|
Holiday
Greetings from Bob & Erika --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/NHcottage/XMAS2002.htm
Quotes of the Week
From
the Wow Topic of the forthcoming edition of New Bookmarks in Year 2003
Why does this matter?
Because we are asking our students to learn more and more from a monitor.
Getting clear thoughts across on the printed page has always been a challenge.
Doing it with a computer is harder, even with the unique attributes it has
over the static page. But clear thinking visually is not just good teaching,
it can be a matter of life and death.
The Challenger
disaster, for instance, could have been avoided if the visual representation
of quantitative data had been clear. The engineers knew there was a problem
nearly 12 hours before the launch and voted to postpone it. But when
challenged to justify their argument, the contractors presented tables and
charts, none of which brought the essential point to light: the causal
relationship between temperature and O-ring damage at launches.
The sad fact is that
had the data been ordered by temperature, it would have shown a direct
correlation with O-ring damage. The Challenger launch temperature was six
standard deviations outside the range for which they had actual engineering
data. It was, as they say, a disaster waiting to happen.
Phillip D. Long --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/352wpVisual/000DataVisualization.htm
Work is the refuge
of people who have nothing better to do.
Oscar
Wilde
"By
concocting elaborate schemes of so-called 'structured finance' with no
legitimate business purpose other than tax and accounting manipulation,
Citigroup and JPMorgan Chase helped Enron deceive the investing public,"
claimed Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, ranking Democrat on the panel, in a statement.
Reuters, December 9, 2002
Trouble Tree --- http://www.geocities.com/Broadway/Stage/5078/merrychristmasupdate.html
The carpenter I hired
to help me restore an old farmhouse, had just finished a rough first day
on the job. A flat tire made him lose an hour of work, his electric saw
quit, and now his ancient pickup truck refused to start. While I drove him
home, he sat in stony silence. On arriving, he invited me in to meet his
family. As we walked toward the front door, he paused briefly at a small
tree, touching the tips of the branches with both hands.
When opening the door
he underwent an amazing transformation. His tanned face was wreathed in
smiles and he hugged his two small children and gave his wife a kiss.
Afterward he walked me to the car. We passed the tree and my curiosity
got the better of me. I asked him about what I had seen him do earlier.
"Oh, that's my
trouble tree," he replied. "I know I can't help having
troubles on the job, but one thing's for sure, troubles don't belong in the
house with my wife and the children. So I just hang them on the tree every
night when I come home. Then in the morning I pick them up again."
He paused.
"Funny thing is," he smiled, "when I come out in the morning to
pick 'em up, there ain't nearly as many as I remember hanging up the night
before."
Work makes for
a shorter day and a longer life.
Diderot
Denis
Let us run the
risk of wearing out rather than rusting out.
Theodore Roosevelt
It's not the
critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or
where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit goes to the man
who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood;
who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the
great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause;
who, at best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the
worst, if he fails at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall
never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.
Theodore Roosevelt
Look at a
stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much
as a crack showing in it. Yet at the one hundred and first blow it will split in
two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone
before.
Jacob A. Riis
I make the
most of all that comes and the least of all that goes.
Sara Teasdale
This thing we
call 'failure' is not the falling down, but the staying down.
Mary Pickford
It's supposed
to be hard. If it wasn't hard everyone would do it. The 'hard' is what makes it
good.
Tom Hanks in a movie titled A League of Their Own
I'm in a
wonderful position: I'm unknown, I'm underrated, and there's nowhere to go but
up.
Pierre S. Dupont IV
In the three
years that I played ball, we won 6, lost 17, and tied 2. Some statisticians ...
calculated that we won 75% of the games we didn't lose.
Roger M. Blough
You miss 100%
of the shots you never take.
Wayne Gretzky
God made the
world round so that we would never be able to see too far down the road.
Isak Dinesen
I never lost a
game. I just ran out of time.
Bobby Layne
They ask me
'What are you on?' I tell them, I'm on my bike 6 hours a day busting my ass.
What are you on?
Lance Armstrong
I believe I
have found the missing link between animals and civilized man. It is us.
