions. It examines some of the rhetorical strategies that have been used to talk about online education by commercial groups, and discusses some of the hopes and fears that have been associated with online instruction by academics, administrators, and businesspeople. The paper outlines some of the main players and positions involved in debates about online education, and suggests some strategies that academic groups ought to explore. In particular, the author argues that academics need something an open source movement for academic resources, akin to the Free Software Foundation. This 'Free Courseware Foundation' would give teachers greater control of their resources, and better enable them to share materials with other teachers and with the public.

There has recently been a mad rush by universities, venture capitalists and corporations to develop online courses, virtual universities, education portals, and courseware. The drive to develop a winning formula for commercial online education has fostered some unusual partnerships. This paper provides a broad overview of some models of online education that have been developed by commercial and academic institutions. It examines some of the rhetorical strategies that have been used to talk about online education by commercial groups, and discusses some of the hopes and fears that have been associated with online instruction by academics, administrators, and businesspeople. The paper outlines some of the main players and positions involved in debates about online education, and suggests some strategies that academic groups ought to explore. In particular, the author argues that academics need something an open source movement for academic resources, akin to the Free Software Foundation. This 'Free Courseware Foundation' would give teachers greater control of their resources, and better enable them to share materials with other teachers and with the public.

Contents 

Here are some tidbits that I jotted down while reading Werry's paper:

 

www.instantknowledge.com  - a place to connect, build community, exchange ideas, and earn a professional wage.

IK knowledge producers from around the world earn money - quickly - write about the books they love, edit the best knowledge on the Web, and deliver the news.

Join a growing movement of scholars benefiting from the power of the Internet to break down walls that have separated the sources of knowledge - scholars - from those who need it most - students.

And in July 2000 their Web site invited graduate students to "earn money doing what you love - creating knowledge, building community, establishing career credentials. Take control of your academic career - offer your knowledge beyond the scope of the university, to the world, through the Internet". The site organizes and hosts the materials produced by graduate students and TAs, and makes money from sponsorships, advertising and co-branding. InstantKnowledge is one of many commercial online education companies that do not offer courses per se, but do provide a range of services and resources to university students. Other companies provide online tutoring services, test advice, and collect databases of course evaluations (needless to say the criteria constructed are typically quite different from the ones teachers use to evaluate classes). These services function as an informal, largely invisible (to most academics, at least) network of educational materials, advice, and knowledges that may, over time, subtly recontextualize aspects of the educational work we carry out.

Page 8
With the arrival of Jones International University, higher education found its "first fully accredited online university" [17]. Jones International University was granted accreditation by the U.S. regional accreditation agency in March 1999, and is the first online university to become fully certified by the Global Alliance for Transnational Education. Courses at Jones International are taught over the Internet by part-time, free-lance teachers located in universities all over the U.S. The courses are highly modular and all involve business subjects. There is no regular faculty or participatory governance system, and no research is carried out. Critics of Jones International argue that although it has the term "university" in its title, it ought not be considered one. Altbach argues that Jones International is merely a credentialing service, "a degree delivery machine, providing tailored programs that appeal to specific markets" [18]. The American Association of University Professors has fought to prevent accreditation of Jones University, along with similar online programs.

Quotation from Page 51 of The Business of Borderless Education, by S.C. Cunningham, et al., (Australian Department of Education, Evaluations and Investigations Programme of the Higher Education Division, 2000). Hard Copy ISBN 0 642 44446 3 and Online Copy ISBN 0 642 44447 1 --- http://www.detya.gov.au/archive/highered/eippubs/eip00_3/bbe.pdf 

It (JIU) currently offers two degrees, Bachelors and Masters degrees in Business Communications, and certificate programs, with each subject costed at about $600 at Bachelor level, making a degree about $11 000, and $700 at Masters level ($19 000 total). Student numbers have been low to date, with only 1 0 students enrolled in the Bachelors program at March 1999, and 64 in the Masters. Officials do not anticipate making a profit until 2001, and expect to spend ‘millions’ in advertising (Pam Pease, The Denver Business Journ a l, Marc h 12-18 1999, p. 29A). Curriculum development costs have been $US2.5 million to date (C H E, March 19, 1999, p. A27).

One such members of the UNext Advisory Faculty (Steve Orpurt who is now completing his accounting Ph.D. at the University of Chicago) and Don Wortham (Executive Director, For-Credit Programs at UNext.com) will be making presentations on authoring and delivery systems at the August 11 CPE No. 1 session at the American Accounting Association annual meetings in Atlanta --- http://accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aaa/2001annual/cpe/cpe1.htm 

A unique institution that offers degrees and certificates based completely on competencies -- your ability to demonstrate your skills and knowledge on a series of assessments -- not on required courses. We make it possible for you to accelerate your "time to degree" by providing recognition for your expertise..

You can read more about WGU in my threads on assessment at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#WGU

 

 

The Werry article is too long and complex to do justice to in a brief quote.  Werry most certainly wants the power and the open source rights in the hands of faculty rather than college administrators and corporate executives. His concluding comments are as follows:

In the e-commerce text Net Gain: Expanding Markets Through Virtual Communities, Hagel and Armstrong describe how to organize and exploit the resources produced by online communities. They discuss how to train "community architects" whose job it is to "acquire members, stimulate usage, and extract value from the community" [38]. I would like to suggest that in our teaching practices we could attempt to produce oppositional "community architects". This would entail resituating courses that deal with online information as part of an expanded project of critical practice in which students are seen not just as technical problem solvers, but also as critics who actively intervene in situations in which issues of value, power, and social organization are negotiated. Such classes might promote the idea that it is important that those who are engaged in the design and publication of electronic texts, interfaces, databases, and tools for the formation of online resources think about the cultural, political, and social implications of their work. Training "community architects" could involve looking at how competing discourses and competing information architectures represent the possibilities for organizing online space, activity, access, assembly, public use, control and ownership.

