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 

New Haven, CT, May 22, 2001 --- Amidst the current turbulence in our financial markets, a group of leaders from business, banking and academia, established at the suggestion of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in April 2000, released its findings today on ways to improve the system of financial reporting for companies. It concluded that investors do not have all the information they need to make the most reasoned judgments on how to value companies. 

The group indicated its belief that any disclosures that allowed investors to better assess future profits and cash flow of companies -- and therefore to make more informed judgments about future value -- should be encouraged. This includes more information on a company’s business model, competitive environment, intangible assets, and operating performance measures. The task force believes that companies should be encouraged to make these enhanced disclosures voluntarily, and that the market will penalize those who do not.

The task force focused its efforts on two categories of information in particular: intangible assets and operating performance measures, and it offered two principal recommendations:

The report makes specific suggestions to accomplish these two goals.

The group was chaired by Jeffrey E. Garten, Dean of the Yale School of Management, and was comprised of the following members: G. Leonard Baker, Managing Director, Sutter Hill Ventures; John Doerr, Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; Rob Glaser, Chairman & CEO, RealNetworks; Henry Kaufman, President, Henry Kaufman & Company; Timothy M. Koller, Principal, McKinsey & Co.; Kenneth Lay, Chairman, ENRON; Baruch Lev, Professor of Accounting and Finance, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University; Nancy Peretsman, Managing Director, Allen & Company; Peter G. Peterson, Chairman, The Blackstone Group; Dennis Powell, Vice President and Corporate Controller, Cisco Systems; David L. Shedlarz, Executive Vice President & CFO, Pfizer; Richard Sherlund, Managing Director, Goldman Sachs & Co.; Joseph E. Stiglitz, Professor of Economics, Stanford University; and Hal R. Varian, Dean, School of Information Management and Systems, U. of California at Berkeley.

“At a time when our stock markets loom so large in the economy,” said task force chairman Jeffrey Garten, “we need to close large gaps in the quality of information that companies disclose. A lot of studies have been conducted on these issues, and now it’s time for concrete measures.”

The report is being widely disseminated to interested professionals, and Garten said that the task force stands ready to meet with administration officials to go over the report, and with the next chair of the SEC once he or she is appointed.

Click here to read the full executive summary.

For a copy of the full report, please contact Ms. Karin Nobile at Karin.Nobile@yale.edu

I obtained a copy an found some interesting things to highlight:

 

Exhibit 1

Examples of Intangibles and Operating Performance Measures

Intangible Assets

Operating Performance Measures

 

 

Brand names

Customer acquisition cost

Patents

Revenue per customer

Trademarks/copyrights

Number of customers

Proprietary business processes

Inventory turnover

Skilled employees

Cost per unit

Business Alliances

Market share

Product licenses

Time to market

Loyal or locked-in customers

Revenue pre transaction

Customer lists

Employee turnover

Desirable locations

Manufacturing  throughput

Preferential rights (e.g., drilling)

Order backlog

Landing rights

Revenue per employee

Airwave spectrum rights

Revenue from new products

 

 

Recommendations

To improve the quality of supplemental disclosures the task force makes two principal recommendations:

Create Framework for Voluntary Supplemental Reporting of Intangible Assets and Operating Performance Measures

Various studies, some completed, some in progress, have been developing perspectives on various aspects of company reporting, including reporting about intangible assets and forward looking information.  These reports, while often more technical in nature, broadly align with our own conclusions. For example, the Business Reporting Research Project, sponsored by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), found that while many leading companies are voluntarily disclosing extensive information that is important to investors, there is substantial room for additional reporting about intangible assets and forward-looking data. We recommend that the SEC pull together this and other work to create a framework for voluntary supplemental reporting for intangible assets, operating performance measures and forward-looking information.  One way to do this would be for the SEC to issue a “concept release” to solicit widespread comments from the business and professional community on the most important aspects of the work done so far in order to facilitate next steps.  Following the comment period, we anticipate that a dedicated group of experts and practitioners from industry, academia, the accounting profession and investors would be asked to develop a best practices report for companies interested in adopting enhanced disclosures.  This report should not mandate any specific reporting standards for companies.  It should focus on broader reporting principles, such as how to link business models to value creation, how companies could explain their approach to supplemental reporting, and how industry groups could help develop a common language for supplemental reporting.  The report might also provide examples of innovative supplemental reporting by companies.  Industry specific reporting practices, however, should evolve naturally as companies and investors gain experience.

We suggest that such a framework for supplemental reporting should be driven by the following considerations:

1.  Supplemental Reporting, Not A Replacement for GAAP.  Efforts should be directed to developing a framework for supplemental reporting by companies about intangible assets, operating performance measures, and forward looking information, not replacing GAAP.  In other words, the focus should be on the extra information that companies may choose to provide to investors, in addition to the GAAP-based financial statements that are currently reported. Of course, the task force believes potential improvements in GAAP itself should always be under consideration. We would be concerned, however, about delaying the implementation of supplemental reporting if it was combined with controversial changes to GAAP.

Our emphasis on supplemental reporting is based on our analysis of what information investors want and need to value companies.  Investors value companies based on their assessment of a company’s ability to generate sustained future profits and cash flow.  Investors use information about intangible assets, operating performance measures and forward looking information to develop their assessments of a company’s future performance.

The impact and valuation of intangible assets has been spotlighted in the business press and financial community over the last several years.  Our view is that companies should not attempt to value intangibles and add them to the balance sheet.  It is more useful to investors for companies to provide information about intangible assets that will help investors assess the impact of the intangibles on future profits and cash flow.

2.  Common Language, Not a List of Prescribed Measures.  The framework for supplemental reporting should create a common language for companies and investors.  This common language should consist of standard terms, definitions and calculation methods for reporting that improves comparability across companies.  It should be not be a list of prescribed measures (e.g., number of patents, number of engineers in R&D, percent of sales from new products, etc.) that all companies must report on a regular basis.  The task force believes that there is too much diversity of useful information that varies across industries and companies for any predefined set of measures to be helpful for investors.  For example, the number of patents or percent of sales from new products may be helpful to understand the potential performance of a high-tech manufacturing company, but totally irrelevant for a retailer.  Nevertheless, there is a strong case for investors’ being better able to compare information across companies in the same industry on the basis of clearer and more consistent measures.  Accordingly, we support description, dissemination, and standardization of best practices, not additional regulation. 

We recognize that not all companies will adopt voluntarily the best practices of their industry, at least not initially.  But the benefits of a flexible, voluntary system outweigh the risk of lack of disclosure or selective disclosure by some companies.  Over the years, the power of investors has increased substantially.  We believe this trend will continue and that companies lagging in their disclosures will see their share prices suffer.

3.  Linked to Value Creation and Providing Comparability.  The framework for supplemental reporting should provide a language and process to help companies explain in a consistent way how their business creates value and help improve comparability across companies in the same industry.  Such a framework would likely include the following components:

We acknowledge that our approach, which is based on voluntary disclosure, will not achieve complete comparability from company to company.  Nonetheless, we think that enough companies will improve their disclosure for investors to benefit substantially.

Create an Environment that Encourages Innovation in Disclosures

In addition to working to create a consistent approach to disclosures about intangible assets and operating performance metrics, the government should take as many actions as it can to create an environment that encourages innovative disclosures by reducing the risks associated with such disclosures.  We wish to emphasize that such an environment must continue to protect investors against intentional deception by companies.

Many task force members believe that the litigious climate in the US discourages companies from experimenting with supplemental disclosures.  This concern remains despite efforts such as the introduction of safe harbor provisions for forward looking information that were introduced by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.

Accordingly, we support renewed efforts to protect companies who are willing to disclose more information, much of it “soft” and speculative in nature.  The government should start from the presumption that, in today’s economy, investors need more information and different types of information that cannot be adequately described by regulation.  Companies should be permitted to provide more speculative, hard to measure information, as long as they warn investors that the information is speculative and provide explicit definitions about how such information is constructed.

Specific ideas for creating a less risky environment for disclosure are listed below.  As the task force did not include any legal experts, these ideas are merely suggestions from a layman’s viewpoint.  In addition, we realize that some of these ideas would represent radical changes from our current legal system.  They might also create differences between securities law and other laws.  Nevertheless, we believe that ideas such as these should be surfaced and debated.  Specific ideas for consideration might include:

We would encourage the SEC to use the full range of its relationships with the business and investment community to communicate its support for better disclosure and to solicit input on how to create a more supportive environment.  The task force recommends that the SEC facilitate the establishment of a group of experts, representing investors, companies, accountants, and legal experts, to make detailed recommendations.  This group should address the following issues:

 Examine other approaches to reduce risks for well-intentioned companies such as some of the ideas described above.

Other Issues Discussed by Task Force  

During the course of its discussions, the task force considered a number of other issues. (See Attachment C for more on these issues). In summary:

We did not reach consensus on whether additional disclosures on the past history of management and founding investors, nor on the issues of accounting treatment for mergers and other combinations, or on accounting treatment for stock options.

[1] This approach is based on a framework suggested by Professor Baruch Lev (a member of the task force).  In Lev’s framework, value creation is separated into three steps: discovery, implementation, commercialization.  Each step has a number of subcomponents.  Discovery’s subcomponents are internal renewal, acquired knowledge and networking.  Each subcomponents has a number of measures.  See Baruch Lev: Intangibles:  Management, Measurement and Reporting, Brookings Institution Press, forthcoming June 2001.

 

Professor Lev's helpful Website is at http://www.stern.nyu.edu/~blev/ 

 

The above Garten SEC Report is somewhat at odds with the Upton FASB Report

FASB REPORT - BUSINESS AND FINANCIAL REPORTING, CHALLENGES FROM THE NEW ECONOMY 
NO. 219-A April 2001
Author:  Wayne S. Upton, Jr.
Source: Financial Accounting Standards Board --- http://accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/fasb/new_economy.html 
Trinity University students may download the 135 page PDF file from J:\courses\acct5341\fasb\intangibles.pdf 

In recent years, many commentators have remarked on what they consider to be a disconnect between information provided in financial statements and the information needs of investors and creditors. Most recently, some have characterized this as a disconnect between "new economy" companies and "old economy" financial reporting. In particular, many have contended that financial statement users need:

Members of the FASB and its staff have been active participants in several efforts to improve the quality of business reporting, which encompasses the broad spectrum of information that a company provides to investors and creditors. Our most recent effort was the FASB Business Reporting Research Project. The Steering Committee directing that project published three reports during 2000 and 2001, including Improving Business Reporting: Insights into Enhancing Voluntary Disclosures. This Special Report is another step in that process.

This Special Report examines each of the three areas described above, with special attention to research and recommendations developed by other organizations in the United States and Europe. One of our objectives in publishing this Special Report is to provide a background for discussion of potential projects to be added to the Board’s agenda. With that in mind, the Special Report includes a brief description of four potential projects that the Board might consider. There are probably more possibilities, and there may be some areas covered in the Special Report that appear to have a higher priority than others. We hope that constituents will see this as an opportunity to offer their insights as the Board begins to consider whether it should add new projects to its agenda.

These issues are deep into theory and controversy at the present time.  The basic conclusions of the report are as follows:

Reprise 
As mentioned in the preface, this Special Report is more a sampler than a catalog. Still, it covers most of the significant proposals of which I am aware.  The review of those proposals and the accounting and disclosure issues involved suggested a number of observations made in the course of the paper but worth repeating at the end. 

Chapter 1. 
Labels and slogans abound in discussions of “intellectual capital” and the “new economy.” Those labels and slogans do not help, and may hinder, any effort to improve business and financial reporting. The important question is whether business or financial information should be expanded or improved to make it more useful to investors and creditors. 

Chapter 1. 
Similarly, prejudgments and assertions about the capacity of financial reporting to respond to perceived shortcomings are unhelpful. The conceptual frameworks of financial reporting pave the way for vital and resilient reporting systems. Accounting standard setters may decide that general-purpose financial statements should not incorporate particular items as assets, perhaps because those items lack the essential characteristics of assets or fail other recognition criteria. That decision is much different from the popular assertion that financial statements cannot accommodate intangible assets.

Chapter 2. 
The chapter discusses some of the difficulties with those proposals, especially their cost and complexity, and concludes that they are unlikely to prove useful in general-purpose business and financial reporting. Users value information about an entity’s plans and prospects, but existing techniques and expanded use of nonfinancial metrics seem to offer a more cost-effective solution. 

Chapter 3. 
Users value disclosure of nonfinancial information. Presentation of nonfinancial performance information in metrics that can be tracked from period to period would enhance the usefulness of that information. Presenting a “suite” of nonfinancial metrics would enhance both the usefulness and accessibility of that information. 

Chapter 3. 
Current presentations of “new economy” or “intellectual capital” metrics tend to include a heavy dose of very traditional nonfinancial performance metrics. New and unusual information about customers, innovation, or workforce is limited and often hard to understand. 

Chapter 3. 
Nonfinancial information is inherently idiosyncratic to particular industries and perhaps to individual enterprises. This militates against any detailed accounting standards, but not against standards for form, presentation, and disclosure of underlying assumptions. 

Chapter 4. 
If one accepts the view that financial statements are not simple reconciliations to market capitalization, then some items proposed for recognition as intangible assets will probably be excluded from recognition. The recognition criteria found in the IASC Framework and FASB Concepts Statements provide the mechanism for understanding which intangibles are candidates for recognition and which are not.

Chapter 4. 
There is no conceptual basis in the definition of an asset for applying different recognition rules to intangible assets purchased from outsiders and the same assets created internally. Different recognition rules, if appropriate, require some other justification. 

Chapter 4. 
Control is one of the essential characteristics of an asset. That criterion, or something like it, is a necessary part of describing an item in a way that allows for monetary measurement. The presence of a control criterion precludes some items (like customer satisfaction) from ever satisfying the definition of an asset. However, it does not preclude other items (like customer lists) from recognition. Nor does the control criterion eliminate the effect that an item not recognized as an asset (customer satisfaction) may have on the value of items (customer lists) that meet the definition. 

Chapter 4. 
There are two “gaps” that frustrate attempts to recognize intangible assets in financial statements. 

Chapter 4. 
While some question the relevance of cost-based measures, there are arguments for beginning work on intangible assets using traditional cost accounting techniques. Academic research suggests that cost-based information is useful. The problems in developing cost-based measures, at least for project intangibles like R&D, are well within the skills of accountants and standard setters. If the alternative is nonrecognition, owing to inability to develop fair-value measures, an imperfect cost-based system may well be preferable. 

Chapter 4. 
Companies’ inability to identify and inventory intangible assets may be a significant obstacle to any comprehensive recognition of intangible assets. 

Chapter 4.
 The rationale underlying FASB Statements 2 and 86 and IAS 38 does not provide a useful conceptual basis for a reconsideration of accounting for intangible assets. 

Chapter 4. 
Standard setters should expect significant opposition to any proposal for recognition of internally generated intangibles. 

Conclusion The introduction decomposed the difference between a company’s market capitalization and the net book value presented on its balance sheet. That table provides a useful device for characterizing the several studies, position papers, and academic papers described in this Special Report, as illustrated on page 110. None of those proposals offer a comprehensive solution to the perceived disconnect between business and financial reporting on one hand and the new economy on the other. Only a few recognize their limitations. Each attempts to address the “intangibles problem” by dealing with one of its attributes; they are like the blind men and elephant described in the ancient proverb. 

The “intangibles problem” doesn’t lend itself to a single answer because the problem has more than one dimension. We can observe the total market capitalization and accounting book value, but those are the only known amounts. Describing the entire difference between market capitalization and book value as intangibles is circular, it defines the thing in terms of itself, and adds little to the discussion. Improved business and financial reporting of the “new economy” will require attention to: 

• Recognition of internally generated intangible assets in financial statements and improved measures of those assets 
• Expanded and systematic use of nonfinancial performance metrics 
• Expanded use of forward-looking information. 

Nor does the “intangibles problem” lend itself to an answer developed by a single accounting standard setter acting in isolation. Chapter 1 described important contributions from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, and the OECD. Swedish companies have been leaders in providing nonfinancial metrics. One standard setter might take the lead, but a successful effort should build on the range of talent and insight that is clearly available in the broader international arena.

 

Lamenting the New Economy

From Information Week Between the Lines on May 25, 2001

Dear readers: 

Your services were solicited, and I'm not at all surprised to report that you responded magnanimously and magnificently to last week's request to help connect the dots and describe The Big Picture behind some nuttiness having to do with business plans or the lack thereof, revenue or the lack thereof, risks and rewards or the lack thereof, and doughnuts. You were also given leeway to debunk the absurd descriptions of Old and New Economy, but the term New Economy spikes my blood pressure, so I won't mention it. In addition, I promised to pick out the best Big Picture description and award its describer a prize: a certificate for a dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts or an InformationWeek T-shirt (for anyone who saw the line about the prize being "an original Picasso," that was a simple typo--sorry 'bout that).

Please let me share with you some of the collective wisdom from all of you.

"I would only add that Old and New Economy are viable terms," Larry Turner says. "For a while, it seemed that the Internet was going to bring a true revolution to business practice. Well, that was a new, hyperinflated perception--New Economic thinking applied. It was truly 'voodoo economics.' If we all live long enough, I'm sure we'll see another speculative bubble again. In any event, hooray for Krispy Kreme!"

Michael Lang offers simply, "Thou weep what ye sold."

Reaching into movie history, Michael Tarot says, "The picture created is the witch melting in "The Wizard of Oz." Or shall we quote Lee Marvin in "The Wild One": 'Oh, the shame of it all, the shame of it all.'"

Dipping into the doughnut dimension, Bob Forgrave says, "Two concentric circles. On the outside are dazed dot-coms running in circles trying to justify the childish things they did with money. On the inside, you've got leaders running for a place to lay low after the burst bubble. Put it all together, and it looks a lot like a Krispy Kreme doughnut. Only now, everyone has stopped talking about the (boring Old Economy) hole in the middle and has noticed that creme filling (actual profits). Sweet!"

Ted Newcomb also offers a doughnut-dimpled description: "People like to drink coffee and eat doughnuts while reading about the economic plight of others. This way they feel good three times over!"

A less-sugary picture is drawn by Michael S. Gilly: "Quoting Gen. Anthony McAuliffe, American commander at Bastogne in World War II: 'Nuts!'"

Debra McCusker pins the blame on the media: "The U.S. economy is an organism comprised of millions of individual consumers and investors. Its behavior is largely affected by the tone set by the press. As the media goes in waves, so go the rest of us. 'Buy tech, buy tech,' we're told, and the dot-coms soar. But borrowing and venture capitalizing isn't a long-term solution. So the news changes course. The balance sheet rules and the organism adapts."

Food fills this description from Shawn Casey: "When the going gets tough, the tough quit complaining long enough to buy doughnuts. With the rise of the doughnut stock, I'd say in the end we're still the closeted geeks eating the sprinkled ones, waiting for the pizza to arrive."

Bill Lambert offers four dots of his own. "Dot 1: Revenue minus expense equals profit. Dot 2: You cannot run a successful business for long without profit. Dot 3: The free-enterprise system works to limit your revenue, so you must work to limit your expense. Dot 4: There is no magic. Given your reasonable intelligence, if your CFO or CEO says something that does not make sense, it probably doesn't."