Lorenz
Konrad
Dear Santa:
Forget Mattel, and bring on Nokia.
http://www.wired.com/news/holidays/0,1882,56784,00.html
Little kids in the modern age grow up so fast. Now even third-graders want their
own Nokias, Kyoceras and Ericssons.
In this world there are only two tragedies; one is
not getting what one wants, the other is getting it.
Oscar
Wilde
This seems to be a variation on the ancient (Chinese?) proverb:
"Be careful what you wish or pray for, because you may get it."
WHAT MAKES AMERICAN CAPITALISM SURVIVE?
See Bob Jensen's
December 31, 2002 updates on the accounting and finance scandals can be found at
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/fraud123102.htm
Believe it or
not, while the accounting industry news from Wall Street has run the gamut from
bad to horrible this year, the news from Main Street, USA is actually very
encouraging. http://www.accountingweb.com/item/96763
.
. . 68 percent of small business owners say they are very satisfied with the
service they receive from their CPAs (another 25 percent say they are
satisfied) makes it evident that CPAs have worked hard to earn the trust of
their small business clients, and translates into increased opportunity for
CPAs.
Main Street
accountants are obviously perceived much differently than the handful of
financial professionals at the center of the maelstrom on Wall Street. Despite
the Enron scandal, 88 percent of small-business owners say they have not lost
confidence in their own accountants and will continue to trust them for
counsel. But while CPAs have worked hard to earn the trust of their clients,
small business owners must also do their part to maintain this trust and
continue growth. This is why it’s also important for them to do their
homework when looking for the right accountant for their business:
- Find out what
experience an accountant has in your industry
- Know who will be
your principal contact
- Call other clients
for references
- Find out how the
accountant stays abreast of current trends in your industry
- Ask if they are
actively pursuing CPE credits to maintain accreditation
- Are they informed
about the latest financial technology?
- How will they work
with you on an individual level to share information?
The optimism and
confidence of small business owners is best seen in the fact that by yearend
Americans will have launched approximately 575,000 new businesses that employ
workers other than the owners. (Even more will hang their shingles as
one-person shops.) Two-thirds of these fledgling firms will still be open for
business two years down the road. Wall Street may be under a dark cloud of
suspicion these days, but the American dream is alive and well on Main Street,
and America’s accounting professionals are helping more people realize that
dream than ever before.
Check out the top ten
trends for 2003 with quotes from luminaries such as the creator of Dilbert, the
CTO of GM, authors of top business books and executives from companies such as:
HP, Cable & Wireless, CSC, Salesforce, Nielsen/Netratings, Bowstreet,
divine, Zapthink and Infravio: http://ecnow.com/2003Top10TrendsArticle-withQuotes.pdf
Top ten trends for 2003 --- http://vms3.info/Dec2002/feature.article.htm
Top level news stories via the lenses
of the Value Framework(tm) --- http://vms3.info/Dec2002/management.perspective.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on
electronic business are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/ecommerce.htm
My jaw dropped when I received a very
authentic bank note for $10 million in "Hell Money" as a Christmas
gift from Paul Pacter. There was no explanation until I asked him about it in an
email message. Paul is a former doctoral student who now lives in Hong Kong. I
think I'll take his gift with me when I pass on, although in my case it's
probably not enough. Paul explains "Hell Money" as follows:
Hi Bob,
It was $10,000,000! I
felt very generous this year.
Actually the Chinese
Buddhists call it Hell Money. Most of us do not do sufficient good works on
earth to immediately get reborn into a new life. So we are buried with Hell
Money to tide us over until then. I think there are up to 7 stages of Hell to
go through depending on how poorly we did on earth.
December 18, 2002 reply from Dee
Hi Bob
Hold on to that note.
It's a collectible item. see http://www.luckymojo.com/hellmoney.html
Have a warm and wonderful Holiday Season.
dee davidson
Accounting Systems Specialist
Marshall School of Business
Leventhal School of Accounting
University of Southern California 213.740.5018 dee.davidson@marshall.usc.edu
Paul Pacter actively maintains the best
international accounting site on the Web --- http://www.iasplus.com/index.htm
The top paragraph of his latest news announcements contains the following:
18 December
2002: New Journal of International Accounting Research
The International Section of the American Accounting Association has published
the inaugural edition of its new annual journal, The Journal of
International Accounting Research. The journal aims to publish articles
that increase understanding of the development and use of international
accounting and reporting practices or attempt to improve extant practices.