 

One anecdotal indicator of how global the accounting world has become is the fact that the top two performers on the  November 2000 United States CPA examination are both from overseas (they were also educated and work overseas) --- http://www.aicpa.org/pubs/jofa/jun2001/inside.htm 

German, Austrians Get Top Exam Honors

Werner Ellmauer of Munich, Germany, won the Elijah Watt Sells gold medal by earning the highest overall score on the November 2000 Uniform CPA Examination, conducted by the AICPA. A total of 62,000 candidates took the exam.

Ellmauer, who graduated from Johannes Kepler University with a master’s degree in social and economic sciences, works in the audit practice division of PricewaterhouseCoopers in Munich.

Andreas Poelzelbauer and Erich Ploechl, both of Vienna, Austria, won the silver and bronze awards for taking second and third place, respectively.

Poelzelbauer, who has a master’s in business administration from the University of Economics and Business Administration in Vienna, works as a senior manager at Moore Stephens City Treuhand GMBH. Ploechl, who graduated with a master’s degree from the Vienna University of Economics, is an audit manager with Ernst & Young, Vienna.

The Sells award, created in 1923, recognizes the contributions to the accounting profession made by Elijah Watt Sells, a founding partner of Haskins & Sells (a predecessor to Deloitte & Touche). Sells, who was one of the first CPAs licensed under a New York state law enacted in 1896, was active in the establishment of the AICPA.

 

AccounitngEducation.com has database links category of international university directories --- http://accountingeducation.com/links/ 

 

At the start:

1st Page 2000 HTML Editor

2001 Colleges, College Scholarships, and Financial Aids Page

50states.com Guide to US Colleges and Universities

7Soft Guide to UK Taxation

AAA Accounting Course Page Exchange

This searchable database is designed to make it possible for accounting educators to both share educational materials and find useful ideas to support the development of their accounting courses.

AAA Minority Faculty Development Committee

The American Accounting Association's Minority Faculty Development Committee has established itself online. The Committee's objectives are broadly to develop minority's interests in both the profession and academica.

Abacus

Aberdeen Papers in Accountancy, Finance and Management

Academic Press/Harcourt

Academy of Accounting Historians

For the remainder, go to http://accountingeducation.com/links/ 

CPA firms are looking for ways to add value and survive in the exploding world of electronic commerce and networking.  The American Institute of CPAs (AICPA) and the state CPA societies in the U.S. have partnered with CPA2Biz to launch helper portal envisioned in the AICPA Vision Process.  The CPA2Biz portal will soon be operational at http://www.cpa2biz.com/ 

 

CPA2Biz represents a massive effort to brand the CPA profession as the premier e-enablement professional. As a CPA, you'll be able to give your clients the e-business capability they need and desire.  CPA2Biz means

FAQs

1) What is CPA2Biz?
CPA2Biz, is a unique portal by CPAs for CPAs which offers a single point of access to the following:

2) Whom does CPA2Biz serve?
CPA2Biz serves you, the CPA, and your small business clients.

3) As a CPA, how will I benefit from your resources?
CPA2Biz is designed to move you up the value chain, which means that you will experience increased income, higher valued services, greater opportunities, and a stronger and more valuable relationship between you and your clients or employers.

There are lots of business portals out there. There are also lots of low-end software solutions. They promise many different things to many different people.

See also 

E-BUSINESS SITES

IT News From the Net --- http://news.dci.com
This Web site offers advice and news for corporate information technology officers. A recent article in the eBusiness News section was titled “Getting Venture Capital for Your Internet Start-Up.” The site provides links to other e-business sites (see the five listed below).

Consult the Consultants --- www.bcg.com
The Boston Consulting Group offers articles written by IT professionals on its staff. Users can search archived titles in the BCG Publications section by choosing “e-commerce” from the “browse by” pull-down menu. Titles include “How the Internet Can Boost Your Brand,” “Arming for E-Combat in Asia Pacific: The New Rules of Engagement,” and “Organizing for E-Commerce.”

A Virtual Tutor --- www.website101.com
This site calls itself the “small business Internet tutorial for e-commerce entrepreneurs” and features virtual courses delivered to your e-mail. Course material includes advice and tips for getting a small business online. Also, Dr. Ebiz, an e-zine linked to this site, offers its own advice. A current issue states “paying for directory and search engine listings makes good sense.” Free e-mail subscriptions for Dr. Ebiz are available.

E-Commerce Law --- www.lexmercatoria.org
Since the Internet emerged as one of the major players in the information game, the legal profession has been formulating and revising rules and regulations on online information. Lex Mercatoria, the “international trade and commercial law monitor,” includes documents on Web regulation in a section of the company’s site called Electronic Commerce. Among the topics found here are digital signatures and privacy.

Let’s Talk E-Commerce --- www.gbd.org
This site is a “worldwide, CEO-driven effort to develop policies that promote global electronic commerce.” Progress reports from working groups of the Global Business Dialogue on Electronic Commerce appear here as well as related archived news articles on consumer confidence, cyber security, digital bridges, e-government, Internet payments and taxation.

E-Business Resources --- www.zdnet.com/enterprise/e-business
Technical publisher Ziff Davis’ site boasts enough information and resources to make it a good first stop for any e-business research. It provides sections on best practices, news, opinions and reviews and links to e-commerce case studies and white papers. An e-commerce newsletter also is offered free to users via e-mail.

 

Bob Jensen is starting some new threads on e-Commerce.  Please send him ( rjensen@trinity.edu ) news about great e-Commerce sites on the Web, including e-Commerce and e-Business courses.  The draft to date is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce.htm 

 

Wow Innovation of the Week

Think of how this idea from Digital Convergence can be extended to electronic books and online course materials!  I mean it!  This may become the Wow innovation of distance education in the 21st Century.  It is especially important since video technology seems to becoming the technology of choice in leading distance education systems such as the ADEPT program at Stanford University and various degree programs at NYU.

 

The Digital Convergence homepage is at http://www.crq.com/master_templ.cfm?view=Home&CFID=359975&CFTOKEN=91893694 

 

We envisioned an Internet where users could pinpoint Web pages without typing in lengthy addresses. We imagined computer software that gathers and remembers Web sites that flash across a TV screen. We wanted to simplify the Internet.