And our winner, Jay Jarrett, weaves together the parallel themes of mind/body, business/doughnuts: "The articles provide insightful commentary on our society's physical and mental state of being. The dot-com crowd of beautiful people espousing utopian business practices, with no business model, represents the 'Fit Body/Fat Mind' operating model. Therefore, enacting the antithesis of Upton Sinclair's lament of aiming for the heart and hitting the stomach, perhaps the 'Fat Body/Fit Mind' model makes more business sense. Moral of the story: Sell doughnuts in America!"

Congratulations, Jay! And thanks to all who connected the dots. - Bob Evans is editor-in-chief of InformationWeek. E-mail him at mailto:bevans@cmp.com . You can join in on the discussion about this column in his Listening Post forum: http://update.informationweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eDoq0BcUEY0V10NvU0A2

** John Soat: IT Confidential

There's deep prejudice against businesspeople from the South," said Charles "Junior" Johnson, CEO of PurchasePro, in an interview earlier this year, explaining why his company was getting so much bad publicity, adding, "along with the fact that we're in Las Vegas." Whether it was his Kentucky roots, his Vegas headquarters, or his being a relative stranger to the IT industry, Junior was ousted from the E-commerce software vendor last week after a late-night emergency meeting of the company's board of directors. Johnson is certainly no stranger to controversy. The Kentucky native has 17 lawsuits pending against him, including one that claims he stole the idea for PurchasePro from a former business partner. And he leaves PurchasePro facing plenty of problems. Last week, the company restated its first-quarter earnings, lopping off 42% of the $29.8 million in revenue it reported April 2. That widened its loss to 23 cents a share from the previously reported 2 cents a share. On top of that, PurchasePro says an ongoing audit will likely result in further adjustments to first-quarter financials. The company is also late in filing its 10-Q to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the second time it has missed the deadline. So PurchasePro has to fill its CEO seat, sort out its accounting debacle, and provide investors with financial guidance, which it hasn't revised since it made a now-impossibly optimistic forecast of $225 million in revenue for the year.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. Ask Junior. Or ask Mike Harden, director of sales for Sagent Technologies, the Mountain View, Calif., business-intelligence software vendor. Two weeks ago, Hardin E-mailed a couple hundred people in his network of associates with a unique marketing proposal: Slip him a sales lead that ends up in a signed contract and you'll get $4,000. But the pay-for-play deal didn't go over too well with Sagent's top brass. A spokeswoman for the company says Hardin was reprimanded by the CEO and the VP of sales. "He got his hand slapped," she says. But Hardin doesn't sound contrite: He says he's got two leads already, and the $4,000 figure has some give to it. "That number is just a working number," he says. "I could go even higher if I needed to."

Schlotzsky's, the nationwide chain of deli-style restaurants, last week named former IBM and Dell Computer exec Robin Hanna as VP and CIO, a new position created to head the franchisor's aggressive technology initiatives, including creating "cyberdelis" with Internet access, refining the back-office software system, redesigning the touch-screen PC-based point-of-sale system, and expanding Schlotzsky's Web site (http://update.informationweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eDoq0BcUEY0V10OT30Au ) and E-marketing strategy. Hanna was Dell's director of operations for notebook and advanced-desktop manufacturing from 1996 to 1998; before that, she worked at IBM in the group that developed the PC.

It was good news, bad news for the FBI's anti-cybercrime efforts a week. The good news: The bureau brought criminal charges against 90 individuals and companies stemming from a nationwide investigation, code-named "Operation Cyber Loss," that targeted online auction fraud, systemic nondelivery of merchandise bought online, credit-card and debit-card fraud, bank fraud, investment fraud, and multilevel marketing and Ponzi and pyramid schemes, which represented more than 56,000 victims who suffered cumulative losses in excess of $117 million. The bad news: A report by the General Accounting Office criticized the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Center as inefficient and ineffective in warning companies against virus attacks, mainly because of staff shortages, a lack of interagency reporting, and the agency's reluctance to share sensitive information on potential vulnerabilities.

Boy, do I know that feeling! One step forward and two steps back. Or is it two steps forward and one step back? How come it's never all steps forward and no steps back? Step forward with an industry tip to mailto:jsoat@cmp.com or phone 516-562-5326 or fax 516-562-5036. Or we can talk about the FBI and its cybercrime efforts--why, for instance, the FBI can't develop an early-warning system for hackers or viruses but it can perfect an electronic eavesdropping system--at InformationWeek.com's Listening Post. - John Soat is senior executive editor of InformationWeek. E-mail him directly at mailto:jsoat@cmp.com or share your thoughts with others in his Listening Post forum: http://update.informationweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eDoq0BcUEY0V10NvV0A3

** Taking Stock: Troubling Signs To Watch For

I've been watching the Los Angeles Lakers do their magic during these playoffs as Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant take center stage and score point after point. But the most amazing part is the transformation that O'Neal has undergone. Despite his talent, raw strength, and great intuition, he struggled for years. He went through one frustrating season after another until he finally appears to have blossomed with the Lakers.

In life, as in basketball, struggle and perseverance eventually make people stronger and wiser (unless you're the Golden State Warriors these days). This situation isn't much different from what numerous tech companies are experiencing during the current downturn.

Blue Martini Software Inc. (BLUE-Nasdaq) and Art Technology Group Inc. (ARTG-Nasdaq) are both electronic-customer-relationship management companies that help other companies customize, personalize, and track visitors at their Web sites. Both help businesses tailor an interactive experience to specific customers based on preferences and data gathered from their previous visits. In addition, this information can be tied into call centers and campaign-management efforts.

Blue Martini and ATG have good technology, but this might not be the key determinant of their fate. Rather, it's a matter of managing well and with foresight under the current circumstances. Like so many other young technology companies, the management teams of these two companies haven't experienced a downturn. Managing in a downturn is vastly different from managing in an upturn. During a downturn, the focus shifts to very different priorities.

Both companies disclosed earnings shortfalls recently, with Blue Martini reporting a 25% decline in sales and ATG experiencing a decline of 32%. Along with the shortfall came the realization that each company had expanded too quickly, expecting growth that would no longer materialize. The upshot was, of course, layoffs.

As a manager, you now have a completely different mood to deal with, because the remaining employees fear a second round of layoffs is imminent. The challenge is to keep the remaining troops focused. Otherwise, distractions such as low morale and attrition will hamstring the company. More than ever, this is the time when strong and decisive management is needed.

Morale is fickle. It's so hard to create a great, positive attitude that permeates the company and so easy to destroy it with seemingly unconnected events. Layoffs take their toll. It's equally bad when the senior executives start selling their options at prices that approach the stock's all-time low. These are exactly the people who should have the most faith in the company and be preaching the gospel of the company's greatness internally.

At Blue Martini, William Evans, VP and general manager for Asia-Pacific, is relentlessly selling shares; Jeffrey Johnson, VP of sales, is selling shares, not the product; and, finally, Scott Hanham, VP of product development, also has reduced his holdings significantly. It doesn't give me great faith in the company when people of such importance for its future growth sell at these prices.

Meanwhile, at ATG, the co-founders and other senior executives are behaving just like their counterparts at Blue Martini. ATG's chief technology officer, Joseph Chung, and CEO Jeet Singh have been active sellers, along with recently departed CFO Ann Brady. In addition, William Wittenberg, head of product development, also has been liquidating his options. Need I say more?

Finally, both companies are losing key executives. ATG recently lost Brady, its CFO, and rumor has it that Blue Martini has lost an unnamed senior exec. Key executives are important, if not vital, to a young growth company.

Besides watching financial statements, investors should also watch to see if the management teams are able to make the basket, shoot an air ball or let it roll off the rim. - William Schaff is chief investment officer at Bay Isle Financial Corp., which manages the InformationWeek 100 stock index. Reach him at mailto:bschaff@bayisle.com . Is he on target or off the map? Discuss Schaff's column in his Listening Post forum: http://update.informationweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eDoq0BcUEY0V10OT40Av 

 

It's been said that if you were to lay all the laws end to end, there would be no end. Or if you laid all lawyers end to end, it would be a good thing.  So we watch to see just how complex legislators worldwide can make the regulation of business on the Web.  See  http://clickz.com/article/cz.3962.html 

Ed Scribner called my attention to AccountingMalpractice.com --- http://accountingmalpractice.com/index.asp 

For more than a year we have been identifying and researching those factors that cause accounting malpractice claims. We believe that the economic and environmental factors now present have the potential to result in numerous, quick and dramatic client failures. These failures in turn have the potential to produce losses in time, resources and personal well-being that could dwarf the profession's losses of the early to mid 1990s. Upon consideration, we believe that practitioners will agree with our assessment. The factors include:

Fundamental shifts in competitive structures deriving from technology convergence and business-to-business e-commerce Re-emergence of economic cycles leading to massive industry shakeouts of marginal companies Increase in non-audit services and implications to firms and practitioners Heightening of legal liability exposure deriving from the vast amounts of information (peer, background, industry, legal and other risk assessment/mitigation tools) now available on the Internet Continuing existence and expansion of the Expectation Gap and the propensity of lawyers to prosecute these cases Our Mission

Our mission is to provide the practitioner CPA with:

The latest information and tools to help reduce their exposure to accounting malpractice claims. These resources will be delivered in the form of advice, educational services, database resources and real-time downloadable information products A central depository of all relevant information regarding the advancement of engagement quality control, risk reduction and malpractice reduction Innovative resources, databases and web resources that will take the prevention of malpractice to a new level of sophistication on a real-time basis Our Strategy

Through our databases, research library, industry risk reports, going-concern reports, research studies, videos and CPE products, we will arm the practitioner with the prevention tools and knowledge needed to reduce his exposure before a malpractice claim can develop.

Mark Cheffers, CEO

Electronic Book Trends:  WSJ:  The Little Dickens

A serialized novel makes its way onto the pages -- and homepages -- of The Wall Street Journal --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/business/0,1367,44135,00.html 

For the first time, The Wall Street Journal is serializing a novel -- Amanda.Bright@home  -- by journalist and author Danielle Crittenden. The first chapter debuted Memorial Day weekend in both the printed edition of the paper as well as at OpinionJournal.com. Subsequent chapters will be posted solely online now through Labor Day.

Crittenden, a frequent contributor to the Journal’s editorial page and author of the hotly debated nonfiction title What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us, said that she is releasing the novel week by week. "I’m really doing it the way Dickens did -- sending it out while the ink is still wet -- or whatever the cyber version of wet ink is."

While Crittenden hopes the book will appear between covers one day, "the immediacy of writing directly for readers and bypassing the publishing process is exhilarating," she said. The print rights have not yet been sold and Crittenden made the deal to serialize Amanda.Bright@home directly with the Journal. Payment for each chapter is modest, the author said. "I’m getting about as much per chapter as I would get paid for an editorial column."

James Taranto, OpinionJournal's editor, said he is intrigued at the prospect of publishing serialized fiction online. "We're breaking new ground here. Amanda.Bright@home is a good read, and its tough-minded political and social commentary ought to appeal to our readers."

See also:
New Accounting for Best-Sellers
Pay to Publish, Pay for Review

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

 

The Teaching and Curriculum Section of the American Accounting Association is pleased to announce that the Spring 2001 edition of The Accounting Educator, the Section Newsletter, is available on the T&C web site at --- http://accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aaa/tccomm/newsletters/Spring01/news90.htm 

Congratulations to Department of Business Administration faculty featured in the Trinity Magazine, Spring 2001.

Feature on Page 10 (Rita Kosnik) "Wanna Make Something of it? Prof Kickboxes to De-stress" 
Reviews how Dr. Kosnik moonlights as a physical fitness instructor.

Feature in pp. 16-17 (Petrea Sandlin) "Brains and Brawn a Winning Combo for Accounting Majors" 
Reviews Dr. Sandlin's duties as a NCAA representative and as the director of the graduate accounting program at Trinity University. One reason for the article was the abnormally high proportion of former varsity athletes (many of them were stars) in the 2001 MS in Accounting Class. The entire class this year is now employed in the Big 5 public accounting firms.

Feature in pp. 20-22 (Phil Cooley) "How Much of Your Retirement Portfolio Can You Spend Each Year ... Without Running Out of Money?"

Feature in pp. 23-25 (Dick Burr) "Seeing Things From a Different Perspective" 
This article reviews Dr. Burr's trip to Bosnia with 25 other business and civic leaders. The mission was "to observe and understand the significance of the work of the National Guard reservists who were helping maintain peace in the Balkans."

 

 

The SMS Craze (Perhaps we should learn shorthand and put shorthand characters in PDAs)

We are all urged to become poets, but I have a hard time getting the hang of decoding some of these creative "poems"

 

Short text messaging (SMS) is all the rage in Europe, so much so that the Guardian sponsored a poetry contest. The rslts cn mk u :-). --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/wireless/0,1382,43782,00.html 

Because the size of a phone's screen is limited and an SMS message can hold only 160 characters, contestants had rather interesting ways of expressing their thoughts. Check out Hetty Hughes' championship entry:

txtin iz messin, / mi headn'me englis, / try2rite essays, / they all come out txtis. / gran not plsed w/letters shes getn, / swears i wrote better / b4 comin2uni. / &she's african

Hughes is right. txtin iz messin w/ evrybodis englis.

Despite the fact that using SMS quickly creates the digital equivalent of writer's cramp, the enthusiasm for using the device in literary, and not just business ways, remains relatively large.

The ubiquity of short text messaging over mobile phones has transformed the written word and even created new literary genres.

Take, for example, SMS poetry.

For its poetry contest, the Guardian sifted through 7,500 poems written on mobile phones.

The newspaper winnowed the entries down to 100 and then handed them to professional poets who selected seven of the poems for cash prizes. The judges chose a poem written by Julia Bird as the "most creative use of SMS 'shorthand' in a poem:

14: / a txt msg pom. / his is r bunsn brnr bl%, / his hair lyk fe filings / W/ac/dc going thru. / I sit by him in kemistry, / it splits my @oms / wen he :-)s @ me.

People who lost the contest shouldn't feel too bad. Bird, who is cited in the article as a member of the "Poetry Book Society," has experience.

Her poem also required a printed translation even though it was published in a country running amok with people pecking away at their mobiles:

14: / a text message poem / his eyes are bunsen burner blue, / his hair like iron filings / with ac/dc going through. / I sit by him in chemistry, / it splits my atoms / when he smiles at me.

"Text messages combine the pleasures of reading and writing with instantness and a handy little gadget," said Andy Wilson, one of the contest's judges, in an e-mail message. "It's almost a conversation, but in a conversation you always think of something funny to say 10 seconds after you should have said it. With text messages you get the extra 10 seconds."

SMS is arguably the most popular cell phone service besides regular calls. In Western Europe, 11.9 billion SMS messages were sent last year. That number is expected to skyrocket to 57.3 billion messages by the end of this year, according to market research.

SMS lets people send and receive messages of up to 160 characters, which forces writers to express a thought creatively and concisely, Wilson said.

"The limitations are one of the best things about it," he said. "Having rules and barriers to overcome is very liberating creatively. Creation becomes a game, a test of ingenuity. How can I fit this into 160 characters? That leads to much better poetry than the freedom to express deep thoughts on deep subjects at great length."

The rest of the article is at http://www.wirednews.com/news/wireless/0,1382,43782,00.html 

See also:
SMSINJURY Headline
SMS Provides SOS Lifeline
School's Out for Hooky Hoodlums
Honk If You Hate Cellular
Unwired News: The Next Generation
Discover more Net Culture

 

Networking is a matter of maintaining relationships with people who can assist you in your future professional objectives. Find out how you can start building a network of your own ---  http://www.accountingweb.com/item/47678 

More and more, entrepreneurial businesses across North America are accessing the Internet looking for accounting and financial service providers. To address this trend, AccountingWEB is pleased to announce the "Entrepreneur to Accountant Referral Network" (EARN) program, a new business service in partnership with BusinessmatchMaker.com that matches accounting needs of small businesses with the talents of AccountingWEB members. Find out how your firm can benefit from this exclusive network --- http://www.accountingweb.com/item/39161 

A message from Scott Bonacker

Here are two sites I came across while looking for partnership accounting texts:

http://www.swcollege.com/vircomm/gita/gita.html 

http://acct.tamu.edu/kratchman/holmes.htm 

No doubt these are well known to most list participants already.

Scott Bonacker, CPA McCullough, Officer & Company, LLC Springfield, Missouri moccpa.com

The first link passed along by Scott is from South-Western Publishing Company's service called "Great Ideas for Teaching Accounting."  --- http://www.swcollege.com/vircomm/gita/gitapref.html 

Transition and change characterize accounting education during the decade of the nineties. Institutions of higher education are examining and modifying their programs in response to changes in their external environments. Specifically, the changes relate to increased requirements for certification in many states and to recommendations from the accounting profession for the inclusion of broader based skills and competencies beyond technical knowledge in the accounting curriculum.

In order to support curricular revision, the large accounting firms funded the Accounting Education Change Commission . Grants from this commission have afforded recipient institutions the opportunity to develop innovative accounting programs that incorporate the teaching of critical thinking, communication, teamwork, ethical awareness, technological competence and independent learning in their accounting courses. Accounting professionals in the twenty-first century will need more than technical competence to be successful.

The current climate in accounting education heightens the motivation for instructors to hone their teaching skills. Great Ideas in Teaching Accounting offers us as accounting professors the opportunity to share some techniques that have been successful in our classroom. In order to facilitate the locating of tips for specific classroom topics, the organization of the book follows the format of the typical introductory accounting textbook. In addition a general section contains teaching tips related to classroom management, communication skills, teamwork development and other miscellaneous topics. Another section contains teaching tips for the area of management accounting.

I have enjoyed working on this project. South-Western College Publishing, in general, and David Shaut, in particular, have been most helpful and supportive. My colleagues here at Elmhurst College have also lent me support. One person in particular, my student aide Patty Cleary, deserves a round of applause for her dedication and hard work.

Great Ideas in Teaching Accounting would not have been possible without the excellent contributions submitted by accounting instructors from across the United States. Thank you for helping me with this project and for assisting all of us with the sharing of your successful teaching techniques. I hope that everyone enjoys reading and using Great Ideas for Teaching Accounting.

Martha Sampsell Elmhurst College

What's New
About Great Ideas
Great Ideas Table of Contents
Search the Great Ideas Site
Share Your Great Ideas
Great Idea for Teaching Intermediate Accounting

The second site passed along by Scott is part of what I featured in the May 25 edition of New Bookmarks at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book01q2.htm#052501 

Using Fiction as an Educational Tool

 

Over a year ago, I wrote a document (screen play? short story? tutorial? case?) that is a takeoff on the Muppets.  It is entitled "Clyde Gives Brother Hat a Lesson in Arbitrage" and can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/acct5341/speakers/muppets.htm 

 

The above document contains a tribute to Bill Breit and Ken Elzinga.  Probably the most successful attempts in the world to teach economics via fiction can be found in three mystery novels authored to date by "Marshall Jevons."  Marshall Jevons is really a pseudonym derived from the combined names of two famous 19th Century economists ---  Alfred Marshall and William Stanley Jevons.  The real 20th century economist authors are William Breit and Kenneth G. Elzinga.  Dr. Elzinga holds a distinguished endowed chair at the University of Virginia, and Dr. Breit has a distinguished endowed chair at Trinity University in San Antonio.