International accounting is broadly interpreted to include the reporting of
international economic transactions; the study of differences among practices
across countries; the study of interesting institutional and cultural factors
that shape practices in a single country but have international implications;
and the effect of international accounting practices on users.
Click for More
Information ( http://www.iasplus.com/resource/aaajournal.pdf
). Click here to go to American
Accounting Association Web Site ( http://accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aaa/index.html
)
I recently joined up with Gerald Trites
from Canada to present a workshop at the Asian-Pacific annual meetings.
Jerry focused on Internet Reporting of financial data. Two links of
interest provided by Jerry are shown below:
Financial
and Business Reporting on the Internet --- http://iago.stfx.ca/people/gtrites/webrep/WEBREP.htm
Audit
Implications of e-Business --- http://iago.stfx.ca/people/gtrites/ebusaudit/EBIZAUD.htm
Jerry put a lot of work into
these topics.
His homepage complete with audio of
"Dueling Banjos" is at http://iago.stfx.ca/people/gtrites/
Bet you can't sit still if you click on the above link!
The world's largest and best-loved
search engine owes its success to superior technology and a simple rule: Don't
be evil. But Google is finding that moral compromise is the cost of doing big
business --- http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.01/google.html
Google owes its
swelling popularity to deft algorithms that quickly divine what's useful on
the Web. But there's more to it than that. At Google, purity matters. Over the
years, Brin and Page have resisted pressure to run banners, opting instead for
haiku-like text ads and unintrusive sponsored links. They've taken a stand
against pop-ups and pop-unders and refused ads from sites they consider to be
overly negative. All the while, they've stubbornly kept the Google homepage
concise and pristine. On just a faint whisper of a marketing campaign, the
company pulled in an estimated $70 million last year (a third from licensing
fees and the rest from ads).
The Google strategy
appeals to every engineer's sense of The Way It Should Be. Build the best
entry in the science fair. Do not tart it up. Do not make it more clever than
it needs to be.
But a funny thing is
happening on the way to Internet adulthood - Google's awkward teen years. The
company's growth spurt has spawned a host of daunting questions that no
data-retrieval system can easily answer. Should Google play ball with
repressive foreign governments? Refuse to link users to "hate"
sites? Punish marketers who artificially inflate site rankings? Fight the
Church of Scientology's attempts to silence critics? And what to do about the
cache, Google's archive of previously indexed pages? In April, the German
national railroad threatened legal action to remove an obsolete site
containing sabotage instructions.
Most major companies
refer to a detailed code of corporate conduct when considering such policy
decisions. General Electric devotes 15 pages on its Web site to an integrity
policy. Nortel's site has 34 pages of guidelines. Google's code of conduct can
be boiled down to a mere three words: Don't be evil.
Continued at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.01/google.html
Wow Topic of the
Week
Visual representation of
multidimensional data should be of particular interest in accountancy in modern
times as we move toward improved networking of data with OLAP, XBRL, EDGAR, and
other advances in reporting of financial and non-financial measures --- http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/XBRLandOLAP.htm
"The Visual Display of Data,"
by Phillip D. Long, Syllabus, December 2002, pp. 6-8 --- http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=6987
The computer has
provided a revolutionary tool to represent information visually. Its power is
clearly demonstrated by the captivating power of today's video games. While
usually describing a narrative of mayhem and destruction, the stunningly
seductive rendering of 3D imagery in video games draws the gamer into new
visual worlds. It also has the power to bring forward data from multiple
dimensions to render information.
One of the most
stunning multidimensional graphical representations of human folly was created
141 years ago by Charles Joseph Minard, a French engineer and general
inspector of bridges and roads. Sometimes called the "best statistical
graphic ever produced," and a work that "defies the pen of the
historian," Minard drew a flow-map depicting the tragic fate of
Napoleon's Grand Army in the disastrous 1812 Russian campaign. Using pen and
ink, Minard captured on the two-dimensional page no fewer than six dimensions
of descriptive data.