Digital:Convergence Corporation is the leader in precision Internet navigation services. We offer the only Web navigation system that can link virtually any media or product instantly and easily with the Internet.

We developed the idea of guiding an Internet user directly to a specific site and a specific page deep within that site with what we call a "cue." Print cues are our own proprietary slant codes, which look like product codes. Audio cues take the form of specific audio tones. Our technology also reads product codes like UPC, ISBN or EAN symbols.

 

From Goggle Box to Chatterbox, BBC News, May 29, 2001 --- http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1357000/1357736.stm 

Soon your TV could be talking to your PC and telling it which webpages to load.

A US company has produced a gadget that reacts to audio signals embedded in TV programmes and tells your PC to surf over to webpages related to that show.

TV shows holding the audio signals are starting to be aired in the US this week.

It is likely to prove popular with media junkies who surf the web as they are watching TV.

Hidden signals

In late May US television giant NBC announced it was working with technology firm Digital Convergence on a system called CueTV that gets a television set and a PC talking to each other.

When fitted with the CueTV gadget a PC will react to audio signals buried in a television programme and load webpages relevant to the show or advert being broadcast.

The first TV programme designed to work with Cue TV is an NBC game show that will give away $400,000 (£284,000) in prizes when it is shown in June and July.

The technology is intended to prove a boost to interactive TV which many experts claim is not taking off. Some have said that the reason for this is the very different ways that people use TVs and PCs. Using a computer is usually a solitary experience and requires close attention to the screen, also the text sizes and images used on webpages reproduce badly on TV.

In contrast people relax, or lean back, when watching TV and tend to let the images wash over them.

For the rest of the article, go to http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1357000/1357736.stm 

 

Thank you for sharing.

INSEAD Knowledge http://knowledge.insead.edu/index.cfm 

 

Welcome to INSEAD Knowledge, your portal to today’s most prominent business research.

Knowledge presents:

  • Easy-to-read abstracts of working papers and cases
  • Longer, in-depth explanations of research
  • Professors’ personal insights
  • Features (click the “New” link on the home page) with Professor interviews, news-related items, INSEAD conferences and more
  • INSEAD's recently published books (click the “Books” link on the home page)

Navigating Knowledge is simple.

  • Click on the headline of any abstract to read more
  • Click on a primary theme of research (in the green menu on left-hand side). You will arrive on a theme page with several topical abstracts. Then, click on a headline to read more and download the full text of the case or working paper.
  • Find links to INSEAD’s research centres under “Related Research” on relevant theme pages (right-hand side).

You may customise Knowledge by setting your preferences on My Knowledge. The site will automatically provide you with abstracts on the topics that interest you the most.

  • Click on My Knowledge (always in the top menu) to set it up
  • Each time you log on to your personal page thereafter, the new abstracts relevant to your favourite themes appear automatically.
  • My Knowledge library allows you to store abstracts for as long as you wish
    (for more information, see FAQs).

Subscribe to our email newsletter
Knowledge will directly send you new abstracts each month.

Please send feedback to the Knowledge team if you have any difficulties or problems. Enjoy the Knowledge!

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Other international resources for educators and students can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm 


Fraud and Online Business Reporting
As financial reporting migrates toward online reporting in real time, it is extremely important for both accountants and the world at large to be aware of the increased fraud potential and other externalities that accompany such reporting.  One article worth taking a look at is "Beware on Game Playing in Online Markets" by John McCright, News&Views (An eNewsletter from Ziff Davis), May 30, 2001. 

We shouldn't be surprised if, over the next few years as higher volumes of trading move online, some industries are beset by trading scams that result in the downfall of major names and the disruption, albeit temporary, of at least one major industry. Such calamities will be directly attributable to online gaming.

As just-in-time production filters through to every components manufacturer in a supply chain, inventories will fall, and the opportunities for gaming will rise. I'm not talking about people playing Dungeons and Dragons online. The games I'm referring to are the kind of high-stakes gambles that have been the domain of Wall Street. What will move this gaming into the corporations themselves is the massive amount of real-time data being collected and made available in online marketplaces.

An example of gaming might be when a supplier sees an opportunity to sell goods at a high price and so offers for sale a higher quantity of that good than it has in stock. The assumption the supplier makes is that it can either buy the excess goods at a lower price later when it is time to ship them or can convince the buyer to take shipment later since it has already gone through the hassle of setting up the deal.

Some buyers, too, will play the market, perhaps by buying up the supply of a key component so that competitors will be stuck without the parts or be forced to come to them to buy the component.

It is basic economics: Fluctuations in supply and demand move prices and create opportunity for profit. Before much of a given industry's trading goes online, there is not as much opportunity for this kind of gaming. It takes a lot of time and money to gather the information to make the process worthwhile. Only a few commodities brokers can make a living at it.

But with the inevitable rise of online marketplaces, information on trading in a large segment of a given industry-maybe even most of an industry-will be just a few mouse clicks away.

It will be dangerous, just like risking this month's paycheck or the family house in a Las Vegas casino is dangerous. Usually, someone gets hurt-and it's not the casino.

Gaming is certainly not a new concept in business. I can't count the number of CEOs and chief financial officers who have taken a fall because they gambled by fudging their revenue recognition or outright fabricating their books in the hope of avoiding detection once the market for their product turned around and sales ballooned to match their bogus forecasts.

But the risk will become greater as electronic supply chains become ingrained in the way we do business. As just-in-time production filters through to every components manufacturer in a supply chain, inventories will fall, and the opportunities for gaming will rise. The risk, of course, is that as the buffer of available components falls, one spike in demand coupled with deceptive supply information created through a supplier's gambit could leave the production lines idle through much of a given industry.

Market gaming, although not necessarily restricted to online markets, can be seen in the California electric power industry. Aside from the claims that power supplies simply aren't there, several groups have reported that power suppliers have squeezed buyers by withholding electricity or committing to deliver more than they could actually produce or buy.