 

Dan Stone was commissioned by Jane Reimers to review three accounting and tax books that use fiction as a means of teaching technical material.  See the Book Reviews in The Accounting Review, April 2001.  

 

Ten didactic novels are now published and in use in accounting education. In other academic disciplines (e.g., medicine, literature, sociology, communications, and business) fictional discourse has long been regarded as an effective method for exploring the complexities and intricacies of human and organizational experience. Medicine provides an example of the potential for fiction to inform and be informed by professional practices (Anderson 1990). ‘‘Literature and medicine’’ is now a respected, growing field of inquiry with its own journal (Literature and Medicine) and history of explicating the relationships between medical practice and fiction (e.g., see Stein 1984, 1985, 1991). In addition, a top medical journal (The Journal of the American Medical Association) regularly publishes fiction and poetry that reflect and comment on medical practice.

The three books reviewed by Dan are as follows:

 

D.LARRYCRUMBLEY, The Ultimate Rip-off: A Taxing Tale (SunLakes,AZ:Thomas HortonandDaughters,1998,227pp.,$10.95,Pb, http://www.bus.lsu.edu/accounting/faculty/lcrumbley/ripoff.html ) .

 

LOEBBECKE,JAMESK., The Auditor: An Instructional Novella (UpperSaddleRiver, NJ:PrenticeHall,1998,117pp.,$18,Pb, http://vig.prenhall.com/catalog/academic/product/1,4096,0130799769,00.html  ).

R.E.MCDERMOTT,K.D.STOCKS,ANDJ.OGDEN, Code Blue (Syracuse,NY:UT, TraemusBooks,2000,175pp.,$19.95,Pb, http://www.traemus-books.com/ ).

 

Meet wireless technology's newest health hazard: TMI, or Text Message Injury. It's what you get when you try to send too many SMSes --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/wireless/0,1382,43875,00.html 

Teenagers throughout the world seem to be typing on their phones more often than they're writing on paper.

"It's saying something that teens in Finland are learning to touch type with their thumbs," said Marc Retting, a member of HannaHodge, a market research firm in Chicago.

Short text message service (SMS) on mobile phones is nearly as popular with users as making voice calls. But some avid SMS users are paying dearly for it.

The growing use of text messaging on mobile phones could result in an epidemic of repetitive strain injuries, Andrew Chadwick, director of the British RSI Association, recently told Britain's Mirror newspaper. RSI occurs when people sit or move in unnatural positions for long periods of time.

Chadwick, who dubbed the new epidemic TMI -- or Text Message Injury -- said children especially are prone to painful swelling and inflammation of the fingers and thumbs from sending so many text messages on their phones.

"We're talking about people making hundreds of tiny repeated movements as they use the mobile keypad," Chadwick said. "Because the movements are small they do not cause the blood to circulate, and that means the fingers are acting like an engine without oil."

See also:
Don't Go Gently Into That SMS
Ergo, By Any Other Name, Hurts
When Your Voice Is All You Have
If Ergo Rules Relax, Do Workers?
Unwired News: The Next Generation
Discover more Net Culture

 

Psychological Research on the Net -- American Psychological Society http://psych.hanover.edu/APS/exponnet.html 

 

Microsoft's main man hosts more than 100 business leaders at a company summit and declares, "I think this next decade will be the big one." --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/exec/0,1370,44056,00.html 

Pioneering e-commerce sites like eBay and Amazon.com are going to be around for a long time, he said, because they're reliable and customers know what they can expect.

But the wane of the dot-coms has altered the high-tech investment landscape, Gates said.

"Some of the mania about this has really changed."

Looking ahead, he said software programs that link computers, telephones and communications devices will change the way business is conducted, bringing improvements in entertainment and in productivity.

Gates said development of broadband links to speed access to the Internet continues to be slow. Because of that, and because of broadband's high cost, Gates said he expects many people will continue to use phone-line connections to the Internet for the next few years.

See also:
Gates Sells Microsoft Shares
XP: 'Your Mother's Windows'
Hard Time for E-Commerce Saint?
Microsoft Judge Ripped in Court
Executive Summary: movers and shakers

William Blake Online - poet, printmaker, visionary. (English Literature and Philosophy) http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/blakeinteractive/ 

Web Hosting For Peachtree and QuickBooks,  by Monty Dillavou --- http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=42457#trans 

Summary e-Controller is a B2B Accounting solutions provider that specializes in services and support to small businesses and accountants who use QuickBooks and Peachtree Software. At this AccountingWeb workshop, Monty Dillavou, President of e-Controller presented information about the company's e-WebHosting System for QuickBooks and Peachtree Software.

e-WebHosting is their Internet based, secure hosting service whereby they host, via their web-enabled, secure servers, QuickBooks and Peachtree software applications along with company data files.

Simply put, this means that a QuickBooks or Peachtree user can move application and data file(s) from their local PC or LAN to e-Controller?s web-enabled, secure servers. The user can then access and work with the QuickBooks or Peachtree file via any Internet connection rather than on just the local machine. The application still looks, runs, interacts and prints the same as the user is used to.

Some of the advantages to this are access from anywhere, anytime, and users can work with their accountants in real time.

The complete transcript is at http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=42457#trans 

Meanwhile, I received the following message from one of the original Webledger providers, NetLedger, that now will purchase your old onsite general ledger system if you upgrade the NetLedger online system --- http://www.netledger.com/ 

Dear Bob,

How would you like $250 - AND the best solution to run your business?

By upgrading to NetLedger 1 System, you will save time, save money, and make your business much more efficient. And for a limited time only, we will buy back your current desktop software for up to $250!

NetLedger 1 System is the answer to all of your business frustrations for two main reasons:

1. NetLedger 1 System is one completely integrated application. This means all of your core business processes - like accounting, sales, payroll, your Web site, and your CRM, for example - work together perfectly in our one application without the need for constantly re-entering data into multiple applications. This "one-stop-shop" power was previously available only to Fortune 500 companies, but now NetLedger has brought that power to all businesses in an easy-to-use and affordable solution, priced at just $99 per month.

2. You use the Internet to access NetLedger 1 System. You and your employees can securely access your key information and run your business from anywhere, at anytime. This complete flexibility will make your entire company significantly more productive immediately. Everyone will have the information they need to succeed right at their fingertips, versus unsecured data stuck in someone's PC. And every time we add new features, you get them instantly, so you never have to spend time and money on costly upgrades again.

Call us at 1-800-netledger today to purchase NetLedger 1 System and receive up to $250 with our 1 System Rebate Offer.
NetLedger [NLMailer@netledger.m0.net] 

Bob Jensen's threads on Webledgers can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/webledger.htm 
It should be noted that these Webledger systems offer more than general ledger accounting.  Business firms may also purchase services to process payrolls, perform billings and collections, manage cash, and maintain inventories.  Contrary to opinions shared by some accountants, your records are probably safer on a Webledger system than they are on a local system that does not have such high technology security and backup systems in place.  It is also possible to process transactions from most any online computer in the world.

Talking to Computers:  A keyboard, monitor and mouse are now standard devices on every personal computer, but that may change—somewhat—in the near future, Scientific American --- http://sciam.com/explorations/2001/052101compu/ 

Display glasses, too, are already a reality, though often as part of wearable computers, which themselves are rare. According to Winograd, they probably won't become popular in the short term. "You don't want to wear special glasses," he says. "You'll be carrying your cell phone anyway. If you're talking long term, your cell phone will be replaced by something like a hearing aid. If everything else goes away and the only reason you're still carrying something is to look at it, then it makes sense to mount it on your face."

So is the end of the current PC near? "The standard screen plus keyboard plus pointing device will die out," Winograd concludes, but adds, "I think you're still going to want to have some times when you sit down, use your full attention and maximize throughput. Not that the current screen and keyboards are optimal, but it'll be approximately that configuration. There are some kinds of things for which workstations are very highly optimized, and you will probably never find anything that will be much better."

RELATED LINKS:

Wearing Your Computer

The Reinvention of Paper

Welcome to the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the annual showcase for the latest in computer and video gaming. And if you're wondering what a stripper's sticky business on a steel pole has to do with video games, well, then you haven't been paying attention to just how big -- and sleazy -- a boy-toy party the computer gaming industry has become --- http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/05/22/e3_2001/index.html 

Deloitte & Touche is out to prove it is still the number one firm when it comes to Big Five recognition of female employees. The firm expects to double its female partner and director ranks over the next five years. http://www.accountingweb.com/item/48313 

From Infobits on June 1, 2001

TUTORIALS ON USING THE WEB FOR SCHOLARLY STUDY

The Resource Discovery Network (RDN) launched the Virtual Training Suite, a collaboration between 30 universities providing 40 tutorials to help people learn more about using the Internet as a source of scholarly information. Tutorial topics cover the categories of engineering and mathematics, humanities, social sciences, business and law, health and life sciences, and physical sciences. The tutorials offer self-directed learning with the help of an expert "tour guide" commissioned from universities, libraries, museums, and research institutes across the United Kingdom. The Virtual Training Suite is on the Web at http://www.vts.rdn.ac.uk/ 

The RDN is a national Internet service for academics and professionals funded by the Higher and Further Education Funding Bodies via the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and by Research Councils such as the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). It is coordinated by the Resource Discovery Network Centre (RDNC), a center run jointly by staff from UKOLN (UK Office for Library and Information Networking at the University of Bath) and King's College London. For more information about the RDN, contact: RDNC, Kings College London, 3rd Floor, Strand Bridge House, 138-142 The Strand, London WC2R 1HH UK; email: info@rdn.ac.uk; Web: http://www.rdn.ac.uk/ 

OPPORTUNITIES FOR NONTRADITIONAL LEARNERS

The Lumina Foundation for Education, a private, independent foundation, addresses issues surrounding financial access, educational attainment, and opportunities for nontraditional learners. The foundation recently published "Funding the 'Infostructure': A Guide to Financing Technology Infrastructure in Higher Education" by Ronald A. Phipps and Jane V. Wellman. The report "makes recommendations that can help campus officials and state and federal policymakers develop regular funding policies for information technology . . . identifies a range of options for funding information technology, examining the advantages and drawbacks of each... [and] urges state and federal policy-makers to address the disparities in institutions' ability to pay for technology." The report is available online at http://www.luminafoundation.org/Publications/New%20Agenda%20Series/infostructofc+title.htm 

For more information about the foundation and its other publications, contact: Lumina Foundation for Education, 30 South Meridian Street, Indianapolis, IN 46204-3503 USA; tel: 317-951-5704; fax: 317-951-5063; Web: http://www.luminafoundation.org/index.htm 

Forwarded by Barry Rice

Taylor & Francis currently publishes over 540 academic peer-reviewed journals across a variety of disciplines. In response to the changing needs of the academic community, we are using the Internet actively to disseminate information about journals in advance of publication.

SARA - Scholarly Articles Research Alerting, is a special email service designed to deliver tables of contents, for any Taylor & Francis, Carfax, Routledge, Spon Press, Martin Dunitz or Psychology Press journal, to anyone who has requested the information. This service is completely free of charge.

All you need to do is register, and you will be sent contents pages of the journal(s) of your choice from that point onwards, in advance of the printed edition. You can request contents pages either for any number of individual titles, or for one or more of our sub-categories or a main category, and you may unsubscribe at any time. For each of your choices, you will receive the relevant bibliographic information: journal title, volume/issue number and the ISSN. You will also receive full contents details, names of authors and the appropriate page numbers from the printed version.

This will give you advance notice of what is being published, making it easier for you to retrieve the exact information you require from the hard copy once it arrives in your library.

Titles that may be of interest to accountants are:

Accounting Business and Financial History The European Accounting Review Accounting Education

To register for this complimentary service, please visit: http://www.tandf.co.uk/sara  and click on the SARA button.

For further information on the above titles, please visit: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journal s

If you have any questions regarding this service, please email: SARA@tandf.co.uk 

The Small Business Knowledge Base at BizMove.com --- http://www.bizmove.com/ 

 

AccountingWEB's Entrepreneur to Accountant Referral Network (E.A.R.N.) program, matching the accounting and financial needs of thousands of small businesses with the talent of the AccountingWEB community. http://www.accountingweb.com/item/39161

Bob Jensen's small business helpers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm 

Black Loyalists: Our History, Our People http://collections.ic.gc.ca/blackloyalists/ 

The latest e-mail worm, Noped, is designed to ferret out the collectors of child pornography and tip off the feds as to their whereabouts. But its tracking methods may be as flawed as the logic behind it --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/technology/0,1282,44112,00.html 

Now that a key House committee has voted to can sex spam, most everyone should be happy, right? Well, it turns out that the bill applies even to non-spam e-mail relating to sex, and legitimate businesses are grumbling --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/politics/0,1283,44088,00.html  

See also:
So Many Worms, So Little Info
New Worm a Marketing Ploy?
Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam
Spam, Or Just Glad to See Me?
Cooking Up a Revised Spam Bill

Underwater Archaeology --- http://www.culture.fr/culture/archeosm/en/ 

From The Rovia Reader Email on May 23, 2001

Publishers Weekly, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Reuters News Service, Boston Business Journal, The Boston Herald and others are reporting Rovia’s success in the online textbook market.

The common themes? Rovia’s unique technology, unsurpassed security and its popularity among professors, students and publishers like Houghton Mifflin and Thompson Learning.

FULL STORY: http://www.imakenews.com/rovia/e_article000022790.cfm?x=13224%2C1252574 

Archives of European Archaeology (AREA) --- http://www.inha.fr/area-archives/ 

If the shoe fits, throw it away!

An e-mail discussion list hosted by VeriSign is no longer, after company criticisms began dominating the threads --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/ebiz/0,1272,44080,00.html 

The company that manages databases for the Internet's most popular names has shut down an e-mail discussion list that had turned into a forum for its critics.

VeriSign Inc. made the announcement on the "Domain-Policy" mailing list Thursday. The decision was effective immediately.

Many of the complaints center on VeriSign's monopoly over the records, a monopoly it received under contract with the U.S. government.

Participants also have ranted about the proper role of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the organization selected by the government in 1998 to oversee naming policies. Many contributors to the list believe ICANN frequently oversteps its bounds.

Discussion forums are available at ICANN's website. Critics have also set one up through ICANNWatch, a watchdog group. Many companies in the business of selling domain names also have smaller lists and message boards.

See also:
ICANN-VeriSign Brouhaha
Furor Over ICANN-VeriSign Deal
Domain Deals Nearly Done
Dot-Biz Land Rush Begins
There's no biz like E-Biz
Discover more Net Culture

Spain's attempt to regulate websites has civil libertarians up in arms, to the point where they're even evoking the memory of Queen Isabella, who ruled Iberia with an iron fist in the 1500s --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/business/0,1367,44110,00.html 

I'm going to miss you old scout!  

From the Scout Report for the Social Sciences on May 29, 2001

The Last Issue of the _Scout Report for Social Sciences & Humanities_ The Internet Scout Project is sad to announce that this is the final issue of the _Scout Report for Social Sciences & Humanities_. We have been unable to secure funding to continue publishing our subject-specific reports. The last issue of the _Scout Report for Business & Economics_ will be May 31, and the last issue of the _Scout Report for Science & Engineering_ will be June 20. We have, however, no immediate plans to cease publishing our flagship report, the _Scout Report_. Many thanks to our loyal readers.

Scout Report Archives Improvements http://durden.cs.wisc.edu/archives/index.html 

Three on Thinking Critical Thinking On The Web: 

Two from the National Library of Canada: Images in the News: _
     Canadian Illustrated News_ http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/cin/  
     Sheet Music from Canada's Past http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/sheetmusic/index-e.html 

Scribbling Women [RealPlayer] http://www.scribblingwomen.org/ 
This fine resource uses radio dramatizations produced by the Public Media Foundation to teach prominent texts by American women writers -- the same writers Nathaniel Hawthorne, fearing for his livelihood, cursed as a "damned mob of scribbling women." Currently, the Website offers dramatizations of three texts: _The Yellow Wallpaper_ by Charlotte Gilman, _A Wagner Matinee_ by Willa Cather, and _A Jury of Her Peers_ by Susan Glaspell. In addition to the full audio (offered in RealPlayer) of the radio dramatizations, each dramatization is accompanied by an essay offering a literary interpretation and another discussing the work's literary and historical context. Further reading, a biography, and sample lesson plans are also posted. Seven other works are also covered on-site, containing all of the above materials with the exception of the audio dramatization. These works are _The Schoolmaster's Progress_ by Caroline Kirkland, _Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl_ by Harriet Jacobs, _Life in the Iron Mills_ by Rebecca Harding Davis, _A Whisper in the Dark_ by Louisa May Alcott, _Louisa_ by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, _Hate is Nothing_ by Marita Bonner, and _The Bones of Louella Brown_ by Ann Petry.

The U.S. Government Knows How to Sell Online (e-Commerce)
From InformationWeek Online May 30, 2001

Uncle Sam Rings Up $3.6B In Online Sales

Look out, Jeff Bezos. Amazon.com Inc.'s $2.8 billion in annual revenue has been eclipsed by another E-commerce contender--a purveyor of flame throwers, burros, and Lamborghini Diablos that generated $3.6 billion in sales last year. The mastermind behind this E-retailing juggernaut? Uncle Sam.

That revelation comes from a recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and Federal Computer Week magazine, which tracked the government's E-commerce activity. Of course, straight revenue comparisons may not be fair. After all, it's not exactly a level playing field for Amazon since the government's $3.6 billion came from 164 sites. That was a bit of a shock for Allan Holmes, editor-in-chief of Federal Computer Week. "When we first started, I had no idea how many sites we would find. I thought maybe a few dozen." Plus, that revenue figure would be significantly lower without the Treasury Department, which generated $3.3 billion from the sale of bonds and notes.

But the remaining $300 million in sales is still a significant achievement, considering the government hasn't done much to promote its efforts. Looking to bid on luxury items such as helicopters or sports cars? Try Bid4Assets, which sells property seized by the U.S. Marshals Service in criminal raids. "The federal government has always had surplus property and auctioned off property seized in drug busts. Now they're able to do it more efficiently and reach more people," Holmes says.

Viruses and e-mails get all the attention and fearful reaction, but hidden programs known as Trojans can be far more devastating -- to computers and lives --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,43981,00.html 

There may be a ghost in your machine -- a hidden program known as a Trojan horse -- that allows a malicious hacker to spy on you, ruin your data and computer and, in extreme cases, wreck your business or your life.

Attackers have used Trojans to surreptitiously observe the users of infected machines over their webcams, and can also listen to conversations transmitted via the infected computer's microphone.

Trojans have also been used to siphon funds out of electronic bank accounts, stalk ex-lovers, spy on business associates and rifle through the contents of hard drives in search of sensitive information.

Viruses, with their sexy names and ability to spread around the globe in a matter of hours, get a lot of media attention. But viruses are usually easy to detect and eradicate. Security experts say that the real threat to system security and users' sanity are the hard-to-spot Trojan programs.

David Kroll of Finjan Software, a firm that develops security applications, calls Trojans the "silent killer."