Edward Tufte, an
information designer who, for over three decades, has cultivated the art and
science of making sense of data, has eloquently described Minard's map.
The thick band in the
middle describes the size of Napoleon's army, 422,000 men strong, when he
began the invasion of Russia in June of 1812 from the Polish-Russian border
near the Niemen River. As the army advances, the line's thickness reflects its
size, narrowing to reflect the attrition suffered during the advance on
Moscow. By the time the army reached Moscow (right most side of the drawing),
it had been reduced to 100,000 men, one-quarter of its initial size. The lower
black line depicts the retreat of Napoleon's army, and the catastrophic effect
of the bleak Russian winter. The line of retreat is linked to both dates and
temperature at the bottom of the graphic. The harsh cold reduced the army to a
mere 10,000 men by the time it re-crossed into Poland. In addition to the main
army, Minard characterizes the actions of auxiliary troops who move to protect
the advancing army's main flanks.
Minard's map is a
tour de force of data representation, an escape from flatland. He conveys a
central reality about the world: Things that are interesting are
multidimensional. Minard captures and plots six variables: the size of the
army (1); the army's location on a two-dimensional surface (2, 3); direction
of the army's movement (4); the temperature on various dates during the
retreat from Moscow (5, 6).
The truth is nearly
everything is multidimensional. Consider giving directions. Telling someone
how to get from Logan airport to Cambridge at different times of the day
requires the traveler to juggle information in four dimensions.
Continued at http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=6987
Visual display of multidimensional data
has been a special interest of mine over the years. I devoted an entire
chapter to this topic in a research monograph that I wrote in 1976. This
is included in the document at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/352wpVisual/000DataVisualization.htm
Wow Topic for the Beginning of Year 2003
I have a working draft of a document on data visualization that will be featured
in the first edition of New Bookmarks in the Year 2003 ---
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/352wpVisual/000DataVisualization.htm
Distance Education in the First Two
Years of Engineering Studies in North Carolina
"Partnerships Increase Access to Engineering Education: North Carolina's
Two+Two Experience," by Catherine E. Brawner, et al., T.H.E. Journal,
October 2002, pp. 30-36 --- http://www.thejournal.com/magazine/vault/A4183.cfm
North Carolina State
University (NC State), The University of NC at Charlotte (UNCC) and NC A&T
State University (NC A&T) have the three colleges of engineering in the
16-campus University of NC system. These colleges of engineering provide
access to engineering education throughout the state, including to those
citizens in the more remote and less wealthy areas. For more than 20 years, NC
State has partnered with The University of NC at Asheville (UNCA) in a Two+Two
engineering program in which students take their first two years of general
education at UNCA, and then transfer to NC State's College of Engineering for
upper division courses and their degree.
In 1998, NC State
began to offer UNCA students the lower division engineering courses through
live distance education in lieu of site-based delivery by local, adjunct or
traveling faculty members. Then in 1997, NC State proposed that the Two+Two
program be expanded to include the University of NC at Wilmington and Lenoir
Community College (LCC). With approval of the funding came a request from the
legislature that NC State partner with UNCC and NCA&T in the
implementation of the two new Two+Two engineering programs. These two sites
began to offer the program in spring 2000.
Distance education
supports the Two+Two programs in the larger disciplines, namely electrical and
computer engineering, mechanical engineering and civil engineering. Courses
offered include statistics, engineering dynamics, electric circuits, an
introduction to logic design, and solid mechanics. Students interested in
other disciplines, such as chemical engineering, complete their general
education requirements during the first two years, and then transfer for all
of their engineering coursework and the completion of their degree.
Continued at http://www.thejournal.com/magazine/vault/A4183.cfm
Prepaid college-tuition plans were once
regarded by parents as rock-solid bets, but slumping investments and soaring
tuitions mean some programs might not make the grade --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB1040087291317375553,00.html?mod=todays%5Fus%5Fmarketplace%5Fhs
"Academic Publishing in the
Digital Realm: An Interview with Clifford Lynch," Syllabus, December
2002, pp.10-13 --- http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=6983
Syllabus interviews Clifford A. Lynch, executive director of the Coalition for
Networked Information (CNI).