Surely no C-level executive would gamble away his or her entire company through marketplace gaming, you say. But it isn't always a top exec who ruins a company and shakes the confidence of an industry. Do you remember a company called the Bank of Credit and Commerce International? This 100-year-old British trading and finance company was bankrupted a few years back when a rogue trader made some bets on foreign currency trading that went disastrously wrong.

You may make the argument that the trader's bosses should have had better controls in place to make sure such trading didn't take place. But if a staid, old industry like banking doesn't have such controls in place, what are the chances that many companies involved in the get-rich-quick atmosphere of e-commerce will have the forethought to put such controls in place from the outset?

 

In the early 1990s, Bob Jensen overwhelmed his students with HyperGraphics, a DOS-based course management software system that did PowerPoint things and more (such as animation) long before Microsoft issued PowerPoint,  His students found it overwhelming, tiresome, and brain deadening).  Now in 2001, PowerPoint has its detractors.

"PowerPoint Invades the Classroom," by Lisa guernesey, The New York Times, May 31, 2001 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/31/technology/31POWE.html 

PowerPoint — the must-have presentation software of the corporate world — has infiltrated the schoolhouse. In the coming weeks, students from 12th grade to, yes, kindergarten will finish science projects and polish end-of-the-year presentations on computerized slide shows filled with colorful animation, bold topic headings and neat rows of points, each introduced with a bullet mark. Software designed for business people has found an audience among the spiral notebook set.

"When you get to high school, you will need a lot of PowerPoint," said Nestor Mendoza, another student in Mr. Bennetti's class, "and in the real world, too. This gives us time to practice."

But just as PowerPoint has its detractors in the corporate world, some educators are disturbed by the program's march into the classroom. They are concerned that too many students will become fixated on fonts and formats without actually thinking about what they are typing next to all those bullets.

Sandee Tessier, a kindergarten teacher at San Altos Elementary School in Lemon Grove, Calif., has been using PowerPoint with her 5- and 6-year-old students for nearly four years, integrating it into her regular reading and math lessons.

"People come in and they have tears in their eyes because they can't believe what these little kids are doing," Ms. Tessier said. "It's part of their day, like picking up a pencil."

Sometimes, she said, she will take digital photographs of her pupils acting out scenes from a book, put the photos on slides and ask the pupils to describe their actions in words. In the process, the children create their own books.

"I train them how to get into PowerPoint, how to get into their files, over many months," Ms. Tessier said. "And then they type captions under each slide. Their spelling isn't that great, but that's O.K."

Ms. Tessier also encourages her pupils to write accounts of their lives and present them in front of the class.

"It is sensational for oral language development," she said. "They'll say, `Hi, my name is Julie, and I like to eat pizza.' And there is their picture on the screen behind them, like on a TV monitor. They are the stars of PowerPoint."

According to figures from Microsoft, the real star of the classroom may be PowerPoint itself: 69 percent of teachers who use Microsoft software use PowerPoint in their classrooms, an application second in popularity only to the workhorse of word processing, Microsoft Word.

The software is not only a teaching aid, used by instructors as a substitute for a chalkboard. It has become a tool for students to use as well. Suddenly magic markers and construction paper seem so Old Economy.

Some critics contend that PowerPoint's emphasis on bullets and animated graphics is anathema to the kind of critical thinking students should be learning in class.

"Beware of PowerPointlessness," said Jamie McKenzie, the publisher of From Now On, an online journal about educational technology.

Joan Vandervelde, a director of online professional development at the University of Northern Iowa, said that she was offering courses this summer to help teachers combat PowerPoint abuse.

PowerPoint's most pernicious quality, critics say, is its potential for substituting presentation polish for thinking skills. The software is not merely a word processor with large fonts: it can also serve as a silent guide on the art of persuasion. Step-by-step instructions are offered by what Microsoft calls the Autocontent Wizard, a tool that provides a template for building an argument. The wizard never fails to offer instructions. Click to add Topic No. 1. Insert real-life examples here.

"It fosters a cookie-cutter mentality," said Jerry Crystal, the technology coordinator at Carmen Arace Middle School in Bloomfield, Conn.

"PowerPoint to me is more about standardizing, rather than allowing students to uniquely express what they got out of a lesson," said Colleen Cordes, a founder of the Alliance for Childhood, a nonprofit group that questions the use of computers among young schoolchildren. "It may have a narrowing effect on children's imagination."

According to Microsoft, PowerPoint's introduction into the classroom was not planned when the program was developed. But in the mid-1990's, as Windows 95 became the operating system of choice in homes and offices, Microsoft set its sights on an arena it had not yet dominated: the K- 12 school market.

Schools were already in the midst of a push to install more machines to take advantage of the Internet, an initiative generated largely by the federal government and technology companies. Microsoft rode the momentum to market Microsoft Office, a suite of business programs that includes PowerPoint, as an essential tool for education as well. The company offered software discounts, primarily to school districts, sponsored workshops for teachers, offered free online tutorials and handed out sample lesson plans.

The strategy worked. Among elementary and secondary schools, Microsoft Office is the most popular software package for word processing, spreadsheets and multimedia projects. More than 95 percent of public school districts in the United States are using or intend to purchase Microsoft Office this year, according to Quality Education Data, a market research company. Among individual schools, more than 75 percent are using the product.

"Some people ask, `Isn't Office too much?' " said Marcia Kuszmaul, industry relations manager in Microsoft's Education Solutions Group. "The answer is, Absolutely not. Students push Office. Bill Gates has said that students give the toughest workouts to our products."

Gina Herring, a science teacher in Glen Ridge, N.J., is an advocate of PowerPoint, as long, she says, as it is used as a supplement to reports and oral presentations, not as a replacement for them.

At the Ridgewood Avenue Upper Elementary School, where Ms. Herring teaches sixth graders, she said she had seen her students develop better organizational skills using PowerPoint.

"It allows me to check their comprehension," she said, "and allows them to show what they have learned in a creative way, in a sequenced way."