"Last year there was a bank in California, (that) I cannot identify by name, that was extorted for approximately $500,000 by a hacker who had BackOrifice installed on a vice president's PC. The bank had no idea how this extortionist was getting all this inside information on the bank," Kroll said.

See also:
Discuss this story on Plastic.com
Security Mavens Invaded by Trojan
Beware the Computer Zombies
Wait! Don't Forward That E-Mail
Infostructure strengthens your backbone
Read more Technology news

One of the great masters.  
About Johannes Vermeer Art --- http://www.about-vermeer-art.com/vermeer/index.html 
(Don't forget to click the enlarge button for a really big showing of each painting.)

The FBI's "Operation Cyber Loss" puts the hammer down on schemes that bilked thousands of consumers out of $117 million --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,43981,00.html 

A magazine dedicated to a green and friendly environment
Orion Online --- http://www.orionsociety.org/index2.html 

Deep Web forwarded by The Webmonkey on May 18, 2001

Apparently search engines reach less than one percent of the sites out there. So how do we get to the other 99+ percent known as the The Deep Web? It helps when the sites want to be found and we know where to look.

"How to go about digging deeper on the Web," by Jackie Loohauis,  JS Online, May 12, 2001 --- http://www.jsonline.com/enter/netlife/may01/deepweb13051101.asp 

Traditional search engines have access to only a fraction of 1% of what exists on the Web, according to BrightPlanet, an Internet search company, noting that as many as 550 billion pieces of content are hidden from most search engine scrutiny. These documents make up what is known as "The Deep Web."

Undercover and undercovered, the vast reservoir of the Deep Web is estimated to be 500 times larger than the "surface" World Wide Web. And, according to BrightPlanet, the Deep Web is the largest growing category of new information on the Net.

"There's a huge amount of information you can't find entirely or easily via a search engine," says Net search guru Gary Price, a librarian at George Washington University, and co-author of the upcoming book "The Invisible Web" (CyberAge Books, $29.95). "The material on the Web is unorganized, very ephemeral. There's no rhyme or reason, no language control. The Web is a huge directory that's very hard to get at."

What's hidden? What makes up the depths of The Deep Web? The biggest part of this invisible Web is information stored in databases - massive libraries of Web content unsearchable through such tools as Yahoo! and Google. You have to know they exist before you can search them.

Such a database would be the Government Printing Office listings at www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/aces/aaces002.html . There are thousands more.

Other aspects of the Net remain hidden in deep waters, too.

"There are tons of things out there," says Tara Calishain of Researchbuzz.com, an online Internet guide. "Pay content sources, lots of genealogy sources. The Library of Congress ( www.loc.gov ) has fabulous collections you can't find on Alta Vista."

Several types of information are most elusive for search engines - bibliographies, multimedia files, information that comes in .pdf files (Adobe's portable document format). "News is dreadful, says Calishain. "Search engines don't cover it. It's tough to find breaking news."

Some sites, such as Amazon.com have sections so far from the surface of their home pages that they, too, can be classified as Deep Web, says David Crane, a spokesman for search engine Google ( www.google.com ). An example, says Crane, is "the section that specifically offers a 'portable compact disc player by Sony.'"

But the deepest Deep Web drop-off is in the category of government, and it's getting deeper.

"More and more city and county governments are putting their offerings on the Web. The State of Pennsylvania has a new crime reporting database ( www.ucr.psp.state.pa.us/UCR/ComMain.asp  ), and more and more of that kind of thing is coming up now," says Calishain.

. . .

Two groups of Web experts are also making it their business to provide searchers with information on Deep Web sources.

Calishain's Researchbuzz.com ( www.researchbuzz.com ) chronicles search engines, new data collections ("Online Legal Information in Denmark, Norway and Sweden"), browser software and other Deep Web mining tools that "a research librarian, journalist, educator and others would find helpful, from the perspective of someone who's really going to use it."

And in the early '90s at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Internet Scout Project ( www.scout.cs.wisc.edu  ) was started with funding from the National Science Foundation to "inform the higher education and research communities about resources on the Internet," says Scout Director Rachael Bower. The project posts detailed reports each Friday to keep searchers, including the general public, "up to speed" on Deep Web sources.

The Scout Project is driven by five editors who have spent years creating bookmarks and automatically checking changes in existing sources; there's a searchable archive of 11,500 sites available.

"We do supply Deep Web information. A lot of the things you get from Scout an Alta Vista search wouldn't get, or it's buried. Think of it as being a card catalog with information about information," says Bower. "It's one of the first attempts to get librarians to catalog Web resources. All of the editors doing the cataloging are graduate students in the subject or in library science."

 

"RTFM: A Guide to Online Research,"  by Steve Champeon, Webmonkey, February 23, 2001 --- http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/00/08/index2a.html 

 

So, then, why do so many feel the need to ignore the vast resources available to them, publicly and repeatedly offer up disinformation, and generally offend the basic tenets of the liberal arts education? What can be done to help these people, so obviously confused by their encounter with a badly constructed tutorial, or ruined by unmonitored self-study? I mulled the problem over a strong cup of Kenya AA and suddenly struck my fist into my palm, shouting, "Eureka! We must introduce them to the primary sources!"

 

One of the great things about being a Web designer or developer is that you have access to an enormous collection of tutorials, documentation, specifications, and related materials, no matter what part of the Web you work with.

 

. . . 

The IETF produces several different kinds of "standards":

 

. . .

Armed with this knowledge, go forth and uphold the social contract of the Internet: "Be conservative in what you do, and liberal in what you accept from others." The conservatism is the natural result of having a good reference library at your fingertips. The liberalism extends only so far and doesn't include accepting an uninformed line of bull from somebody on a mailing list.

Related links

Take a look at Search the Invisible Web at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm 

 

Also see my threads on RDF and other standards at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/xmlrdf.htm 

 

 

High End Online Course Authoring Systems

 

Cantra's Mindlever --- http://www.centra.com/mindlever.asp 
Blended eLearning programs that combine live interactive sessions with access to self-paced, task-specific content provide the most powerful and cost-effective learning solutions. By integrating MindLever's learning content management systems with Centra's live eLearning and real-time collaboration products, Centra is the first to provide a truly integrated solution for blended eLearning and mission-critical knowledge delivery.

With this combined product offering, organizations will be able to extend the power of their Centra eLearning solution by adding the ability to index business content for easy retrieval, on-demand access to extensive multimedia knowledge directories of learning content in industry-standard (SCORM-compliant) formats, and personalized eLearning programs. The extended capabilities of the Centra eLearning infrastructure will enhance the value that Centra already provides organizations - the ability to rapidly and effectively deliver knowledge to employees, customers, and partners to improve business performance.

Cantra's Symposium 5.0 ™ for Microsoft BackOffice Symposium 5.0 for Microsoft BackOffice leverages your IT investment in Microsoft BackOffice by enhancing the capabilities of this platform to include the delivery and management of live, interactive eLearning. Through seamless integration with BackOffice technology, Centra's award-winning capabilities are extended to include threaded discussion forums, Outlook calendar notification to provide users with a single view of their appointments and online classes, and robust database management and reporting tools available in SQL Server.

Received high marks for integration of Microsoft Office software (in a relational database) as reported in a University of Wisconsin study --- http://www.zdnet.com/eweek/stories/general/0,11011,2717916,00.html 


Hypercosm --- http://www.hypercosm.com/  
Hypercostm is a leading provider of highly interactive 3D web-based visual solutions for the eCRM market. Extending beyond text-based interaction currently provided by other eCRM solutions, Hypercosm's technology provides compact transmission of interactive 3D graphics, enhancing the user's web experience, and helping companies acquire, retain and better serve their customers at a fraction of their current costs.

Received high marks for interactive objects and graphics as reported in a University of Wisconsin study --- http://www.zdnet.com/eweek/stories/general/0,11011,2717916,00.html 

 

Macromedia's Web Learning Studio --- http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/proom/pr/2000/weblearning.html 

San Francisco, California —November 15, 2000—Macromedia, Inc. (NASDAQ: MACR) today announced the Macromedia Web Learning Studio, the complete authoring solution for online learning. The studio includes Macromedia Authorware 5.2, a new version of the leading authoring product for online learning, with Web authoring standards such as Macromedia Flash and Macromedia Dreamweaver. The integrated authoring studio enables developers, instructional designers, and subject matter experts to create and deploy engaging, standards-based learning applications for delivery on the Web, corporate intranets, and via CD-ROMs.

"We have found that the majority of our learning developers are using HTML and Macromedia Flash content in their online courses," said Pat Brogan, vice president of education and learning at Macromedia. "The Macromedia Web Learning Studio gives developers all the software they need to address the full range of application and delivery requirements — from simple Web-based tutorials to sophisticated, rich-media simulations."

The Macromedia Web Learning Studio includes all new versions of Macromedia authoring products and features Authorware 5.2, the latest release of the leading software for creating rich-media learning for Web, LANs and CD-ROM. New features in version 5.2 are support for Macromedia Flash 5, a robust new scripting editor, Windows controls, assessment Knowledge Objects, and enhanced, standards-compliant data tracking capabilities. The studio also supports industry standards to ensure the learning content it creates can be easily tracked by learning management systems.

"We are delighted to see Authorware adding support for leading-edge technologies like Macromedia Flash 5," said Mark Steiner, manager of learning services, Chicago, for marchFIRST, Inc.. "We rely heavily upon Authorware's ability to integrate a diverse variety of media types and then rapidly add logic and interactivity to deliver successful online learning courseware for our clients."

"We are impressed with Macromedia's ability to integrate leading edge solutions, like Authorware and Macromedia Flash 5," according to the global training division of FedEx Express. "With Macromedia delivering cutting edge Web authoring tools, we can focus on delivering on-time training and packages."

To enhance the power of the new studio, Macromedia is also providing free learning extensions for Macromedia Flash 5 and Dreamweaver 4, including the now free CourseBuilder extension for Dreamweaver. These extensions and other learning resources will be available from the Learning Resource Center on the Macromedia Web site (http://www.macromedia.com/learning). "Getting Started with Online Learning," a how-to guide for developers written by online learning experts, is also available with the studio and as a free download from the Learning Resource Center. The learning extensions enable the development of online learning content with Macromedia Flash and Dreamweaver by providing pre-built navigational frameworks, learning interactions, quizzes and built-in data tracking.

Received high marks for being the most complete authoring system available in the market as reported in a University of Wisconsin study --- http://www.zdnet.com/eweek/stories/general/0,11011,2717916,00.html 

 

 

NYUonline's iAuthor --- http://www.nyuonline.com/vn_6/vnav_06.html?development/development.html 

The NYUonline homepage is at http://www.nyuonline.com/ 

This system is a carefully constructed set of development tools combined with a development process that reflects the best practices for creating e-Learning courseware in learning object format.

 

Received high marks for metadata tagging and a mulit-user database as reported in a University of Wisconsin study --- http://www.zdnet.com/eweek/stories/general/0,11011,2717916,00.html 
But the $50,000 price tag is a bummer.

 

Click2learn's Multimedia ToolBook --- http://www.click2learn.com/ 

 

Forwarded by Dan Gode

eWEEK's comment in the article "Lessons Learned - eWEEK grades tools that build lessons for distance learners" about Click2learn's reason for withdrawing from the evaluation is incorrect, and we are in the process of obtaining a correction.

Click2learn did not state that we were de-emphasizing ToolBook. In fact, Click2learn engineering is actively working on future releases of ToolBook. We are very excited about the future of ToolBook and are planning some innovative capabilities for our future versions. Our plans will ensure that ToolBook not only continues to be the leading desktop authoring tool but also has some of the best enterprise server components to complement it. We will be announcing these shortly.....

Click2learn withdrew from the review because eWEEK would not disclose to us the product vendors who agreed to participate in this review, nor specific details about the parameters of the shoot-out. Our review policy is to require this information be disclosed to us before we participate in product reviews of this kind to ensure that the review will be a fair judge of product performance and customer needs.

Thanks very much for your continued support!

Brad Crain VP,GM Learning Tools Click2learn, Inc.

Click2learn ( http://www.click2learn.com/ ) declined to participate in the eVal study that I described in my May 21 edition of New Bookmarks.  You can read about this study at the University of Wisconsin by clicking on http://www.zdnet.com/eweek/stories/general/0,11011,2717916,00.html 

 

If the above report is removed from the Web, you can read my summary at 
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/book01q2.htm#052101 

 

History and Future of Course Authoring Technologies
(Including Predictions for the 21st Century and Knowledge Portals)
  http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/290wp/290wp.htm 

 

Course Management System Demos from TLT SUNY --- http://tlt.suny.edu/cms.htm 

 

If you are interested in using a Course Management System (CMS) to support traditional classroom based courses there are many tools from which to choose. Course Management Systems offer different features and making a decision about which CMS product is right for you or your campus depends on many factors. One way to learn about these products is to take a test drive.  The links below will take you to the place on the website of the vendors of these products where you can see a demonstration or "try before you buy".  

Angel new and free Eduprise Intralearn Topclass
Blackboard.com and
CourseInfo 4.0  

e-College		 FirstClass

 Quickplace
Virtual U

e-Education
Prometheus new
Toolbook II Instructor and Assistant
WebCT 3.0 demo new  and
 Instant Trial Course

Here is a list of SUNY Colleges and the CMS Products they use

As you will notice from the list of CMS products in use at SUNY  that three products, Blackboard, TopClass and WebCT are most commonly used.  In many ways this reflects general trends in CMS use in higher education. However, recently Blackboard and WebCT have seen vastly increasing adoption, whereas many colleges have shifted away from TopClass as WBT (makers of the product) have shifted their focus to corporate clients.  Prometheus is gaining some attention recently and is used by a few dozen higher education institutions, most prominently George Washington University, Vanderbilt, and NYUonline.

 

Send Out (Broadcast) Your Streaming Multimedia on the Internet
PlayStream --- http://www.playstream.com/ 
You don't even have to have your own Web server.

Want to play your audio & video on the Internet? PlayStream now makes it even easier to add streaming video and audio to your Web site. We simplify streaming media technology, so you can play multi-media online, from corporate Web casts to personal videos, that enriches, educates and entertains your viewers.

   
  Frequently Asked Questions
3-Minute Streaming Lesson
Sample Showcase
What Our Clients Are Saying		  
 
  Encoding
Our Technology
Pay-Per-View
Affiliate Program

Frequently Asked Questions --- http://www.playstream.com/home/faq.asp 

What is PlayStream?

What is streaming media?

I have audio & video. Now what?

What do you mean by format?

How does PlayStream fit into this?

I only want to stream audio, or flash animation, not video. Are you still able to meet my needs economically?

Does PlayStream charge a setup fee?

Does PlayStream require long-term contracts?

Does PlayStream offer different price packages?  See http://www.playstream.com/pricing.asp 

Why PlayStream?

How do I tell the difference between a good streaming provider and a bad one?

Can I just send you my material and let you take care of the rest? What if I don't have a Web site?

Bob Jensen's threads on authoring software can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/290wp/290wp.htm 

Adobe Streaming Media Collection --- http://www.adobe.com/products/smcoll/main.html 

The Adobe® Streaming Media Collection integrates comprehensive and powerful streaming media, interactive animation, and Web design and management capabilities to deliver the cost-effective toolset professionals need to create dynamic Web sites. The four products' cross-platform interoperability and extensive integration with Adobe Photoshop® and Adobe Illustrator® software help you learn quickly, work productively, and experience the extraordinary depth of features and functionality you¹ve come to expect from award-winning Adobe applications.

Bob Jensen's threads on authoring software can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/290wp/290wp.htm 

Adobe ePaper and eBook --- http://www.adobe.com/epaper/main.html 

Adobe  Acrobat®
The best way to share documents online
Adobe  Acrobat® Business Tools
Interact with Adobe PDF using collaboration and Web capture tools
Adobe  Acrobat® Capture®
Bring your paper documents to life on the Web
Adobe  Acrobat® Distiller® Server
Centralized Adobe PDF creation for your entire network
Adobe  Acrobat® eBook Reader™
Read high-fidelity eBooks on your notebook or desktop computer
Adobe  Acrobat® Messenger™
The paper-to-digital dispatch center
Adobe  Portable Document Format
The open de facto standard for electronic document distribution
Adobe  Acrobat® Reader®
View and print Adobe PDF files
Adobe  Content Server
Package and distribute Adobe PDF eBooks directly from your Web site
Adobe  Document Server
A Web server companion for making PDF files more accessible
Create Adobe PDF Online
Convert documents into Adobe PDF files with this Web-hosted service
Adobe  Third-party plug-ins
Enhance your favorite Adobe software with additional special effects, productivity tools, and other add-ons from select companies
Adobe  Type Library
The world's broadest selection of high-quality typefaces

From Syllabus Web Email on May 25, 2001

Adobe Targets Higher Education with eBook U

Adobe Systems Incorporated recently launched Adobe eBook U, a joint project between Adobe and a select group of higher edu- cation institutions to explore the use and impact of e-books on educational environments. As part of the program, students and educators at participating campuses will be able to exper- ience course materials that will be made available as e-books, based on the Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF). Partnering institutions receive Adobe's software and training to create, encrypt, and distribute Adobe PDF-based e-book content such as textbooks, course packs, and customized course readers. In turn, Adobe will have the opportunity to learn and exam- ine the way e-books are being adopted in institutions of higher education. Participating institutions include: MIT Sloan School of Management, Occidental College, Miami-Dade Community College Medical Center Campus, Mills College, Scottsdale Community College, University of Maryland Univer- sity College, University of Utah Center for Advanced Medical Technologies, Tufts University, and University of Wisconsin.

For more information, visit http://www.adobe.com. 

CraftyGal is a great arts and crafts site at http://www.craftygal.com/ 
There are also a lot of helpful household hints.

A University of Virginia professor uses a self-written computer program to catch students who plagiarize term papers. Over 100 students are being investigated and may be expelled. --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/school/0,1383,43561,00.html 

A professor at the University of Virginia has nabbed 122 students for plagiarism using a computer program he wrote himself.

Louis Bloomfield, who teaches an introductory-level physics course called "How Things Work," wrote the program after he "heard rumors that papers were coming in more than once."

Update from Syllabus Web on May 21, 2001

Computer Programs Detect Plagiarism

A computer program, designed by University of Virginia physics Professor Louis Bloomfield, searches for similar phrasing of six consecutive words or more in student papers. He ran 1,500 term papers submitted by e-mail over the last few years through the program and found 122 had suspiciously similar wording, including 60 papers that were nearly identical. If found guilty of plagiarism, the students who turned in the papers could be expelled or stripped of recently awarded degrees from the school. Computer science professors are using software pro- grams to identify suspiciously similar strings of code in programming assignments. The Measure of Software Similarity (MOSS) program gained wide use after its creator, the University of California, Berkeley's Alex Aiken, distributed it free to fellow programming professors around the world in 1997. Another service, http://www.turnitin.com , takes a digital fingerprint of the student's paper, then scans the Internet and the group's own database looking for matches, highlighting passages that match and providing links to the online source. Another service, http://www.findsame.com , scans the Web for matching sentences or whole documents, instead of just keywords.