CL:
There are two rather separate things going on, that occasionally get jumbled
together under the guise of electronic publishing even though they have rather
different characteristics. On one side of the fence we see the changes in the
traditional business of scholarly publishing—which includes the journals,
monographs, and other kinds of materials that we are all familiar with—this
is the incremental evolution of print publishing to the digital world.
On the other side, we
have new works of digital authorship and truly new electronic publishing
models. Here is where we see an investigation of the transformative potential
of digital media. Both sides can be legitimately talked about as electronic
scholarly communications, but often, discussions of scholarly publishing in
the digital realm focus too narrowly on one side or the other.
S: Why don't we
talk first about what's happening on the traditional scholarly publishing
side—are we seeing a major movement toward electronic publication?
CL:
These materials are
moving on a large scale now, from print to digital form. But the
conceptualization of the work is still very much rooted in print. Indeed, you
will often see people printing these materials out in order to read them. So,
rather than producing paper and shipping it to a library, what you'll see is a
publisher setting up a Web site that people browse, reading some things online
but printing out what they really want to study carefully.
This move to
electronic publishing has happened largely with journals. It's happened to a
lesser extent with books and monographs, the sorts of things that would be
read in rather large chunks, in part because they are awkward to print out on
demand for readers.
S: Are the authors
of these materials creating different versions of their works digitally? What
are the authority considerations?
CL:
When you look at how
people author for these kinds of works, they are mostly still writing things
which could appear equally in digital or paper form. But it's interesting that
journal publishers in particular take the position that the authoritative
version is the digital version. I think that is an important intellectual
step, but it's one that their authors have not entirely caught up with yet.
Virtually all of these authors are still producing articles for which the
digital and the print versions are essentially equivalent.
So, while the
editorial decision that the digital version is definitive opens the door to
things like interactive simulation models or datasets that can be navigated
and analyzed by readers, in practice, the tradition of scholarly authorship is
still very strongly based on a print model.
S: And what about
indexes and reference materials?
CL:
Indexing and abstracting services, encyclopedias,
dictionaries—these things have a more natural existence in the digital world
as databases, so they have really gone off on their own separate trajectory
and are no longer particularly recognizable from their origins as printed
volumes.
S: What about the
publishers? Are there new business models?
CL:
This move to digital formats has been driven primarily
by the same groups who were the major players in the print publishing world.
The scholarly societies, the university presses, and the commercial journal
publishers—particularly in the scientific, technical, and medical areas.
Obviously there have
been some perturbations in business models. For instance, we now typically see
site licensing, particularly for journals, giving all members of an
institutional community unlimited, concurrent access to that journal—rather
than adhering to the convention in the print world, where a large institution
would subscribe to multiple copies of a journal to house in different
libraries around the campus. With site licensing, some publishers have moved
to a pricing structure that figures in the size of the institution.
S: But this is
really incremental progress on the traditional scholarly publishing side.
CL:
That's what's happened with the traditional publishing
industry so far. They are using electronic publishing as a way to disseminate
and deliver, but generally, they are disseminating and delivering things that
are rather strongly rooted in print. Note, however, that this is a generality.
There are some experiments going on among these publishers—but they are
mostly experiments rather than large-scale change.
S: Then let's talk
about the other side—the new works of digital authorship and the newer
electronic publishing models.
Continued at http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=6983
"The Electronic Portfolio Boom:
What's it All About?," by Trent Batson, Syllabus, December 2002, pp.
14-18 --- http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=6984
(Including Open Knowledge Initiative OKI, Assessment, Accreditation, and Career
Trends)
The term "electroThenic
portfolio," or "ePortfolio," is on everyone's lips. We often
hear it associated with assessment, but also with accreditation, reflection,
student resumes, and career tracking. It's as if this new tool is the answer
to all the questions we didn't realize we were asking.