Ms. Herring is such a proponent of the product that she held a training session this month for fellow teachers in New Jersey. Her sixth-grade students led some of the workshops, walking over to teachers' desks when they raised their hands for help. Later, a student who said he did not like to talk in front of an audience demonstrated how he had added sound to a slide show about a book he had read. As each slide appeared, the student's voice came from the speakers, reading rows of sentences, each starting with a bullet point.

Gary Hank, a math teacher at Lopatcong Township Elementary School in Warren County, N.J., was one of more than two dozen teachers who crowded into the workshop. "The kids would go nuts over this stuff," he said.

But even students seem divided in their enthusiasm for PowerPoint. Back in Union City, some of Mr. Bennetti's students were so eager to use the program that they had it open and running before he told them to get started. Several of them waved their hands in the air, asking questions about "A Raisin in the Sun" that resulted in conversations that went far beyond the six- and seven- word phrases they typed next to the bullets.

But a few floors below, in a computer class of eighth graders who were presenting PowerPoint projects, the spirit was less willing.

The teacher, Anna Rubio, had asked the students to use PowerPoint to create an electronic portfolio, describing and linking to digital projects that they had done during the year.

One by one, students lumbered up to a computer at the front of the dimly lighted room and opened their slides, which appeared on a screen behind them. They did not say a word or even look at their audience, but simply clicked the mouse button, drilling through their presentations in silence. Wild graphics, garish colors and bold titles flashed by. Their classmates paid almost no attention and, like bored employees stuck in a late-day board meeting, looked at their own computer screens instead.

"I asked them if they wanted to read it or show it," Ms. Rubio said. "I guess no one wanted to read it."

You can read about the history of presentation systems in Chapter 3 of http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/245cont.htm 

 

You can read about the history of course authoring and management software at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/290wp/290wp.htm 

Oxford University to Open Internet Institute --- http://wired.com/news/school/0,1383,43616,00.html 

Oxford University will open the world's first "Internet Institute," a multidisciplinary department that will research the Net and its impact on policy and society.

The Oxford Internet Institute will be within the division of social sciences located at Oxford's Balliol College.

The institute has already received 10 million pounds (14.4 million dollars) from the Shirley Foundation, in addition to 5 million pounds (7.2 million dollars) from the Higher Education Funding Council for England to fund the initiative.

The school has not announced when the OII will open, but school officials plan to hire a director for the institute this summer.

"I congratulate Oxford University on establishing this innovative institute," said David Blunkett, the secretary of state for education, in a statement. "Britain needs a center for top-class research on the difficult issues the Internet poses in cryptography, intellectual property rights, security and so on."

"In bringing together research across the country, I hope the institute will become a world leader," he added.

Possible topics for investigation at the OII include global law enforcement, privacy and security, healthcare, defense, the digital divide, community and education.

Oxford will appoint permanent staff to the institute, as well as offer senior visiting appointments.

This is not the school's first foray into Internet initiatives.

The school already offers a number of research programs related to the Internet, including "Virtual Society," which explores the behavior patterns and interactivity between people as a result of new technologies; a program in Comparative Media Law and Policy; and work on Internet-enabled health care at the Institute of Health Sciences.

Oxford has also formed a distance-learning partnership with Stanford, Princeton and Yale, which will provide online courses to alumni, called the University Alliance for Lifelong Learning.

Bob Jensen's international (cross-border) education threads are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm 

 

Bob Jensen's education bookmarks --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob.htm 

 

See also:
Internet2 Crosses the Border
Should States Regulate Privacy?
The Army Is Watching Your Kid
Knowledge Knows No Boundaries
Get schooled in Making the Grade

They Price Laundered Money (Fraud and Crime)
Two Florida finance professors are developing an Internet service that will detect suspiciously priced goods, like $900 pillowcases, entering and leaving the United States --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/ebiz/0,1272,44188,00.html 

 

Ask John Zdanowicz for evidence of suspicious activity in cross-border trade, and he'll provide plenty of examples.

There are the cotton pillowcases worth more than $900 each that one importer brought in from France.

There are the disposable batteries sold for hundreds of dollars each.

There are the single-lens reflex cameras -- retailed for upwards of $200 -- which another exporter shipped to Japan for a bargain price of $3.50 each.

Those are just a few examples in a long list of oddly priced items that popped up in an analysis of U.S. import and export data performed by Zdanowicz and his partner Simon Pak, both finance professors at Florida International University.

This summer, they plan to launch a website that will search and compare prices for all products entering and leaving the United States. Users will simply type in a particular item and a country of origin or destination, to receive a list of prices for recent transactions.

The professors are quick to point out that not every fishy price their system serves up is evidence of criminal activity. It's quite possible, for example, that a shipment of $80,000 motorcycles might have been plated in gold, which would account for the hefty price. It's also not unheard of for people to make clerical errors when putting in pricing data.

For many transactions, however, there's little plausible explanation for weird pricing, other than fraud.

See also:
Secret Service Raids Gold-Age
Casino Investment Scam Craps Out

Knowledge Knows No Boundaries --- http://wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,42660,00.html 

Developing interesting math and science lessons for local school districts can be a daunting and time-consuming task, but what about a curriculum for three countries?

Brazil, Venezuela, and Colombia are attempting to do just that in a new transnational software program.

The International Virtual Education Network (IVEN) combines the brainpower of educators in South America in the development of math and science software over the Net.

"This is really a watershed," said Pedro Paulo Poppovic, the secretary of distance education for Brazil. "As far as I know this has never been done before."

Teams of educators will develop software that emphasizes learn-by-doing and simulation that covers the entire math and science curriculum at the secondary level, including math, biology, chemistry and physics.

Because costs for implementing technology into Third World classrooms can be prohibitively high, the partnership enables the three countries to reap greater benefits at a lower price.

Each country will have teams made up of a master teacher, a graphic artist, a content specialist, an instructional designer and a software developer. As a team works on a particular curricular unit, called a module, they post the design online for the other teams to comment on and critique.