See also:
New Toys for Cheating Students
Phony Degrees a Hot Net Scam
Catching Digital Cheaters
Get schooled in Making the Grade

Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm 

Android World (History and Future of Robotics) --- http://www.androidworld.com/ 

There are more students of English in China than there are people in the United States.
Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way, as quoted in an email message from Ivan Herman

From Syllabus Web Email on May 21, 2001

Kaplan Launches Online TOEFL Skills Assessment

Kaplan, Inc. recently launched TOEFL Skills Assessment, an entirely online introduction to the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL). Accessible at Kaplan's test preparation and admissions Web site http://www.kaptest.com , the TOEFL Skills Assessment expands access to the hundreds of thousands of international students applying to American universities and professional schools. Students first log onto the assessment portion, which consists of 75 questions including listening comprehension, structure and reading comprehension. After completing the assessment, students receive targeted instructional feedback on TOEFL question types and test-taking strategies as well as diagnostic feedback on the students' own test-taking strengths and weaknesses. The TOEFL Skills Assessment is priced at $20, and students can work through the program in three to four hours.

Richard Stallman strikes back at Microsoft
The head of the Free Software Foundation took his message to New York University, rebutting Microsoft's earlier snub of the GPL and open source --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0106015/2766341/ 

IT Ethics and Whistle Blowing Dilemmas:  Caught between a rock and hard place
Brian D. Jaffe: Steering your way through IT's murky moral waters has never been more challenging --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0106016/2764005/ 

From Syllabus Web Email on May 21, 2001

Test.com Launches a New Web Site and a New ASP Model

Test.com, Inc. has released a new Web site at http://www.test.com/ . The online test and test prep center serves students, HR and training professionals and educators as a mini-portal with thousands of interactive, instantly scored tests and practice tests. Now, with its new Private Accounts program, it also serves as an ASP (Applica- tion Service Provider) to permit colleges and universities and pre-K-12 schools, among others, to set up their own private test and survey centers. Following instructions at the site, users can set up these private areas with the look and feel of their own sites, including background colors, logos, and other identifiers. Private Accounts subscribers can enter their own assessments, quizzes, tests, and surveys free through the Test.com authoring programs, Create A Test and Create A Survey. Test and survey results are instantly and automatically e-mailed to the subscriber's administrators, or they can appear instantly online for the client's test and survey takers. Or Test.com can report instant results both ways, via e-mail and online. Survey results can be transferred directly to the client's database.

State of the Beach - assesses the health of America's waters --- http://www.surfrider.org/stateofthebeach/ 

The Scout Research Isaac Project --- http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/research/isaac/ 

BACKGROUND

Finding useful information on the web can be difficult. In 1997 this was becoming increasingly apparent, and more and more organizations began working to improve the situation by creating small, stand-alone directories of high-quality Internet resources. While these directories in many cases proved to be invaluable tools, in some sense they just pushed the problem up one level, requiring the user to find the pertinent directories and search each one for the desired resources. The Isaac project was born out of a desire to solve this problem.

PURPOSE

The Isaac Network provides a means to link these small, stand-alone Internet resource directories by allowing groups to link together geographically- or organizationally-disparate collections of Internet resource description metadata, providing users with the capability of searching through all of the linked collections via a single, coherent web interface. The base standard metadata fields for Isaac systems are based on Dublin Core, and allow information to be queried based an array of standard fields present in all collections, including title, subject, author, and description.

TECHNOLOGY

To insure compatibility and extensibility, the Isaac software runs on readily-available platforms and uses well-established protocols for data storage and intercommunication. The primary development and target operating system for Isaac is Linux. For directory queries and intercommunication Isaac uses LDAP, and for index generation and exchange, Isaac makes use of CIP.

THE FUTURE

In November 2000, after a ten-month lull, development has begun on version 2 of the Isaac software. Principle goals for the new version include:

Better Scalability - When deployed in its initial incarnation, the Isaac software requires a full-connected network, which limits long-term scalability. Version 2 of the Isaac software will include a hub / cache mechanism to remove this limitation.

Data Import Tools - The data that an organization may want to make available via the Isaac network may have been originally stored in many forms. Version 2 of Isaac will include a set of core tools intended to assist in converting data for use with Isaac.

Easier Installation - The goal is to make setting up an Isaac node a near-turnkey process, to minimize the technical resources required to make a collection of metadata available via Isaac.

The initial alpha release of Isaac v2 is expected to be available in the Spring of 2001. If your organization may be interested in participating in the alpha or beta testing or would like to make use of the production release of Isaac, please send a note to scout@cs.wisc.edu to let us know of your interest.

RESOURCES

A Distributed Architecture for Resource Discovery Using Metadata

Originally published in the June, 1998 issue of D-Lib magazine, this article gives a good overview of the technology and issues behind Isaac.

The Isaac Network: LDAP and Distributed Metadata for Resource Discovery

Presented at the 1999 IEEE Metadata conference, this paper covers the concepts and general principles used by Isaac, and briefly discusses some of the technological choices made during its implementation.

Isaac Demonstration Search Page

A search page set up for testing on top of a cluster of Isaac nodes running at systems hosted by Scout and several European collaborators.

CURRENT AND PROSPECTIVE ISAAC NETWORK PARTICIPANTS

MathGuide, Lower Saxony State and University Library G?ttingen SSG-FI

GeoGuide, Lower Saxony State and University Library G?ttingen SSG-FI

InSite , Cornell Law Library

Infomine, University of California

Curricular Resource Library, Project CuRL

LSU Digital Library, Louisiana State University

BUBL LINK, BUBL Information Service

History Matters, City University of New York /George Mason University

Scriptorium, Duke University Libraries

Internet Pointer Guide, Technical Knowledge Center & Library of Denmark (DTV)

Energy & Environmental Information Resources Center (EEIRC), University of Louisiana at Lafayette

Librarians' Index to the Internet, Berkeley SunSITE

EdNA, Education Network Australia

Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library (EEVL), Heriot-Watt University Library

OMNI: Organising Medical Networked Information, University of Nottingham

SOSIG, UK Resource Discovery Network

AMICO, Art Museum Image Consortium

Internet Public Library, University of Michigan, School of Information

Marriage, Women and the Law, 1815-1914: Studies in Scarlet, Research Library Group

AgEcon Search: Research in Agricultural and Applied Economics, University of Minnesota Libraries

ELVIS!: Elec. Library Virtual Info. Services, Seneca College

 

BOOKS, BOOKS, AND MORE BOOKS
Guardian Unlimited Books: Top 10s (Definitely British) http://books.guardian.co.uk/top10s 
There are a lot more than 10 listed.

Latest additions

Joan Smith: books for a more moral society

Howard Sounes: music biographies

Martin Gorst: science books

Fiction

Anne Enright: slim volumes

Alison Hennegan: lesbian books

Niall Griffiths: books from Wales

Jeff Noon: fluid fiction

Matt Thorne: 'New Puritan' novels

Rob Grant: comedy science fiction

Gillian Slovo: South African books

Marian Keyes: relationship novels

William Sutcliffe: relationship novels

Michele Hanson: books about mothers and daughters

Robert McCrum: favourite books of the 20th century

Peter Ho Davies: short story collections

Kate Atkinson: favourite books

Joanna Trollope: 19th-century novels

Magnus Mills: favourite books

Tariq Ali: favourite books

Libby Brooks: novels by women

Jenny Colgan: comic novels

Jilly Cooper: favourite novels

Crime

Toby Litt: crime fiction

Mike Phillips: crime fiction

Poetry

Andrew Motion: poetry collections

Philosophy

Peter Singer: books on ethics

Mary Warnock: books of philosophy

John Marenbon: books of philosophy

Classics

Professor Jean E Howard: books on Shakespeare

Adrian Poole: dramatic tragedies

Science fiction

Jon Courtenay Grimwood: cult science fiction

Norman Spinrad: favourite novels

Dick Jude: science fiction

Children's and teens

Jacqueline Wilson: children's books

Politics

David Walker and Polly Toynbee: books on New Labour

Alistair Beaton: New Labour bollocks

Hugo Young: books on the European Union

Ewen MacAskill: books on politics

Julian Critchley: favourite books

Jeffrey Archer: favourite political books

Derek Draper: favourite political books

Culture

Linda Grant: Jewish books

John Tusa: favourite books on culture

Media

Alan Rusbridger: favourite books

Jon Snow: favourite books

Mohamed Al Fayed: favourite books

John Dugdale: media books

John Hegarty: books for would-be advertisers

Arts and entertainment

Steve Bell: comic books

Malcolm McLaren: favourite books

Mariella Frostrup: books most likely to impress...

Alex James: favourite books

Caroline Sullivan: books on rock and pop

Alice Nutter: music books

Science and nature

Susan Blackmore: favourite books

Tim Radford: science books

Computing and the net

Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday: books about the internet

Robin Houston: books on programming

House and garden

Anthony Bourdain: books about food

Matthew Fort: classic cookbooks

Malcolm Gluck: books on wine

History

Simon Schama: popular history

Richard Vinen: history books

Business

Jonathan Maitland: business books

Reference

Richard Gollner: how to get published

Travel

Gary Younge: travel books

 

Entertainment History
Bob Hope and American Variety --- http://lcweb.loc.gov/exhibits/bobhope/ 

Scot Petersen: Linux will never replace Windows or the Mac as an OS for the masses -- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0105296/2763999/ 

 

Civil Rights Center http://www.dol.gov/dol/oasam/crchome.htm 

 

 

A database on international sports and athletics --- sponet.de  --- http://www.sponet.de/ 

 

 

From Information Week email on May 31, 2001

 

Compaq Walks E-Business Tightrope

Houston--Compaq knows what it's like to be an e-commerce outsider. For years, the computer maker has struggled to use the Internet to compete with direct seller Dell while maintaining its relationships with reseller partners.

Compaq now is convinced it can have it both ways. It's giving resellers Web tools to enhance the services they provide Compaq's enterprise customers, while attacking Dell by increasing its emphasis on direct Web sales. Compaq next month will introduce a portal that consolidates two existing Web sites that coordinate sales and support activities with partners.

"We see the definition of e-business as not just selling stuff on the Web or Webifying existing applications or giving customers instant access to information," said Compaq CIO Bob Napier. "It's about having an interactive collaboration between Compaq and its partners." 

Read on: http://update.internetweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eDpE0Bdl6n0V30OV80Aq 

 

Experience Washington (Travel, History, Art, and Entertainment)--- http://www.experiencewashington.com/ 

Living Edens: Costa Rica (PBS) --- http://www.pbs.org/edens/costarica

Turkey Guide (Travel) --- http://www.turkeyguide.com/ 

 

"Surgeons See into Their Patients," by Lori Valigra, MIT's Technology Review, May 25, 2001 --- http://www.techreview.com/web/valigra/valigra052501.asp 

The 3-D surgery system, called the Cbyon Suite, includes a personal computer, a high-resolution flat panel display, an optical tracking device and sophisticated software that helps guide a physician through neurosurgery, biopsies or other procedures.

"Surgeons usually look at images in 2-D and then imagine them in 3-D, which leaves it to the surgeon's knowledge of anatomy. Our system lets them see the anatomy in 3-D, giving the surgeon an extra level of confidence," says Ramin Shahidi, chief technology officer and founder of Cbyon. Shahidi is on leave from Stanford University, where he developed the Cbyon technology.

The Cbyon system has so far been used for ear, nose and throat operations, as well as brain and spinal surgeries. In the future, the company hopes new technologies like 3-D ultrasound will make the system useful for soft tissue operations, such as heart or breast procedures.

 

This site would like to send you a one-minute learning video each and every day.
Icuna --- http://www.icuna.com/ 

 

A study of time billing for library research 

Syllabus e-News, Resources, and Trends May 29, 2001

Palm, Inc. a provider of mobile and wireless Internet solutions and handheld computers, and West Group, a provider of e-infor-mation and solutions to the U.S. legal market, are working with Stanford University's Law School on a six-month wireless hand- held technology initiative. The 50-person student and faculty program is part of the school's overall wireless initiative and allows law school students to communicate, research, pre- pare for exams, and manage their studies remotely. West Group is providing wireless access to Westlaw legal research service, and six e-book titles that will give students remote access to frequently used legal information. West Group and other soft- ware companies--PDA Verticals, Ury Fischer Esq., NearSpace, Town Compass and Elite.com--are providing legal, Stanford- specific and time-and-billing software. The initiative incorporates a three-month training program and a number of focus groups.

For more information, visit http://www.law.stanford.edu. 

 

Connected Learning Solution:  WebCT  Update
Syllabus e-News, Resources, and Trends May 29, 2001

Partnership Provides Integrated Connected Learning Solution

SCT, WebCT, and Campus Pipeline, Inc.--the three companies that earlier joined forces to create the Product Integration Alliance--have announced the availability of their Connected Learning Solution. The Connected Learning Solution is a pro- duct suite that integrates all major campus technologies so that colleges and universities can improve student services, simplify and reduce the time to deploy technologies, and streamline administrative processes. The Connected Learning Solution combines information, systems, learning tools, on- line services, and communication tools through a single point of access for all campus constituents. It provides access to personalized information, online courses and other e-learning resources, administrative services, community information, and communication tools.

For more information, visit 
http://www.campuspipeline.com  or 
http://www.webct.com  or 
http://www.sct.com .

 

Math/Science Newsletter
The Spring 2001 issue of the Math/Science Online newsletter is now available at http://www.math.tamu.edu/ms-online . This issue contains reviews of two mathematics software packages for teaching: LiveMath, and ODE Architect.

Net pirates nab TV episodes from the sky --- http://cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-6030033.html?tag=tp_pr 

The open deserts of Nevada are perfect for double-wide trailers, 10-foot satellite dishes--and getting tomorrow's TV shows today.

For years, a dwindling crowd of tech-savvy satellite TV subscribers has had the ability to tap freely into the satellite streams meant for affiliate TV stations, seeing shows such as "Star Trek: Voyager" or "The Simpsons" days before the rest of the country. The TV networks have done little to stop this because few people were affected.

But now these "pre-air" shows have started appearing on the Internet and are being traded like songs were in the early days of MP3 music--a practice known as TVRip.

Centre for Counterintelligence and Security Studies --- http://www.cicentre.com/ 

Intel on Tuesday quietly announced the commercial availability of its first 64-bit processor, a major milestone in a seven-year development effort --- http://www.eweek.com/a/pcwt0105293/2766267/ 

Piet Mondrian: The Transatlantic Paintings --- http://www.artmuseums.harvard.edu/mondrian/ 

Country Music Hall of Fame --- http://www.halloffame.org/ 

A new law, mandating that the federal government make its websites accessible to the handicapped, could result in better access and awareness within the private sector, too. But it won't come cheaply --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/politics/0,1283,44062,00.html 

 

A Case of Stolen Identity Clay Shirky on cheap and easy Web heists --- http://www.feedmag.com/templates/default.php3?a_id=1715 

Fictional identities are like stock bubbles, in that they tend to collapse rather than deflate. The end for Dennis Lee, Internet Superstar, was swift: An investigation of his activities by Jennifier Lien of the Singapore Business Times, tipped off by some of Mr. Lee's former colleagues, coupled with confirmation from MIT, ATT, FEED, and others that neither his writings nor his awards were genuine, led to an article exposing the fiction. As a result, the sites featuring his résumés, articles, and books vanished, and the real Mr. Lee was suspended from active duties at elpiva while the CEO digested news of the disappearance of the Dennis Lee he thought he employed.

It's tempting to think that what the Net giveth the Net taketh away, so that the ease of creating faked identities is balanced by the ease of finding them out -- in Mr. Lee's case, plagiarism that was performed in Singapore was no further from its pilfered sources than a Google search. The real lesson is more daunting, however. In the digital world, where identity is easy to fake and easy to spot, hustlers with short-term time horizons can do much more damage with much less effort than they can offline, since the Net makes it trivial to create a seemingly legitimate site with seemingly legitimate articles, backed up by seemingly legitimate images of seemingly legitimate awards. Stephen Glass, the infamous -- and former -- reporter, once created a Web site for Jukt Microelectronics, a fictional company, to bolster an entirely fabricated story. But Dennis Lee has gone him one better, showing that you can fool more people by creating fake degrees, awards, and even colleagues at real institutions, and still get away with it for a while.

 

KnowThis Marketing Virtual Library --- http://www.knowthis.com/ 

 


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Linux at IBM --- http://www-1.ibm.com/linux/ 

 

In recognition of its growing, worldwide user-base, we're proud to introduce the home of Linux at IBM. We're here to share information and bring you news on all the latest developments in the ever-evolving world of Linux.

Linux provides a revolutionary open source platform offering superior dependability and open expandability to support software innovation. We're proud to be a part of the Linux movement, and we look forward to working with the larger community to nurture Linux and to see it thrive.

 

The National Science Foundation will award scholarship money to computer security students who take government jobs upon graduation. Reactions are mixed --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/school/0,1383,44021,00.html 

 

Object-Oriented (Dynamic) Publishing

 

Veen transforms static pages into a dynamic site with its own database publishing system, then looks at how this process is changing how we design the Web --- http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/01/21/index2a.html 

 

In the pages that follow, I’ll show you a process that anyone can use to convert an existing site, made up of static HTML pages, into a dynamic, database-driven site. We’ll look at how to uncover the structure of your content, how to strip that content naked and push it through templates, and finally how this process is fundamentally changing how we design websites.

And remember: Size doesn’t matter. These principles apply to sites that have 100 pages as well as sites that have a million. In fact, the example we’ll use is a site for a small, non-profit organization.

So let’s roll up our sleeves and get to it.

 

To see a sample, go to http://www.calvarypresbyterian.org/ 

 

To illustrate how to build such a site, we're going to look at a small site from a Presbyterian church in San Francisco, California. I could have chosen a large-scale commercial content site, or an e-commerce powerhouse with a triple-digit stock price, but this site faces the same question as all the others: With limited staff and resources, how can this organization maintain a Web presence that can expand quickly yet still maintain a professional and organized look?

 

"Computers Will Save Us The Future According to James Martin," by Brad Lemley, Discover, June 2001 --- http://www.discover.com/june_01/gthere.html?article=featsave.html 

. . .when James Martin makes a forecast, people listen— and his prophecies today are even more astounding. In a new book, After the Internet: Alien Intelligence, Martin insists that we are on the cusp of a discontinuous leap in what computers can do and that the changes coming, properly guided, will lead us all to a land of milk and honey. "It's not just a question of computers becoming more powerful but rather of their developing a different kind of intelligence," says Martin, watching the longtails swoop over his mansion on a private 7-acre island in Bermuda. Computers are already beginning to operate more like the human brain, he says, and that will accelerate. The surprise is that although they'll be a lot smarter than we are, it won't be an intelligence to fear.

"We will have machines that are a billion times more intelligent than we are, but only in narrow, specific ways," Martin says. "In the 1960s and 1970s, the artificial-intelligence people kept telling us over and over again that in 20 years computers would be as intelligent as people. Yet nothing like that has been achieved. We grossly underestimated the complexity and subtleties of the human mind. We cannot now get close to programming what a mosquito does, much less a human being."

We must abandon the false promise of artificial intelligence— the general term for technologies that aim to emulate human cognition— and understand, embrace, and exploit the alien nature of computer thinking, says Martin. There will be close, synergistic partnerships with machines, but the machines will do what they're good at and people will do what they're good at. Humans will undertake creative tasks, leaving the drudgery of realizing them to evolved computers that are simultaneously mysterious, powerful, and oddly naive. Martin likens them to human idiot savants, and as such, he believes we can keep them under control— "a person with general intelligence will always find ways to control a person without such intelligence."