A portfolio,
electronic or paper, is simply an organized collection of completed work. Art
students have built portfolios for decades. What makes ePortfolios so
enchanting to so many is the intersection of three trends:
- Student work is
now mostly in electronic form, or is based on a canonical electronic file
even if it's printed out: papers, reports, proposals, simulations,
solutions, experiments, renditions, graphics, or just about any other kind
of student work.
- The Web is
everywhere: We assume (not always true, of course) that our students have
ready access to the Web. The work is "out there" on the
Internet, and therefore the first step for transferring work to a Web site
has already been taken.
- Databases are
available through Web sites, allowing students to manage large volumes of
their work. The "dynamic" Web site that's database-driven,
instead of HTML link-driven, has become the norm for Web developers.
We've reached a
critical mass, habits have changed, and as we reach electronic
"saturation" on campus, new norms of work are emerging. Arising out
of this critical mass is a vision of how higher education can benefit, which
is with the ePortfolio.
We seem to be
beginning a new wave of technology development in higher education. Freeing
student work from paper and making it organized, searchable, and transportable
opens enormous possibilities for re-thinking whole curricula: the evaluation
of faculty, assessment of programs, certification of student work, how
accreditation works. In short, ePortfolios might be the biggest thing in
technology innovation on campus. Electronic portfolios have a greater
potential to alter higher education at its very core than any other technology
application we've known thus far.
The momentum is
building. A year ago, companies I talked with had not even heard of
ePortfolios. But at a focus session in October, sponsored by Educause's
National Learning Infrastructure Initiative ( www.educause.edu/nlii/
), we found out how far this market has come: A number of technology vendors
and publishers are starting to offer ePortfolio tools. The focus session
helped us all see the bigger picture. I came away saying to myself, "I
knew it had grown, but I had no idea by how much!"
ePortfolio developers
are making sure that their platforms can accept the full range of file types
and content: text, graphics, video, audio, photos, and animation. The manner
in which student work is turned in, commented on, turned back to students,
reviewed in the aggregate over a semester, and certified can be—and is
being—deeply altered and unimaginably extended.
This tool brings to
bear the native talents of computers—storage, management of data, retrieval,
display, and communication—to challenge how to better organize student work
to improve teaching and learning. It seems, on the surface, too good to be
true.
|
ePortfolios vs. Webfolios
Since the mid-90s, the term
"ePortfolio" or "electronic portfolio" has been
used to describe collections of student work at a Web site. Within the
field of composition studies, the term "Webfolio" has also
been used. In this article, we are using the current, general meaning
of the term, which is a dynamic Web site that interfaces with a
database of student work artifacts. Webfolios are static Web sites
where functionality derives from HTML links. "E-portfolio"
therefore now refers to database-driven, dynamic Web sites, not
static, HTML-driven sites. |
So, What's
the Bad News?
Moving beyond the familiar one-semester/one-class limits of managing student
learning artifacts gets us into unfamiliar territory. How do we alter the
curriculum to integrate portfolios? How do we deal with long-term storage,
privacy, access, and ongoing vendor support? What about the challenge of
interoperability among platforms so student work can move to a new campus upon
transfer?
In short, how do we
make the ePortfolio an enterprise application, importing data from central
computing, serving the application on a central, secure server, and managing
an ever-enlarging campus system? Electronic portfolios have great reach in
space and time so they will not be adopted lightly. We've seen how extensively
learning management systems such as WebCT, Blackboard, and Angel can alter our
campuses. ePortfolios are much more challenging for large-scale
implementations.
Still, ePortfolio
implementations are occurring on dozens if not hundreds of campuses. Schools
of education are especially good candidates, as they're pressured by
accrediting agencies demanding better-organized and accessible student work.
Some statewide systems are adopting ePortfolio systems as well. The Minnesota
State Colleges and Universities system and the University of Minnesota system
have ePortfolios. Electronic portfolio consortia are also forming. The
open-source movement, notably MIT's Open Knowledge Initiative (OKI), has
embraced the ePortfolio as a key application within the campus computing
virtual infrastructure.