The lessons will be distributed on a browser-based network but they will not be Internet-dependent. For those schools with no connection to the Net, a version of a browser will be copied onto a proxy server, and the lessons will be downloaded from CD-ROMs.

"Teachers in all three countries will be able to communicate and exchange ideas," said Wadi Haddad, the president of Knowledge Enterprise, who is chief coordinating advisor for IVEN in the United States. "These pilot schools will be well supported technically and educationally."

For the remainder of the article, go to http://wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,42660,00.html  

 

Bob Jensen would sure like to land a new MIS colleague at Trinity University.  Part of an internal memo from my Department Chair

Very soon, we will have two on-line ads for the MIS position.

Beginning today, we have a thirty day ad in the new AACSB Management Education Career Marketplace at http://www.aacsb.edu/mejobs/ .

Dan Walz and I will be going to the AMCIS convention in Boston the first weekend in August.

Dick

Richard M. Burr, Ph.D. Professor & Chair Business Administration 715 Stadium Drive San Antonio, Texas 78212-7200 210-999-7290 FAX 210-999-8134

This is important news for those of you into derivative financial instruments accounting and auditing.

Please pass this along. 

The site below referred to by Mr. Fanzini is at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/caseans/000index.htm 

However, the important update news is in his message below.

Bob Jensen

-----Original Message----- 
From: Fanzini, Louis [mailto:louis.fanzini@csfb.com]  
Sent: Thursday, May 31, 2001 3:01 PM 
To: 'rjensen@trinity.edu' Subject: Bob Jensen's FAS 133, 138, IAS 39 site

Bob,

Kudos on a great site that I have visited often!

One item re embedded derivatives that you may want to include when you next update the site; the SEC has come out and said a bifurcated derivative and its host can be shown on the balance sheet net. The theory being that bifurcation is an accounting concept and that, in reality, only one contract exists between the counterparties. So, there will no longer be a difference between 133 and IAS 39.

Best regards,

Lou

> Louis Fanzini > Accounting & Regulatory Policy & Research > CREDIT l FIRST > SUISSE l BOSTON > Tel: (212) 325-7365 > Fax: (212) 325-8539 > E-Mail: louis.fanzini@csfb.com  >

 

Assessment Takes Center Stage in Online Learning:  
The Saga of Western Governors University

Western Governors University was formed by the Governors of 11 Western states in the United States and was later joined by Indiana and Simon Fraser University in Canada.  WGU attempted several business models, including attempts to broker courses from leading state universities and community colleges as well as a partnership with the North American branch of U.K.'s Open University.  All business models to date have been disappointments and online enrollments are almost negligible to date.  WGU has nevertheless survived to date with tax-dollar funding from the founding states.  The WGU homepage is at http://www.wgu.edu/wgu/index.html 

One unique aspect of WGU is its dedication to competency-based assessment (administered to date by Slvan Systems).  An important article on this is entitled "Assessment Takes Center Stage in Online Learning:  Distance educators see the need to prove that they teach effectively," by Dan Carnevale, The Chronicle of Higher Education, April 13, 2001 --- http://www.chronicle.com/free/v47/i31/31a04301.htm 

Students at Western Governors University aren't required to take any courses. To earn a degree, they must pass a series of assessment exams. The faculty members don't teach anything, at least not in the traditional sense. Instead, they serve as mentors, figuring out what students already know and what courses they need to take to pass the exams.

Assessment also plays a big role at the University of Phoenix Online. In a system modeled after the university's highly successful classroom offerings, students are grouped together in courses throughout an entire degree program, and they are given batteries of exams both before and after the program. The tests enable the university to measure exactly how much the students have learned, and to evaluate the courses.

Indeed, assessment is taking center stage as online educators experiment with new ways of teaching and proving that they're teaching effectively.

And traditional institutions, some observers say, should start taking notes.

Education researchers caution that distance educators are still in the process of proving that they can accurately assess anything, and that comparatively few distance-education programs are actually participating in the development of new testing strategies.

One difference between assessment in classrooms and in distance education is that distance-education programs are largely geared toward students who are already in the workforce, which often involves learning by doing. In many of the programs, students complete projects to show they not only understand what they've learned but also can apply it -- a focus of many assessment policies.

In addition to such projects, standardized tests are a key part of assessments in distance education. These tests are usually administered online in proctored environments, such as in a student's hometown community college.

Western Governors and the University of Phoenix Online are among the most visible institutions creating assessment methods, but they are not alone. Many other distance-education programs use some form of outcomes-based assessment tests, including Excelsior College (formerly Regents College), in Albany, N.Y.; Pennsylvania State University's World Campus; Thomas Edison State College, in Trenton, N.J.; the State University of New York's Empire State College; and University of Maryland University College.

All of higher education is moving toward outcomes-based assessments, with online education leading the way, says Peter Ewell, senior associate at the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems. The push for new assessment models in online education comes largely from competition with its older brother, traditional education, says Mr. Ewell. Because distance education is comparatively new, he says, critics often hold it to a higher standard than traditional education when judging quality. It has more to prove, and is trying to use assessments that show its effectiveness as the proof.

Online education is only one of several influences putting pressure on traditional education to do more to assess the quality of courses. Accreditation agencies, state governments, and policy boards are all heading toward an inevitable question, Mr. Ewell says: How much bang for the buck is higher education putting out?

But Perry Robinson, deputy director of higher education at the American Federation of Teachers, says assessment exams shift the emphasis away from what he considers the most important element of learning: student interaction with professors in a classroom.

The federation has been critical of distance learning in the past, saying an undergraduate degree should always include a face-to-face component. Mr. Perry says having degrees that rely on students' passing tests reduces higher education to nothing more than job training.

Also, Mr. Perry doesn't want to see the role of the professor diminished, because that person knows the material the best and works with the students day after day. "Assessment is involved in the classroom when you engage the students and see the look of befuddlement on their faces," he says.

But Peggy L. Maki, director of assessment at the American Association for Higher Education believes that all of higher education will move toward a system of assessing outcomes for students. Although distance education is contributing to this movement, it isn't the biggest factor, she says. "We're talking about a cultural change."