Good thing, too, says Martin, who has no patience for those who believe technology has made our lives worse. "We have now put ourselves in a position where, if we wanted to return to nature, nature could feed only about 500 million people on Earth. Without technology, we could not feed the 6 billion we are feeding now, much less the 9 billion who will be living on this planet by 2050. We are forced to play God, and we are forced to be good at it." If we fail, the results will be catastrophic. But if we succeed, he says, per capita income and individual net worth will soar around the globe. "It's like the child's story of Aladdin's lamp. We are the first generation that can work miracles. We've got the technology to make whatever we wish for."

Such predictions are backed up by credentials as imposing as Martin's 6-foot-5-inch frame. Now 67, he was the father of computer-aided systems engineering (CASE), a fundamental breakthrough in the 1980s that automated software development. Multinational CEOs and other corporate Brahmins still pay him up to $35,000 a day to tell them what the future will bring and apparently find it money well spent. Martin has started a half-dozen wildly successful software and consulting companies, including James Martin Associates, which brought Microsoft founder Bill Gates to Bermuda in 1990 to try to buy it. (Martin declined: "The company was growing. I saw no point in selling.")

Spam is everywhere, and nothing can be done about it -- even though some very smart and powerful people are fighting it --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/ebiz/0,1272,44095,00.html 

See also:
Spam, Or Just Glad to See Me?
This Spam Will Drive You Crazy
SEC Attacks Online Scammers
Use a Spam, Go to Prison
Cooking Up a Revised Spam Bill
Mind your own Business news

Consumers won't be able to sue companies that disregard requests to delete their names from spam lists, according to a bill passed by the House Judiciary Committee --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/privacy/0,1848,44065,00.html 

History of grocery stores and supermarkets.  (American History)
The name of the site is Did You Bring Bottles? --- http://www.groceteria.net/ 

With the release of Office XP, many network managers have been given the mandate to determine if this new version provides more useful collaborative capabilities and benefits for workgroups. NewMedia examines the new software. http://www.newmedia.com/default.asp?articleID=2731 

Also see http://update.internetweek.com/cgi-bin4/flo?y=eDpj0Bdl6n0V30OYh0AK 

It's hard to muster enthusiasm for Office XP --- http://www.zdnet.com/eweek/stories/general/0,11011,2767064,00.html 

Other experts argue that it is easy to muster enthusiasm for Office XP.  The advances in Microsoft's latest incarnation of Office are mostly cosmetic, but form follows function nicely and the effect is that it's more user-friendly than ever --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/gizmos/0,1452,44236,00.html 

Overall, Office XP continues to be evolutionary, not revolutionary, but the evolution is thorough and quite good. Microsoft does know how to improve a product, you have to give it that much. (IE 2.0, anybody?)

There is the controversial Activation Key that some people may cry foul over, but I even got to test that after having to reinstall Windows 2000 and Office XP again, and it went without a hitch.

Office XP Standard Edition, which is everything but Access, costs $239 for the upgrade version and $479 for the full version. Office XP Professional Edition is $329 for the upgrade and $579 for new users.

See also:
Pirates Experience Office XP
MS Office Helper Not Dead Yet
MS Users May Experience Pain
MS Monopolizes U.K. Gov't Site

What does the search engine landscape look like now, and what services should be included in a good search engine positioning campaign? http://clickz.com/article/cz.3973.html 

Bob Jensen's search helpers are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm 

Free estate planning helpers from a Georgia law firm --- http://www.scrogginlaw.com/ 

Bob Jensen's threads on personal finance are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm 

Big guns take aim at Aimster --- http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/review/2001-05-31-aimster-in-court.htm 

The big legal guns in an Albany, N.Y., courtroom Wednesday were aimed squarely at Aimster, embroiling the most popular Napster clone in a similar legal battle.

Aimster faced the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America and a Nashville song publisher in the first of what may be a long series of court appearances.

Run by former computer programmer Johnny Deep, 43, and daughter Aimee, 16, Aimster piggybacks on America Online's instant messaging program to let users share files with "buddies." Its software has been downloaded by 5 million users, Deep says.

Also see http://www.newmediamusic.com/articles/NM01020198.html 

The Aimster homepage is at http://www.aimster.com/ 

New techniques are making the Gnutella file-sharing network flourish, but may also dent some key benefits, New Scientist, May 30, 2001 --- http://www.newscientist.com/dailynews/news.jsp?id=ns9999814 

New techniques are making the Gnutella file-sharing network flourish, but may be taking away the key benefits of pure peer-to-peer networking.

The peak number of simultaneous Gnutella users reached more than 40,000 in May, according to a monitoring company called Clip2. This is 20 times more than could originally connect to the network.

In peer-to-peer networking, each desktop computer both provides and receives information, i.e. it acts as both a server and a client. The approach was first made famous by the controversial music file sharing service, Napster. Napster's system allows computers to serve and retrieve music files but it still relies on central servers to find the files.

Gnutella was designed to create a more pure peer-to-peer network. The first version removed the need for Napster's central servers by sending requests for files to every computer on the network. In practice, however, this overloaded the network when more than a few thousand users were connected.

Ironically, Gnutella is now moving back to a system reminiscent of Napster. Recent refinements to Gnutella and related software reduce the burden on the network by stopping clients with slow connections acting as servers. Instead, proxy servers - called reflectors - host information for the slower clients and reduce the overall strain on the network.

Bob Jensen's threads on P2P networking can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/napster.htm 

A North Carolina accounting firm has agreed to pay a fine of $23,229 for piracy of Microsoft software. Following an anonymous tip to the Business Software Alliance (BSA), the firm performed a self-audit in which it was determined that the firm did not have licenses for all of the copies of Microsoft software in use. Is the BSA coming to your town? http://www.accountingweb.com/item/47861 

Amidst the talk of tax rebates, new credits, increased deductions, and other benefits, there is some tax news that is not being well-received in corporate America. http://www.accountingweb.com/item/48205 

Big Five firm Ernst & Young is ready to become the first Big Five accounting firm to open a law office in New York. This is the second such alliance for Ernst & Young. http://www.accountingweb.com/item/48208 

The latest move by E&Y to branch out in the legal profession begs the question: What is the future of multidisciplinary practices in this country? Bobby R. Creech, Jr., CPA, partner in Webster Rogers & Company LLP, and 2000 President of the South Carolina Association of CPAs offers his perspective on this timely issue. http://www.accountingweb.com/item/48338 

If Sherlock Holmes dealt in credit card fraud, he'd search for patterns, knowing that criminals, like all of us, are creatures of habit. Well, that's exactly what a fraud-busting software program does --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/ebiz/0,1272,44203,00.html 

David takes you on a meet-and-greet of JavaServer Pages, revealing basic JSP syntax, browser-sniffing code, and the differences between ASP and JSP along the way --- http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/01/22/index3a.html 

From the last (and final) edition of the Scout Report for Business and Economics on May 31, 2001

Interactive Index of Economic Freedom http://www.heritage.org/index/ 

The Heritage Foundation, along with the _Wall Street Journal_, presents the Interactive Index of Economic Freedom, a tremendous database offering detailed reference information about economic policy for 161 countries. The search feature provides a variety of options for searching the database and organizing the results including sorting the results alphabetically or by rank. Along with a simple search, users can search by country or region and compare that with another region, or sort by policy factors including fiscal burden, banking, black market, and trade policy. Six years of past scores are also available here. The results are presented in an easy-to-read list with comparable features and scores, as well as a detailed snapshot overview of economic information for each of the countries. This useful database will be of great value to those interested in country-to-country comparisons of economic policy.

Commodity Fetish Times http://www.geocities.com/WallStreet/9973/ 

This Website offers a wry and accessible look at Marxist theory, especially Marx' theory of commodity as spectacle. The site is dressed up with images of Betty Boop and puckering lips. However, its breakdown of Marxist theory is actually quite clear and easy-to-understand. Commodity Fetish Times (CFT) also includes updates and watches transnational corporate globalization and worker resistance. CFT provides several helpful links pages to Marxist theory, works councils, and globalization. The site was created in 1997, the year of the dancing, animated gif, so it tends to be a little slow to load. Nonetheless, for those looking for an introduction to commodity and Marxism, Commodity Fetish Times will be a good place to start.

Family Life and Work Experience before 1918: An oral history research
project http://www.essex.ac.uk/qualidata/Teachingmaterials/PTindex.htm

 

This is a resource site rather than a time-specific workshop.
Online Small Business Workshop http://www.cbsc.org/osbw/workshop.html 

Bob Jensen's links for small businesses can be found at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob1.htm 

Why don't I find this surprising?
The British government and Microsoft have brought all government-related 
services onto the Internet -- unfortunately, the site only works for 
users running IE --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/business/0,1367,44186,00.html 
EbXML will allow companies that use older data-exchangetechnology to start using the new XML software, which is
cheaper and more flexible --- http://www.accountingweb.com/item/47357

May 29th Memorial Day edition of the ENews Internet Essentials newsletter for the financial professional. --- http://members.home.com/nhannon/news.html 

1. Digital Reporting and XBRL in New Jersey 
2. Building a Real Time Enterprise: Gartner Group 
3. AUSTRALIA APRA AND XML/XBRL 
4. Remembering Pearl Harbor Web Site Launched 
5. XBRL Featured Topic at Summer Conferences 
6. XML NEWS! Live Feed for all News about XML

Hi Janet,

I wonder how many professions would show a decline if they added one more year of costly and stressful education for license to enter into the profession? Suppose one more year was added to become a nurse, a lawyer, a physician, a teacher, and an engineer? Since most states added one more year beyond the bachelors degree to sit for the CPA examination, I think the main problem lies in the turmoil of employers, parents, colleges, and students themselves in a transition that will take at least another decade to work its way into some sort of steady state in the accountancy profession.

I also think the problem lies somewhat changed attitudes of young people who have lived since kindergarten in a grade-inflated education system that takes the sweat out of learning. Accountancy is a sweat if you really take pride in knowing it well. Young people today want to make twice as much annual income as their moms and dads while they (the youths) are still warming up for the race.

You can read my take on "Advantages of Working in Public Accounting" at http://hr.pro2net.com/x28583.xml 

Also see http://finance.pro2net.com/x28704.xml 

Bob Jensen

-----Original Message----- 
From: Janet Flatley [mailto:jflatley@ffpa.com]  
Sent: Tuesday, May 29, 2001 10:04 AM 
To: 'Prof. R. Jensen' Subject: Studies show an alarming decline in students majoring in the once -thriving field of accounting

Good morning Professor - the news remains bleak concerning decline in accounting students. But I've got to believe that the smart ones in academe are coming up with innovative approaches to solving the problem.

Janet Flatley AVP-Controller 1st Fed S&L Assn Pt Angeles WA (360) 417-3104

 

The Waiter's Revenge --- http://www.waiters-revenge.com/ 

 

I can understand why Dave Shiflett is snubbed as a graduation speaker.

 

Listen Up, Punks!  Forwarded by Chaplain (Retired) Bill Simpson
This might have been titled The Teacher's Revenge

By Dave Shiflett

For the 45th consecutive year, I have been snubbed as a graduation speaker, which is beginning to take on the appearance of a conspiracy. Despite all that, however, I continue to pen a yearly address, and for any speaker who finds him- or herself short of material, the following can be quoted for free and without attribution (as is the standing habit of most public speakers, I have come to understand):

My dear graduates:

Greetings from the real world, which awaits you with drawn daggers.

Yes, I know you have been told that after you leave these hallowed halls, you will remake the world in your own image because you are so smart, so dedicated, and so full of vital energy. I do not blame you for believing this.

Your parents have brought you up this way. From the day you were born, you were groomed to glory. You went to the best schools. You joined the best soccer teams. You went to mind-enhancement classes. You ate lots of fish and kelp.

As you advanced, your cheerleaders in the press sustained these hopes and dreams. So have your guidance counselors, and many of the faculty at this once-great institution. All told, boys and girls, you've had enough smoke blown up your butts to block the midday sun.

The job before you today is to perish those thoughts, each and every one. Line them up against your inner cranial walls and mow them down. For here is the central fact of your existence: The world will grind you up, spit you out, and feed the scraps to the pigeons.

I hear a slight groaning from the bleachers. Mom and dad, in their inimitable shorthand, are saying "Oh no. The cat's out of the bag!"

Bless them. They have only tried to do what they think is best. In many cases, they have struggled and sacrificed on your behalf, or on what they thought was your behalf. They read the latest child-rearing manifestos, and applied their principles with great devotion. They went without so that you could have it all. In short, they made you the center of the universe, because they loved you and wanted to protect you from the many brutalities this universe holds.

Yet the cold, hard, invasive fact is, boys and girls, you are not the center of the universe. Quite the contrary. The universe views you as a collection of pampered freaks. It has been waiting to exact its revenge. And now the day has come.

Prepare to meet thy doom.

Yet I also bring you glad tidings, for great glories do await you. These are real glories, true glories, hard-earned glories -- but they are probably not the ones you were expecting. As the great Hindu saying puts it: The pigeon craps far from the cornfield. Life is very likely to turn out a lot different than you were counting on.

This is as it must be. For those who doubt, let me pose a question. What kind of world would we have if the dreams of children tended to come true? These are the dreams of the inexperienced, the self-infatuated, the ignorant. That these dreams have been nurtured by parents, valets, success consultants and other members of the household staff does not change their basic, corrupt nature.

The real world has little use for them.

But the world does have use for you -- once your hollow gaudiness has been pruned and burned away. That process will probably take time, and will no doubt extract many tears. It may send you to exotic posts, scorch you with diverse flames, and bite you with the force of bitter plagues. You will be like Moses after his trek through the wilderness, beaten to the marrow.

Then will come your transformation, and you will become a true child of the universe ­ the glorious product of its fearful and glorious caress. You will rise up early, and do great deeds that, in your present state of mental imbalance, seem humble and insignificant. You will meet a payroll, perhaps of only a few people. You will help a child with his mathematics, or her reading. You will rescue a dog from a cruel master. These are the great things, on which is built the foundation of a struggling humanity.

However, I must warn that a few of you will be denied all this. You will be the ones who leave here and take that long-awaited job at the big firm. You will quickly make the world your footstool, and in all other ways confirm the suspicion that some people were simply destined to be creeps.

You know who you are.

May God have mercy on your soul, and may he also grant you a spiteful wife, grasping mistresses, hateful children, and loose-boweled pets.

Thank you, and could I have my check now? 

Dave Shiflett is a writer in Midlothian, Virginia.

Forwarded by Debbie Bowling

I thought you would like these for your New Bookmarks!

The Washington Post published a contest for readers in which they were asked to supply alternate meanings for various words. The following were some of the winning entries:

Coffee (n.), a person who is coughed upon.

Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have gained.

Abdicate (v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.

Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation while drunk.

Willy-nilly (adj.), impotent

Negligent (adj.), describes a condition in which you absentmindedly answer the door in your nightie.

Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp.

Gargoyle (n.), an olive-flavored mouthwash.

Flatulence (n.) the emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run over by a steamroller.

Balderdash (n.), a rapidly receding hairline.

Testicle (n.), a humorous question on an exam.

Rectitude (n.), the formal, dignified demeanor assumed by a proctologist immediately before he examines you.

Oyster (n.), a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddish expressions.

Circumvent (n.), the opening in the front of boxer shorts.

Frisbeetarianism (n.), The belief that, when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck there.

And let's add ... Pokemon (n), A Jamaican proctologist.

Forwarded by Dr. Wolff

Pebble Beach

A golfer who was well into his golden years had a lifelong ambition to play one hole at Pebble Beach, California, the way the pros do it. The pros drive the ball out over the water onto the green that is on a spit of land that just out off the coast.

It was something he had tried hundreds of times without success. His ball always fell short, into the water. Because of this he never used a new ball on this particular hole. He always picked out one that had a cut or a nick.

One year he went out to Pebble Beach to try again. When he came to the fateful hole, he teed up an old cut ball and said a silent prayer. Before he hit it, however, a powerful voice from above said, "WAIT. REPLACE THAT OLD BALL WITH A BRAND NEW BALL."

He complied, with some slight misgiving, despite the fact that the Lord seemed to be implying that He was going to let him finally achieve his lifelong ambition.

As he stepped up to the tee once more, the voice came down again, "WAIT. STEP BACK. TAKE A PRACTICE SWING."

So he stepped back and took a practice swing. The voice boomed out again:, "TAKE ANOTHER PRACTICE SWING."

He did. Silence followed. Then the voice spoke out again, "PUT THE OLD BALL BACK."

Forwarded by Walter Bernards

STARGAZING       

The Lone Ranger and Tonto are camping in the desert. They set up their tent, and are asleep. Some hours later, The Lone Ranger wakes his faithful friend.  "Tonto, look up at the sky and tell me what you see."    

Tonto replies, "Me see millions of stars."    

"What does that tell you?" asked The Lone Ranger.    

Tonto ponders for a minute.  "Astronomically speaking, it tells me that there are millions    of galaxies and potentially billions of planets.  Astrologically, it tells me that Saturn is in Leo. Time wise, it appears to be approximately a quarter past three.    Theologically, it's evident the Lord is all-powerful and we are small and insignificant.  Meteorologically, it seems we will have a beautiful day tomorrow."       

"What it tell you, Kemo Sabi?"       

The Lone Ranger is silent for a moment, then speaks.       

"Tonto, you ignoramus, what the stars are telling us is that someone stole our tent."   

Forwarded by Dr. D
(When I read this it seemed that the same thing could be done with the diffusion of research outcomes to various levels in the education system.  For example, middle school textbooks are riddled with politically correct errors.)

DIRECTIVE TO HIS EXECUTIVE OFFICERS: "Tomorrow evening at approximately 20-00 hours Halley's Comet will be visible in this area; an event which occurs only every 75 years. Have the men fall out in the battalion area infatigues, and I will explain this rare phenomenon to them. In case of rain, we will not be able to see anything, so assemble the men in the theater and I will show them films of it."

EXECUTIVE OFFICER TO COMPANY COMMANDER: "By order of the Colonel, tomorrow at 20-00 hours, Halley's Comet will appear above the battalion area. If it rains, fall the men out in fatigues, then march to the theater where this rare phenomenon will take place, something which occurs only once every 75 years."

COMPANY COMMANDER TO LIEUTENANT: "By order of the Colonel be in fatigues at 20-00 hours tomorrow evening. The phenomenal Halley's Comet will appear in the theater. In case of rain in the battalion area, the Colonel will give another order, something which occurs once every 75 years."

LIEUTENANT TO SERGEANT: "Tomorrow at 20-00 hours, the Colonel will appear in the theater with Halley's comet, something which happens every 75 years. If it rains, the Colonel will order the comet into the battalion area."

SERGEANT TO SQUAD: "When it rains tomorrow at 20-00 hours, the phenomenal 75-year-old General Halley, accompanied by the Colonel, will drive his comet through the battalion area theater in fatigues."