Some of this change is prompted by the demands of legislators and other policy makers, Ms. Maki says. Also, institutions are feeling pressure from peers to create outcomes-assessment models. "I think there have been more challenges with people saying, 'Can you really do this?'" she says. "When they do, others say, 'Well, we better follow suit.'"

But traditional and distance-education institutions alike are struggling to figure out how to use the the results of assessment examinations to create programs and even budgets. "This is the hardest part of the assessment process -- how you use the results," Ms. Maki says.

Western Governors University's assessment system is intended to measure the students' competency in specific subjects. Because it doesn't matter to W.G.U. whether the students learned the material on their own or from courses they've taken through the university, the entire degree revolves around the assessment tests.

The university doesn't create its own courses. Instead, it forms partnerships with other universities around the country that have created online courses in various subjects. A student seeking a degree must show competency in a number of "domains." These include general education, such as writing and mathematics, and domains specific to the subject, such as business management.

Western Governors officials create some of their own assessment examinations and buy some from other organizations, such as the ACT and the Educational Testing Service.

For W.G.U.'s own exams, experts from the professional and academic arenas collaborate to determine what students need to demonstrate to prove they are competent in a field. Unlike traditional colleges, Western Governors separates assessment from learning. The professors who grade the assessment exams have not had any prior interaction with the student.

For the rest of the article, go to http://www.chronicle.com/free/v47/i31/31a04301.htm

ALSO SEE:

Three sample assessment questions from Western Governors University in the area of quantitative reasoning, and the answers.


Bob Jensen's threads on assessment are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm 

 

Students paying for college can get financial help from a new website, if they agree to pay investors a fixed percentage of their future income --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/school/0,1383,43977,00.html 

 

MyRichUncle claims to offer students an alternative method of paying for college. The site boasts a network of investors who will help finance a student's undergraduate or graduate education, and upon graduation, the student must pay the company a percentage of their income for up to 15 years.

 

The MRU Education Investment supplements other grants, scholarships or subsidized loans that students receive to pay for school.

Rate payments are determined by the type of program the student is in, the school they attend, the year of enrollment, work experience and other factors.

The company also plans to offer mentorship opportunities for students with MyRichUncle's network of investors.

 

The MyRichUncle site is at http://www.myrichuncle.com/ 

 

Related to this is "Dear Student:  We Pay If You Stay" at http://www.wirednews.com/news/culture/0,1284,38080,00.html 

 

Multinational companies with offices in Central Europe and Asia are quietly trying to plug the brain drain that's siphoning technical talent to the United States by offering to pay for the education of their best and brightest applicants

The catch: Students have to attend local schools and then work in their home countries for a specified period of time after graduation.

The United States is still the most popular destination for foreign students, drawing about 578,000 in the 1998-99 academic year, according to the Department of States International Information Programs.

But the number of foreign students attending college in the United States has been dwindling, according to SIIP. Five years ago, about 40 percent of all international students studied in the United States. Today, it's 32 percent.

The decline is attributed to aggressive recruiting problems in students' own countries and in others, especially in the computer science fields. The high cost of tuition at American colleges and universities is also to blame.

U.S. schools are battling back.

President Clinton recently suggested that "educational institutions, state and local governments, non-governmental organizations, and the business community" should "review the effect of U.S. government actions on the international flow of students and scholars as well as on citizen and professional exchanges, and take steps to address unnecessary obstacles, including those involving visa and tax regulations, procedures, and policies."

In response, the Immigration and Naturalization Service has eased work rules for foreign students. And some colleges are considering adjusting the amount of funds made available for grants to foreign students in order to fill in the gaps caused by weak exchange rates.

 

See also:
Internet2 Crosses the Border
S. Africa Broadband Plan on Hold
In Mexico, Net Not a Priority
Math and Science Seek Fed Funds
New Toys for Cheaters
MIT Cheered From a Distance

From MIT:  How Microsoft's Amazing ClearType really works.

 

"Pixel Perfect," by Don Baker, Technology Review, June 2001

 

ClearType works through manipulation of the red, green and blue components of individual pixels (called "sub-pixels") to sharpen characters. To overcome color blurring, Microsoft developed an algorithm to filter sub-pixels based on their locations, illuminating those near a character's fringes differently than those at the center. The patent issued earlier this year is the first of more than 20 Microsoft expects to receive for the technology. "The importance of ClearType is that it lets us produce really readable type on existing hardware," says Microsoft researcher Bill Hill.

Armed with its first patent, Microsoft is strongly pushing ahead in deployment of ClearType. First released last August as part of Microsoft Reader software for electronic books, ClearType will appear in the next major release of Windows, future versions of the company's Pocket PC handheld computer, and a dedicated e-book device coming this summer.

 

For Bob Jensen's Threads on ClearType and electronic publishing, see http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm 

 

"How the brain 'sees' " By BBC News Online science editor Dr David Whitehouse, BBC News, May 29, 2001

Your brain does not tell you everything it sees, according to new research.

Scientists at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, US, have shown that neurons in the human visual cortex - the region that processes visual information - can detect patterns that are too fine for subjects to "see".

The work shows that some types of visual information, while not consciously perceived, are still registered by the brain.

Researchers say that this discovery contributes to the understanding of vision and the puzzling question of consciousness.

"This is probably the first demonstration that visual cortical neurons are capable of resolving fine lines past the limits previously thought to exist," said Sheng He, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota.

Read the rest of the article at http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1357000/1357729.stm 

 

"A University That Reveres Tradition Experiments With E-Books," by Jeffrey R. Young, The Chronicle of Higher Education,  May 18, 2001 --- http://chronicle.com/free/v47/i36/36a03901.htmb 

 

Textbook pages never rustle during a University of Virginia seminar about the Salem witch trials, because printed books have been replaced by electronic ones. Students in the experimental course were lent hand-held computers loaded with several assigned textbooks, as well as electronic versions of every warrant, indictment, and deposition from the trials.

The course was designed to take advantage of two of the most celebrated features of digital textbooks -- their capacity to hold reams of data and their ability to let readers easily search for any word or phrase. In the classroom, students became on-the-spot historians, using the gadgets to home in on court documents so they could argue for and against various interpretations of what happened in Salem, Mass., more than 300 years ago.

Many futurists have predicted the death of the book, but the printed word has proven extremely difficult to replicate electronically in a form that is as elegant and easy to read as text on paper. A pilot project here this spring, comprising two courses, attempted to see whether the latest e-book technologies could allow entire courses to go bookless.

During class sessions, students tapping on tiny screens with plastic styluses looked more as if they were taking scientific readings than discussing history and religion. The setting was decidedly old-fashioned, though; the class met in one of the few classrooms remaining from Jefferson's "academical village."

"Whenever we got to talking about something in a document, we would just go to the document," says Amy Nichols, a senior who took the course. The students say they used court records and other texts more than they would have with bulky printed versions of the same documents.

What's more, the students were bolder than usual in criticizing scholarly summaries of events presented in their textbooks, says Benjamin C. Ray, the religious-studies professor teaching the course. In fact, they were often too quick to dispute scholarly accounts once they came upon source material that seemed to contradict the textbook, he says. "I think they're going overboard. They're trashing too much ... without knowing the historical methods."

For their part, the students quickly discovered disadvantages of the high-tech texts. Unlike paper books, e-books sometimes crash. Several students lost marginal notes and bookmarks when their hand-held computers suddenly erased their data.

Some students said reading from the tiny screens made the texts seem more fragmented. "When I'm at home sitting on my chair curled up with the afghan on my lap, I don't want to be flipping through this," says Kristen Buckstad, a student in the course, holding up her Hewlett-Packard Journada, which sells for about $450. The hand-held device is roughly the size of a Palm Pilot, with a 2½-by-3¼-inch color screen and enough memory to store about 90 books. "The screen is too small," she says. "It's hard to get the overall feeling of the flow of the narrative."

For the rest of the article, go to http://chronicle.com/free/v47/i36/36a03901.htm 

"Are We Headed Toward the Bookless Campus?" The New York Times, May 18, 2001 --- http://chronicle.com/free/v47/i36/36a03501.htm 

 

In the articles that follow, The Chronicle examines the possibilities of e-textbooks, the impact that e-books are having on academic libraries, and an experiment in teaching with e-texts using specialized reading devices.

 

"The Premature Obituary of the Book:  Why Literature?" by Mario Vargas Llosa, The New Republic, May 14, 2001 --- http://www.thenewrepublic.com/051401/llosa051401.html 
This is a very long article.  Llosa's concluding remarks are are as follows:

 

So literature's unrealities, literature's lies, are also a precious vehicle for the knowledge of the most hidden of human realities. The truths that it reveals are not always flattering; and sometimes the image of ourselves that emerges in the mirror of novels and poems is the image of a monster. This happens when we read about the horrendous sexual butchery fantasized by de Sade, or the dark lacerations and brutal sacrifices that fill the cursed books of Sacher-Masoch and Bataille. At times the spectacle is so offensive and ferocious that it becomes irresistible. Yet the worst in these pages is not the blood, the humiliation, the abject love of torture; the worst is the discovery that this violence and this excess are not foreign to us, that they are a profound part of humanity. These monsters eager for transgression are hidden in the most intimate recesses of our being; and from the shadow where they live they seek a propitious occasion to manifest themselves, to impose the rule of unbridled desire that destroys rationality, community, and even existence. And it was not science that first ventured into these tenebrous places in the human mind, and discovered the destructive and the self-destructive potential that also shapes it. It was literature that made this discovery. A world without literature would be partly blind to these terrible depths, which we urgently need to see.

Uncivilized, barbarian, devoid of sensitivity and crude of speech, ignorant and instinctual, inept at passion and crude at love, this world without literature, this nightmare that I am delineating, would have as its principal traits conformism and the universal submission of humankind to power. In this sense, it would also be a purely animalistic world. Basic instincts would determine the daily practices of a life characterized by the struggle for survival, and the fear of the unknown, and the satisfaction of physical necessities. There would be no place for the spirit. In this world, moreover, the crushing monotony of living would be accompanied by the sinister shadow of pessimism, the feeling that human life is what it had to be and that it will always be thus, and that no one and nothing can change it.

When one imagines such a world, one is tempted to picture primitives in loincloths, the small magic-religious communities that live at the margins of modernity in Latin America, Oceania, and Africa. But I have a different failure in mind. The nightmare that I am warning about is the result not of under-development but of over-development. As a consequence of technology and our subservience to it, we may imagine a future society full of computer screens and speakers, and without books, or a society in which books--that is, works of literature--have become what alchemy became in the era of physics: an archaic curiosity, practiced in the catacombs of the media civilization by a neurotic minority. I am afraid that this cybernetic world, in spite of its prosperity and its power, its high standard of living and its scientific achievement would be profoundly uncivilized and utterly soulless--a resigned humanity of post-literary automatons who have abdicated freedom.

It is highly improbable, of course, that this macabre utopia will ever come about. The end of our story, the end of history, has not yet been written, and it is not pre-determined. What we will become depends entirely on our vision and our will. But if we wish to avoid the impoverishment of our imagination, and the disappearance of the precious dissatisfaction that refines our sensibility and teaches us to speak with eloquence and rigor, and the weakening of our freedom, then we must act. More precisely, we must read.

 

Bob Jensen's threads on electronic books are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ebooks.htm 

 

 

The Garten SEC Report

Bob,

Jeff Garten, Dean of the Yale School of Management, chaired a committee that just released some recommendations to improve the information corporations report to investors. A press release and an executive summary are available at:

http://www.mba.yale.edu/ 

Denny (Beresford)

SEC-Inspired Task Force Issues Report Suggesting Accounting System Falls Short and That Investors Would Benefit From More and Additional Types of Company Disclosures --- http://www.mba.yale.edu/news_events/sec_set.htm