Also forwarded by Dr. Wolff

Moral of the Story

The teacher gave her fifth grade class an assignment: Get their parents to tell them a story with a moral at the end of it. The next day the kids came back and one by one began to tell their stories.

Kathy said, "My father's a farmer and we have a lot of egg-laying hens. One time we were taking our eggs to market in a basket on the front seat of the pickup when we hit a bump in the road and all the eggs went flying and broke and made a mess."

"And what's the moral of the story?" asked the teacher. "Don't put all your eggs in one basket!" "Very good," said the teacher.

Next little Lucy raised and hand and said, "Our family are farmers too. But we raise chickens for the meat market. We had a dozen eggs one time, but when they hatched we only got ten live chicks and the moral to this story is, don't count your chickens until they're hatched."

"That was a fine story Lucy. Johnny, do you have a story to share?"

"Yes, ma'am, my daddy told me this story about my Aunt Karen. Aunt Karen was a flight engineer in Desert Storm and her plane got hit. She had to bail out over enemy territory and all she had was a bottle of whiskey, a machine gun and a machete. She drank the whiskey on the way down so it wouldn't break and then she landed right in the middle of 100 enemy troops. She killed seventy of them with the machine gun until she ran out of bullets, then she killed twenty more with the machete till the blade broke and then she killed the last ten with her bare hands."

"Good heavens," said the horrified teacher, "what kind of moral did your daddy tell you from that horrible story?"

"Stay the hell away from Aunt Karen when she's been drinking."

 

There are more students of English in China than there are people in the United States.
Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way, as quoted in an email message from Ivan Herman

 

Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled.
Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way, as quoted in an email message from Ivan Herman

 

As I was told by a great Spanish teacher I had in Jr. High, "Spanish is a language of rules with few exceptions. English is a language of exceptions with few rules"
McFadden Jr., John L. [jmcfadde@Trinity.edu] 

Japanese Engrish -(not a politically correct and somewhat objectionable site that also has some funny tidbits) --- http://www.engrish.com/ 

My advice to Dick Haar's wife (Gerry) when he croaks at his computer --- Hire a lawyer in the the State of Washington! 
Forwarded by Dick Haar.

Let's see if I understand how America works lately . . .

If a woman burns her thighs on the hot coffee she was holding in her lap while driving, she blames the restaurant.

If your teen-age son kills himself, you blame the rock 'n' roll music or musician he liked.

If you smoke three packs a day for 40 years and die of lung cancer, your family blames the tobacco company.

If your daughter gets pregnant by the football captain you blame the school for poor sex education.

If your neighbor crashes into a tree while driving home drunk, you blame the bartender.

If your cousin gets AIDS because the needle he used to shoot up with heroin was dirty, you blame the government for not providing clean ones.

If your grandchildren are brats without manners, you blame television.

If your friend is shot by a deranged madman, you blame the gun manufacturer.

And if a crazed person breaks into a cockpit and tries to kill the pilots at 35,000 feet, and the passengers kill him instead, the mother of the deceased blames the airline.

I must have lived too long to understand the world as it is anymore. So if I die while my old, wrinkled butt is parked in front of this computer, I want you to blame Bill Gates, OK?

Forwarded by Dr D

A man and his dog were walking along a road. The man was enjoying the scenery, when it suddenly occurred to him that he was dead. He remembered dying, and that the dog had been dead for years. He wondered where the road was leading them.

After a while, they came to a high, white stone wall along one side of the road. It looked like fine marble. At the top of a long hill, it was broken by a tall arch that glowed in the sunlight. When he was standing before it, he saw a magnificent gate in the arch that looked like mother of pearl, and the street that led to the gate looked like pure gold.

He and the dog walked toward the gate, and as he got closer, he saw a man at a desk to one side. When he was close enough, he called out, "Excuse me, where are we?"

"This is Heaven, sir," the man answered.

"Wow! Would you happen to have some water?" the man asked.

"Of course, sir. Come right in, and I'll have some ice water brought right up." The man gestured, and the gate began to open.

"Can my friend," gesturing toward his dog, "come in, too?" the traveler asked.

"I'm sorry, sir, but we don't accept pets."

The man thought a moment and then turned back toward the road and continued the way he had been going.

After another long walk, and at the top of another long hill, he came to a dirt road which led through a farm gate that looked as if it had never been closed. There was no fence. As he approached the gate, he saw man inside, leaning against a tree and reading a book.

"Excuse me!" he called to the reader. "Do you have any water?"

"Yeah, sure, there's a pump over there". The man pointed to a place that couldn't be seen from outside the gate. "Come on in."

"How about my friend here?" the traveler gestured to the dog.

"There should be a bowl by the pump."

They went through the gate, and sure enough, there was an old fashioned hand pump with a bowl beside it. The traveler filled the bowl and took a long drink himself, then he gave some to the dog.

When they were full, he and the dog walked back toward the man who was standing by the tree waiting for them.

"What do you call this place?" the traveler asked. "This is Heaven," was the answer.

"Well, that's confusing," the traveler said. "The man down the road said that was Heaven, too."

"Oh, you mean the place with the gold street and pearly gates? Nope. That's Hell."

"Doesn't it make you mad for them to use your name like that?"

"No. I can see how you might think so, but we're just happy that they screen out the folks who'll leave their best friends behind."

Sometimes, we wonder why friends keep forwarding jokes to us without writing a word, maybe this could explain:

"When you are very busy, but still want to keep in touch, guess what you do -- you forward jokes.

When you have nothing to say, but still want to keep contact, you forward jokes.

When you have something to say, but don't know what, and don't know how, you forward jokes."

"And to let you know that: you are still remembered, you are still important, you are still loved, you are still cared for, guess what you get? A forwarded joke from me."

"So my friend, next time if you get a joke, don't think that I have sent you just a joke, but that I have thought of you today and wanted to send you a smile." :-] 

Memo From God (sort of a guilt trip) --- http://www.webspirations.net/memo/ 

Entertainment History
Bob Hope and American Variety --- http://lcweb.loc.gov/exhibits/bobhope/ 

From Dr. Wolff

For all of you on this Memorial Day.  Dick & Sybil
http://www.hugsandsmiles.com/special/index.html

And that's the way it was on June 4, 2001 with a little help from my friends.

 

In March 2000, Forbes named AccountantsWorld.com as the Best Website on the Web --- http://accountantsworld.com/.
Some top accountancy links --- http://accountantsworld.com/category.asp?id=Accounting

 

How stuff works --- http://www.howstuffworks.com/ 

 

Professor Robert E. Jensen (Bob) http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen
Jesse H. Jones Distinguished Professor of Business Administration
Trinity University, San Antonio, TX 78212-7200
Voice: 210-999-7347 Fax: 210-999-8134  Email:  rjensen@trinity.edu  

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May 25, 2001

Quotes of the Week

Three hallmarks of our time:

1. Technology that brings people together;
2. The fact that we are REALLY becoming ONE world; the coming together of our global economy;
3. The power of free markets not only is clearly demonstrated but actually increasing in importance.
Lawrence Summers, the President-elect of Harvard University and former Secretary of Treasury
(See below)

Harvard University now spends $US8 million per year to maintain the online delivery of programs in its Business School 
MacColl, J. 1999, "Platform on a Pedestal," Times Higher Education Supplement October 1 http://www.thesis.co.uk:80/tp/1/19991001/PRN/EDITION/edition.htm 

 

What Students Want is Not Necessarily What They Need
Bob Jensen (See below)

Results from our project suggest that to raise the quality of the educational experience, significant changes in pedagogy will be necessary. Our belief is that the key to this is to find ways to exploit the ability of the technologies to provide a more flexible learning experience. The flexibility of time-on-task provided by asynchronous techniques is obvious. However, other dimensions of flexibility might include flexibility of media (text vs. graphics vs. audio/video for example) as well as flexibility of course content. For many courses, there is more than one acceptable set of content and more than one acceptable sequencing of content as well. Asynchronously delivered material in multimedia format has the potential of providing a customized, possibly even unique, educational experience to each student based on his or her educational goals, background, and experience. Currently however, we would argue that no one knows how to do this well.
Conclusions of the ADEPT Program at Stanford University (See below)

Finally, motivation can be imparted to the student in a variety of ways. Highly motivating professors are not necessarily the most exuberant or gregarious or witty. The behind-the-scenes efforts of a quiet but dedicated professor, in assembling supplementary material or following up students' questions will also demonstrate to the students the professor's concern. In small classes it is possible to come to know and motivate each student individually. Yet in large classes where this is impossible, an "intimate bond" with the class is still achieved if the students in the back row come to know, through the indirect manner Oakeshott describes, that the professor is concerned that they learn.
University of Illinois Report (See Wow Report of the Week below)

A lot of people approach risk as if it's the enemy when it's really fortune's accomplice.
Sting in A Man's Journey to Simple Abundance

God made man because he loves stories.
Elie Wiesel, The Gates of the Forest

There are more students of English in China than there are people in the United States.
Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way, as quoted in an email message from Ivan Herman

     Rather than technology destroying borders, the tendency seems to be to establish ‘traditional’ international campuses. Massachusetts Institute of Technology is partnering with two Singapore universities to set up a branch campus, and several of Australia’s universities, especially Monash and RMIT, have also pursued this approach. Other institutions combine distance education with block teaching as the basis of their international efforts. This strategy may be considered high risk for all but a few brand name universities.
     Nevertheless, there are some estimates that the number of online higher education subjects available worldwide will be more than a million within a few years (Hibbs 1999). Indeed, the US Education Department’s America’s Learning Exchange already lists nearly one million online subjects. The 1999 Campus Computing Survey of 557 two-and four-year colleges and universities shows that the percentage of college courses using Web resources in the syllabus rose from 10.9 per cent in 1995 to 33.1 per cent in 1998 and 38.9 per cent in 1999, and that more than one quarter of all college courses (28.1 per cent) have a Web page, compared to 22.5 per cent in 1998 and 9.2 per cent in 1996 (Green 1999). Harvard University now spends $US8 million per year to maintain the online delivery of programs in its Business School alone (MacColl 1999). Various US-based web sites exist, with names implying global reach , such as the Globewide Network Academy and the World Lecture Hall, providing gateways to many online college and university subjects. However, Web pages are not subjects, and subjects are not coherent courses.  Many of these online subjects are only accessible to students enrolled in the particular institution.
Quoted from Assignment Berlin, pp. 78-79 (See Assignment 2 below)

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 1:  
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 

 

Assignment 2:  
For those of you planning to attend my session, please download and become somewhat familiar with the following free book.


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 

Acknowledgments viii
Research Team.ix
Abbreviations and acronyms.x

Executive summary xii

1 The brief and methodology 1

1.1 The brief 1
1.2 Methodology 2
1.2.1 Selection of interviewees 3
1.2.2 Interview protocols 7
1.2.3 Timeline 7
1.2.4 Dissemination 8

2 Corporate, for-profit and virtual universities and the emergence of the corporatised universities 9

2.1 Introduction .9
2.2 The corporate university  12
2.3 The for-profit university 15
2.4 The virtual university 16
2.5 The traditional university 17
2.6 The emergence of corporate and virtual universities18
2.7 The corporatised university 23
3 New providers 27

3 New Products

3.1 Exemplar organisations 27

3.1.1 Corporate universities

McDonalds Hamburger University 27
Ford 28
AAPL 30
Microsoft 32

3.1.2 For-profit universities 32

University of Phoenix 32
DeVry Inc. and Keller Graduate School of Management 35
Sylvan Learning Systems Inc 36

3.1.3 Public/corporate universities 38

USAF Air University 38
US Army 39

3.2 Contextual organisations 39

3.2.1 Corporatised arms of traditional universities 40

New York Universityonline 40
University of Maryland University College 41

3.2.2 Regulatory and government organisation 42
3.2.3 Virtual universities 45

Western Governors University 45
National Technology University 47
Christian University GlobalNet 49
Michigan Virtual/Michigan Virtual Automotive College.50
Jones International University 51

3.3 Labour organisation 52

The National Education Association 52

3.4 Service companies 53

Corporate Universities Xchange 53
Gartner Group 53

3.5 Corporate universities 54

Sears Universities 54
Disney University 55
General Electric 56
Sun Microsystems Educational Services 58
Digital Education Systems 60
Motorola University 60

3.6 Other US developments in corporate, for-profit and distance education .62

3.6.1 Auxilliary organisations 64

3.7 Australian organisations investigated  69

Coles Institute 69
Melbourne University Private 71

4 Trends and issues in higher education 75

4.1 Major trends 75

4.1.1 The business of education 75
4.1.2 The borderlessness of education 77
4.1.3 The rise of new providers 79

Corporate universities 79
Virtual universities 82
For-profit universities 83

4.2 Operations of the new providers 84

4.2.1 Mission and purpose 84
4.2.2 Governance and culture 87
4.2.3 Curriculum and content 90
4.2.4 Students and staffing 93
4.2.5 Technology 96

4.3 Issues 101

4.3.1 The business of education 101
4.3.2 Borderless education 103
4.3.3 International trade agreement and higher education 106
4.3.4 Mission and purpose 109
4.3.5 Governance and culture 109
4.3.6 Curriculum 110
4.3.7 Students and staffing 115
4.3.8 Technology 122

5 Implications for Australian higher education 125

5.1 Introduction 125
5.2 Potential for development of corporate and virtual universities in Australia 125

5.2.1 Technology and borderless education 126
5.2.2 Corporate universities 129
5.2.3 Publicly-driven virtual universities 132
5.2.4 For-profit providers 133

5.3 Policy implications for Australian postsecondary education 136

5.3.1 Recognition and regulation 138
5.3.2 Cross-sectoral issues 144
5.3.3 Equity and access issues 146
5.3.4 Institutional academic and staffing policies 148

Appendix A 155
Appendix B 165
References 313

Distance Education Corporations Up the Competition for Faculty
Placement Add in the Accounting Review, April 2001 --- http://aaahq.org/pubs/aaapubs/review/ar04-01/297-304ads.pdf 
Normally such adds are from colleges and universities seeking accounting faculty.  This is a corporate add for "Advisory Faculty."  

UNext, committed to building the world’s premier online university and to providing top-quality education to working adults worldwide, invites candidates with strong leadership skills to apply for their Advisory Faculty staff to help manage online instructors. Advisory Faculty are accountable for the operations and overall quality of course delivery for a team of faculty. They guide Adjunct Faculty on content-related questions that arise in course delivery. The ideal candidate will have 5 years of relevant work experience, some teaching experience, along with a graduate or post-graduate degree in Business. The candidate must demonstrate strong organizational, management, analytical, and communication skills as well as technological savvy. Visit our web site at  http://www.unext.com. Please reference the discipline number when submitting your resume by email to jobs@unext.com : Corporate Finance #01-000511, Accounting #01-000512, Marketing #01-000513, Data Mining #01-000514. UNext is an Equal Opportunity Employer.

UNext Corporation owns Cardean University and has partnered with five prestigious universities (Carnegie-Mellon, Chicago, Columbia, Stanford, and the London School of Economics) to deliver online courses owned and controlled by those universities. Among other things, UNext has partnered with General Motors to deliver training and education courses to 88,000 GM managers and executives.  

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 

They Blazed the Trail for Distance Education (History) by James Gooch --- http://www.uwex.edu/disted/gooch.htm 

In this paper on trends in continuing education the author, who was formerly program information director for outreach services at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, reviews delivery systems that have made distance education possible and practical. The review begins with the introduction of correspondence study classes for off-campus students in 1891 and extends to today's computerized and satellite-delivered systems that make extension classes available to adult students worldwide.

From FEI Express, May 24, 2001 --- http://www.fei.org/newsletters/express/feiexpress62.cfm 

LAWRENCE SUMMERS AT THE FORBES CFO CONFERENCE 
Lawrence Summers, the President-elect of Harvard University and former Secretary of Treasury, talked about what's new in the "New Economy" and how those innovations have contributed to the overall success of the global economy.

Three hallmarks of our time: 1. Technology that brings people together; 2. The fact that we are REALLY becoming ONE world; the coming together of our global economy; 3. The power of free markets not only is clearly demonstrated but actually increasing in importance.

Summers also talked about the dramatic shift in capital allocation arising from shareholder activism in the late '80s and through the '90s. He spoke about how the shift of investors' dollars from unresponsive, under-performing management teams to venture capitalists and private equity investment groups drove the dramatic stock market performance in the '90s. Our capacity for creative destruction and reallocation of capital underlies the ability to do this. Further, U.S. companies have been the most aggressive in seeking out opportunities abroad.

As to the future, he joked that economists are often advised to name a date or name a number, but not both. How quickly the inventories are worked off is one key. Summers thinks they were worked down nicely in the first quarter of this year, which bodes well for the balance of the year. Equipment investment will be weak for some time, in his view. There is still excess capacity and there is equipment being sold off from busted companies at pennies on the dollar. Therefore, investment will lag. Consumer spending is the final key component. Summers thinks that most likely we will just barely avoid a technical recession, but sluggish consumption and investment will continue for three quarters. He thinks the tax cut is too small in the near term to have any impact on the short-term economy.

The tax cut, in his view, will not help in the current economy, and he thinks it's a big mistake in the long run. In his opinion, there is a significant risk, and we can't afford it. Smaller surpluses will lead to higher interest costs. He thinks it will put us back into deficit spending. Second, we can't be sure what the surplus or deficit will be in five or ten years. The error band around the forecasts five years from now has a width of $600 billion. He thinks we shouldn't lock in long-term cuts with that kind of uncertainty.

Globally, Japan is on the downslide again. It must resolve the "mother-of-all" banking crisis before its economy can rebound. Europe faces a real risk of diminished expectations, feeling that 3% growth is just fine. However, Mexico is a bright spot and appears poised for growth in his view. India and China are experiencing substantial growth, while China's growth, is decelerating and India's is accelerating. Brazil is looking at important elections in 2002 that show worrisome signs of turmoil.

For the long run, his view is that we are in a period of remarkable opportunity, but will be challenged in the short term.

Summers emphasized that the US should care more about what happens around the world than we have historically. We are shifting to a world economy and therefore, he feels, we should spend more resources to promote the raw materials for capitalism around the world - an educated population and a culture that has the rule of law - respect for property rights and enforceable contracts - are the raw materials of capitalism.

He mocked the talk of our new economy's improved "scientific control" of inventory. Summers feels the truth is, in rapid expansion periods, that companies press to get more product out, then overbuy from the suppliers, getting stuck when the inevitable slowdown comes. It happens over and over again.

The great expansion of the 90s came with little price increases for companies. He credited the availability of imported products and the overall increase in competition in our economy with keeping a lid on prices. More knowledge-based products that are easily transportable have also provided price restraints.

The Chronicle of Education articles on Distance Education --- http://chronicle.com/indepth/distance/players.htm 
Subscription Required to view the full articles.

Lifelong Learning at Oxford University --- http://www.conted.ox.ac.uk/ 

DACE aims to widen access to University provision to the community at large. It achieves this through provision by its own academic staff and by enlisting or co-operating with members of other University departments and other qualified persons outside the University. Teaching services are provided in as wide a range of subjects to as many groups as resources allow. The Department is committed to the maintenance of University quality and traditions of excellence in all educational programmes which it offers, or with which it is associated. Its staff ensure quality through their own research and scholarship and have special experience and/or training in initiating, designing, promoting and teaching courses for adults.

The Department also acts as a direct link between the University and a wide variety of external agencies, organisations and institutions involved in post-compulsory education and training.

Harvard University's Online Distance Education Program --- http://distanceed.dce.harvard.edu/ 

This year we offer twenty-six distance education courses using Internet streaming video and multimedia technology. When an Extension School course is offered by distance education, it means that registered students can attend lectures when they are given (in a lecture hall at Harvard) or they can view the lectures later via the Internet anywhere in the world. In addition to viewing the lectures, students participate in other aspects of the course in the same fashion as local students. 

I think Harvard Extension has a long way to go if it is serious about distance education.  To my knowledge, there are only a few courses and no degree programs available.  More importantly, the online courses seem to be mostly video replays without substantive interactive course materials and without the faculty immersion into interactive learning.  

Harvard University is such a large system, that there are distance education initiatives apart from the above Extension Program.  One such initiative is at the Harvard Law School --- http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/online/ 

One of the Berkman Center's top priorities is to explore new possibilities for education in a networked environment. As part of this exploration, we offer a program of interactive online lecture and discussion series. For the 2001 program, we have expanded the offerings available for Continuing Legal Education (CLE) credit.

PENSARE AND HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING TO DEVELOP INTRANET-BASED "PERFORMANCE COURSES" --- http://www.pensare.com/newsroom/980921hbsp.asp 
(Note that an intranet is not the Internet.)

Pensare Inc. and Harvard Business School Publishing announce a multi-year agreement to co-develop online business courses for the corporate workplace. Under terms of the agreement, Harvard Business School Publishing (HBSP) will be responsible for providing content (based in large part on the research of Harvard Business School professors), while Pensare will provide the intranet platform, instructional design and software design. The long-term relationship underscores Pensare's commitment to work with the top business schools and innovative providers of business education. The agreement will produce a full suite of intranet-based performance courses and will enable HBSP to provide a new form of customized educational products and performance solutions to corporate clients.

The first performance course by Pensare and HBSP is based on the service management research of Harvard Business School Professors James Heskett and Jeffrey Rayport and is scheduled for release in the first quarter of 1999. Additional general management courses will be developed for release later in 1999. The suite of customizable business performance courses will be distributed through Harvard Business School Publishing and Pensare's direct sales forces, as well as a network of Pensare selling partners.

Pensare and Harvard Business School Publishing are creating customizable multiuser dimensional (MUD) simulations that will enable corporate users to role-play aspects of the performance courses, improving practice and mastery in a risk-free, interactive environment. One value of Pensare solutions is the unique ability to capture a company's "collective wisdom," and share that knowledge widely and easily throughout an organization. Pensare also enables companies to "profile" employees' key areas of expertise and connect them with others as mentors and coaches on a particular subject.

"Harvard University now spends $US8 million per year to maintain the online delivery of programs in its Business School alone (MacColl 1999)".  As quoted from Page 78 of Cross-Border Business Combinations and Strategic Alliances, 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 

More recently, Harvard University entered into a for-profit corporate venture in partnership with Stanford University to deliver executive training and education courses onsite and online.  It is uncertain when this will be operational.  Very few corporate programs are making serious profits to date, but some are or will be making enormous profits, especially corporations affiliated with prestige universities. Examples include the corporate executive distance education companies like Duke Education Corporation and corporations formed by Cornell, Wharton, and Maryland. The Godzilla in the land of monkeys will soon be the new Stanford-Harvard corporation for executive training and education. I'd buy stock in that corporation in a Silicon Valley nanosecond. See "When Harvard Met Stanford," Business Week Online, April 18, 2001 --- http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/apr2001/nf20010418_841.htm 

The International Distance Education Course Finder ---   http://www.dlcoursefinder.com/ 

The International Distance Learning Course Finder is the world's largest online directory of e-learning courses from 127 countries. This universal distance education resource has information on over 50,000 distance learning courses and programs offered from a multitude of universities, colleges and companies.

ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENT Graduate Distance Learning Programs --- http://www.gradschools.com/listings/distance/econ_develop_distance.html 
This document contains a long listing of university distance education programs.

Educators say students should be wary of unscrupulous institutions that market themselves on the World-Wide Web as legitimate providers of distance education

A Collection of distance education resources,  Lund University Electronic Library --- http://www.lub.lu.se/lub/services/distansundervisning.html
There is a lot of information here.

Many other course finders, resources, and programs are linked at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm 

Johns Hopkins University's Center for Talented Youth Center for Distance Education  --- http://www.jhu.edu/gifted/cde/ 
Get the instruction you need when and where you need it! If you are self disciplined and highly motivated, the Center for Distance Education's math and writing courses will suit your learning style.

Join our unique on-line community. You'll share a learning experience with others who have a zest for math or a passion for writing. Math and Writing Tutorials courses are offered throughout the year so you can continue to enrich your education and develop your skills.

Our on-line community now includes these partners:

Not all distance education programs become thriving successes just because they are new, innovative, and from a prestigious university.  There are many failed distance education programs, including some programs from top universities.  At one time, the McGill distance education program for teachers had nearly 50 online courses.

McGill University Courses for Teachers through distance education --- http://www.education.mcgill.ca/distance/default.html 

The current Distance Education offerings are being phased out. Students already enrolled in programs will be able to continue until completion within prescribed time limits. No new admissions to programs will take place. If you are already enrolled in a program, we can fax a registration form to wherever you wish. 

 

The Sharing Professor of the Week is Professor Charles Darling, Capital Community College Hartford, Connecticut

 

Professor Darling's site on Resources for Distance Education is outstanding --- http://webster.commnet.edu/HP/pages/darling/distance.htm 

 

Until I found this site, I was not aware there were so many journals and other resources for distance education.

 

For this and more on resources, courses, journals, ant other important links, go to http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/crossborder.htm 

 

The Wow Important Report of the Week --- A Must-Download from the University of Illinois

Teaching at an Internet Distance: the Pedagogy of Online Teaching and Learning The Report of a 1998-1999 University of Illinois Faculty Seminar --- http://www.vpaa.uillinois.edu/tid/report/tid_report.html 

 

Last week in the May 21 edition of New Bookmarks, I mentioned the above report and provided some quotes from the beginning and ending of the report.  I must admit, however, that I did not read the report in detail until later on.  And WOW, I discovered that this report really is an inspirational piece of work!  It is much more important in the middle than either at the beginning or the end.  

 

The thing that impressed me the most is Section 4 (beginning on Page 19) on Elements of Good Teaching.  It instilled me with guilt that I did not take those elements more into account during over 30 years of teaching in large and small universities.  I will warn you, however, that this section is more in line with what students want vis-a-vis what I perceive as what they need as contrasted below:

 

Bob Jensen's Working Paper 265 Concerns Giving Students the Full Benefits of Newer Technologies May Be Hazardous to Their Long Run Memory and Accomplishments.

Source:  Metacognitive Concerns in Designs and Evaluations of Computer Aided Education and Training: 
Are We Misleading Ourselves About Measures of Success? by Bob Jensen at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/265wp.htm 
  • Multimedia and Other Technologies Can Give Students What They Want by Making Learning More of the Following:
  1. Easy (e.g., interactive graphics, interactive databases, ease of search, ease of access, ease of finding help, ease of navigation, etc.)
  2. Fun (animations, videos, audio, etc.)
  3. Inspirational (cream-of-the-crop instructors, access to experts and motivators)
  4. Realistic (networked simulations and virtual reality)
  5. Collaborative (ease of communication and collaborative software)
  6. Efficient (learn from any location at any time at less cost with personalized knowledge bases and portals)
  • What Students Want is Not Necessarily What They Need
  1. Humans retain more when something is hard to learn.
  2. Humans retain more when something is painful to learn and that part of the retention of what is learned is the struggle in finding the answers.
  3. Students retain more when they reason and discover something on their own.
  4. Leaning from mistakes may be the best teacher.
  5. Humans are prone to information overload.
  6. The pace of life and learning may indeed be a killer.

 

 

In fairness, however, the University of Illinois report in Section 4 brings home the point that teachers can give students what they "need" in various effective and compassionate ways.  On Page 21 you can read the following:

Finally, motivation can be imparted to the student in a variety of ways. Highly motivating professors are not necessarily the most exuberant or gregarious or witty. The behind-the-scenes efforts of a quiet but dedicated professor, in assembling supplementary material or following up students' questions will also demonstrate to the students the professor's concern. In small classes it is possible to come to know and motivate each student individually. Yet in large classes where this is impossible, an "intimate bond" with the class is still achieved if the students in the back row come to know, through the indirect manner Oakeshott describes, that the professor is concerned that they learn.

If a finger can be placed on the "human touch" of teaching, the role of attentiveness in motivating the student could well be it. As we now consider the pedagogy of online instruction, this is a key element that must be kept in the translation, at least for the great many students who need motivation from the instructor. Not only must professors provide teaching over the Internet; they must also be in contact with students to assess learning.

Section 4 of the report is followed (beginning on Page 28) with an excellent section of Teaching Evaluation.

 

The report provides a nice summary of the "No Significant Differences" findings in research.  One of the highlights of this section (beginning on Page 29) is the common sense critique of the rather absurd criteria in a study by Phipps and Merisotis:

The report of Phipps and Merisotis (1999) titled "What's the Difference? A Review of Contemporary Research on the Effectiveness of Distance Learning in Higher Education" cites Russell's work frequently but focuses much more on computer based learning studies published in the 1990s. The purpose of their analysis is "to examine the research on distance learning more closely so that public policy may be better informed." Their report confirms what we heard from all of our external speakers, that "there is a relative paucity of true, original research dedicated to explaining or predicting phenomena related to distance learning." They suggest that "the overall quality of the original research is questionable and thereby renders many of the findings inconclusive," and go on to list the key shortcomings and gaps in the research. Listed shortcomings include non-random subject selection, questionable validity of the instruments used to measure student outcomes, and lack of controls for "reactive effects" of students and faculty such as increased motivation and interest stemming from a project's novelty. Gaps in the research are cited to include emphasis on outcomes for individual courses and technologies rather than whole programs and multiple technologies, no account for differences in students and learning styles, no explanation for higher drop-out rates of distance learners, and no inclusion of a theoretical or conceptual framework. Three implications are drawn from the findings: 1) the issue of nondiscriminatory access remains unclear, 2) technology cannot replace the human factor in higher education, and 3) the technology employed is secondary to pedagogical factors such as learning tasks, student motivation, and the instructor.

Phipps and Merisotis' criticisms of online education research have themselves been sharply criticized. In an article by Brown and Mack (1999), their evaluation is described as convoluted, naive, and contradictory, and their expectations of the research as unrealistic:

Their convoluted expectations illustrate precisely why comprehensive, clear evidence is rarely attainable in the complex, messy world of teaching and learning, even after decades of educational research. Quite simply, Phipps and Merisotis call for a fantasy research paradigm in their critique. They want 'randomized experiments' embedded in 'theoretical construct to test multiple variables' in which 'extraneous variables are controlled' to produce results that do not yield population data, but rather are 'predictive of outcomes for individual learners.' This would be roughly equivalent to a randomized, double blind study of the effects of multiple drugs interacting with each other and with caregivers' styles, resulting in predictions of how various drug combinations work with different individuals in order to make a uniform policy for a universal health care program. 

At issue here is the extent to which it is even possible to evaluate the effectiveness of online teaching and learning.

In a First Monday article, which rebuts Noble's Digital Diploma Mills series, Frank White (1999) argues that the question of pedagogical effectiveness of information technology is the wrong question. He cites both Steven Ehrman, who observes (1997)

"The first group of useless questions seeks universal answers to questions about the comparative teaching effectiveness and costs of technology... That question assumes that education operates something like a machine..." and Ronald Owston, who points out (Owston, 1997)

"...we cannot simply ask 'Do students learn better with the Web as compared to traditional classroom instruction?' We have to realize that no medium, in and of itself, will likely improve learning in a significant way when it is used to deliver instruction. Nor is it realistic to expect the Web, when used as a tool, to develop in students any unique skills." White, again citing Owston, suggests that the right question is "What distinct advantages does an instructional technology offer that instructors can exploit to promote improved learning?"

White seems to be saying that instructional technology should be implemented based on its pedagogical potential, which is well and fine. However, the earlier evaluation philosophies only seek to confirm a technology's pedagogical potential. We disagree that comparisons of learning effectiveness can't or shouldn't be done, with at least some of the rigor called for by Phipps and Merisotis. On the other hand, we do agree that the evaluation of online learning is multifaceted and subtle, and learning competence is only part of the evaluation need.

Our external speaker with the most perspective in this area was Harasim. The "top-down" and "bottom-up" approaches given by Harasim et al. (1995) have also been termed "summative" and "formative" evaluation. Regarding the former type, the text states, "Summative evaluation is generally conducted for the benefit of outsiders, perhaps funding agencies that want to know if their investment paid off or the research community, which wants to know what generalizable conclusions result from a project. Cost benefit analysis is one possible component of summative evaluation." In her presentation to us, she mentioned that rigorous evaluation of learning effectiveness is sorrowfully lacking, but that it could and should be performed. She mentioned random selection of students, and thorough pre and post testing of comparison groups among the requirements for a rigorous evaluation.

Beginning of Page 31, the University of Illinois report proposes "A Suggested Evaluation Program"  that is detailed beginning on Page 32:

For our part, we wish to propose a general program of evaluation derived from the above sets of guiding principles, emphasizing the pedagogical issues that recurred most frequently in our discussions. These are the questions we feel should be asked; one of which can be answered by quantitative evaluation, and the other 5 by qualitative assessment of course materials, student surveys or the archived text of students' coursework:

  1. Is the teaching style innovative? As Bonk called to our attention, teaching innovation is expected in universities, especially in education departments. Are the shortcomings of online teaching (principally communication bandwidth) compensated by either the circumstances (e.g. teaching only in an adjunct mode) or by novel paradigms that work with limited bandwidth such as collaborative learning via CMC?
  2. Is learning competence equal or superior to that of a traditional classroom? Again, we feel that such comparisons are justified. We suspect an affirmative answer in a great many cases.
  3. Are students engaged in the material? Does each student participate in the communication? Is there real depth to the students' responses? As Harasim and co-authors (1995) state, "Formulating and articulating a statement is a cognitive act, a process that is particularly valuable if comments such as 'I don't agree' or 'I do agree' are followed by 'because'..." This question presumes that the presentation of material has been thoughtfully prepared, objectives clearly specified, and students taught appropriate protocol.
  4. Is there interaction between professors and their students, and between the students themselves? Has a "community of learners" been established from which students derive motivation, or do the students feel isolated?
  5. Is access to technical support readily available?
  6. For online programs that are more extensive, such as entire degree programs, are the signs of academic maturity present? These include the ability to synthesize knowledge in different fields, as would be demonstrated for example in a traditional senior-level engineering class in process design. Do the students think critically, and has a desire for life-long learning been fostered in them?

There is too much in this report to summarize here, and when you read the report pay particular attention to Sections 2-5.  These are more important than the concluding remarks of the study.

 

Wow Distance Education Site of the Week --- Stanford Online at http://stanford-online.stanford.edu/ 

 

The ADEPT Program in the School of Engineering at Stanford University made the world take notice that all prestigious universities were not going to take the high road in favor of onsite education with a haughty air of arrogance that their missions were not to deliver distance education courses.  Other prestigious universities such as Columbia University, Duke University,  and the London School of Economics certainly took notice following the overwhelming success of Stanford's ADEPT Program for delivering prestigious diplomas online.

Stanford, through Stanford Online, is the first university to incorporate video with audio, text, and graphics in its distance learning offerings. Stanford Online also allows students to ask questions or otherwise interact with the instructor, teaching assistant, and/or other students asynchronously from their desktop computer. Stanford Online is credited by many sources as a significant contributor to the growth of Silicon Valley, and to the competitive technical advantage of companies that participate in continuing education through distance learning.

Learn More about Stanford Online

Some distance education courses such as the ADEPT Program at Stanford University are almost entirely asynchronous with neither face-to-face onsite classes nor online virtual classes.  Others like Duke's Global Executive MBA program are mostly synchronous in online virtual classes and occasional onsite classes and field trips.

You can read the following about asynchronous learning in the ADEPT program as reported at http://ww.stanford.edu/history/finalreport.html 

Conclusions

In our project proposal, we stated that there were several potential benefits to the use of asynchronous techniques in education. These included increased course access for students, increased quality of the educational experience, and lower costs.

Our experience to date mirrors that of others in that it clearly demonstrates the value of increased access. This includes not only students who had no access previously, but also students who used ADEPT to review material previously accessed by other methods and to enable a certain amount of schedule flexibility. At the same time, the evidence from our project suggests that increased access may not be sufficient, by itself, to justify the cost of providing asynchronous courses to those with other options. This conclusion is, of course, restricted to our particular student body which is composed of high-performing graduate students in technical disciplines who are fortunate enough in most cases to have a variety of options for accessing educational material.

Results from our project suggest that to raise the quality of the educational experience, significant changes in pedagogy will be necessary. Our belief is that the key to this is to find ways to exploit the ability of the technologies to provide a more flexible learning experience. The flexibility of time-on-task provided by asynchronous techniques is obvious. However, other dimensions of flexibility might include flexibility of media (text vs. graphics vs. audio/video for example) as well as flexibility of course content. For many courses, there is more than one acceptable set of content and more than one acceptable sequencing of content as well. Asynchronously delivered material in multimedia format has the potential of providing a customized, possibly even unique, educational experience to each student based on his or her educational goals, background, and experience. Currently however, we would argue that no one knows how to do this well.

The issue of cost is most problematic. As mentioned above, there is an expectation that asynchronously delivered courses will be less costly than synchronously delivered ones. To some extent this is a simple pricing issue. However, if we frame the issue as the need for the production, maintenance, and delivery costs of an asynchronous course to be less than that of either a live or televised class, we can make some observations. Our experience shows that the production and delivery costs of adequate quality multimedia content are high. In a situation such as that at Stanford, where classes are taught live and are also televised, asynchronous delivery is a direct cost overlay. Although live classes will continue into the foreseeable future, on-line synchronous delivery could supplant television should the quality of the two methods become comparable.

To deliver high-quality educational material content asynchronously, it is clear that reuse of material, tools to control content production and maintenance costs, and economies of scale will be the key determinants. These issues were beyond the scope of the present project. Again, we would argue that currently no one really knows how to best manage these determinants to hold down costs.

In closing, we note that there are now a great many successful deployments of asynchronous education and training, including entire asynchronous universities. The "technology deficit" which was mentioned repeatedly by students and which we have explored at length as part of this project, will work itself out over time. At this point, the most urgent need for innovation in asynchronous learning lies in the area of pedagogy and in the areas of large-scale content production, electronic organization, and delivery.

At Stanford, it is our intention to continue to offer asynchronous courses in the manner of this project. As was the case during the project, the courses offered will probably range from two to four per quarter (six to twelve per year). At the same time we hope to continue our track-record as innovators by shifting our emphasis toward exploring methods of increasing the quality of asynchronous education while at the same time reducing its cost.

It would seem that the above "conclusions" from Stanford University are entirely consistent with the major conclusions of the University of Illinois report discussed above.

I notice that David Noble does not devote