Moreover, vendors, in
order to establish themselves as the market begins to take shape, are already
introducing ePortfolio tools. Several companies, including BlackBoard, WebCT,
SCT, Nuventive, Concord, and McGraw-Hill, are said to either have or are
developing electronic-portfolio tools.
|
ePortfolio Tools and
Resources
Within the National Learning
Infrastructure Initiative is a group called The Electronic Portfolio
Action Committee (EPAC). EPAC has been led over the last year by John
Ittelson of Cal State Monterey Bay. Helen Barrett of the University of
Alaska at Anchorage, a leading founder of EPAC, has been investigating
uses of ePortfolio tools for years. MIT's Open Knowledge Initiative
(OKI) has provided leadership and consulting for the group, along with
its OKI partner, Stanford University. The Carnegie Foundation has been
active within EPAC, as have a number of universities.
What follows is a list of
ePortfolio tools now available or in production:
• Epselen Portfolios, IUPUI,
www.epsilen.com
• The Collaboratory
Project, Northwestern, http://collaboratory.nunet.net
• Folio Thinking: Personal
Learning Portfolios, Stanford, http://scil.stanford.edu/research/mae/folio.html
• Catalyst Portfolio Tool,
University of Washington, www.catalyst.washington.edu
• MnSCU e-folio, Minnesota
State Colleges and Universities, www.efoliomn.com
• Carnegie Knowledge Media
Lab, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, www.carnegiefoundation.org/kml/
• Learning Record Online (LRO)
Project, The Computer Writing and Research Lab at the University of
Texas at Austin, www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~syverson/olr/
contents.html
• Electronic Portfolio,
Johns Hopkins University, www.cte.jhu.edu/epweb
• CLU Webfoil, California
Lutheran University, www.folioworld.com
• Professional Learning
Planner, Vermont Institute for Science, Math and Technology, www.vismt.org
• Certification Program
Portfolio, University of Missouri-Columbia and LANIT Consulting,
https://portfolio.coe.missouri.edu/
• Technology Portfolio and
Professional Development Portfolio, Wake Forest University Department
of Education, www.wfu.edu/~cunninac/edtech/technologyportfolio.htm
• e-Portfolio Project, The
College of Education at the University of Florida, www.coe.ufl.edu/school/portfolio/index.htm
• PASS-PORT (Professional
Accountability Support System using a PORTal Approach) University of
Louisiana at Lafayette and Xavier University of Louisiana, www.thequest.state.la.us/training/
• The Connecticut College
e-Portfolio Development Consortium, www.union.edu/PUBLIC/ECODEPT/kleind/
conncoll/
• The Kalamazoo College
Portfolio, Kalamazoo College, www.kzoo.edu/pfolio
• Web Portfolio, St. Olaf
College, www.stolaf.edu/depts/cis/web_portfolios.htm
• The Electronic Portfolio,
Wesleyan University, https://portfolio2.wesleyan.edu/names.nsf?login
• The Diagnostic Digital
Portfolio (DDP), Alverno College, www.ddp.alverno.edu/
• E-Portfolio Portal,
University of Wisconsin-Madison, http://portfolios.education.wisc.edu/
• Web Folio Builder,
TaskStream Tools of Engagement, www.taskstream.com
• FolioLive, McGraw-Hill
Higher Education, www.foliolive.com
• Outcomes Assessment
Solutions, TrueOutcomes, www.trueoutcomes.com/index.html
• Chalk & Wire, www.chalkandwire.com
• LiveText, www.livetext.com
• LearningQuest
Professional Development Planner, www.learning-quest.com/
• Folio by eportaro, www.eportaro.com
• Concord (a digital
content server for BlackBoard systems), www.concord-usa.com
• iWebfolio by Nuventive
(now in a strategic alliance with SCT), www.iwebfolio.com
• Aurbach & Associates,
www.aurbach.com/
|
Continued at http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=6984
Bob Jensen's threads on education
technology are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on assessment
are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm
Bob Jensen's bookmarks for education
are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob.htm
The home page of the European
Accounting Association --- http://www.eaa-online.org/home/index.cfm
From the December 2002 EAA Newsletter
| Interview
with Professor Serge Evraert, incoming President of IAAER and past
President of EAA
For the first
issue of this new newsletter we have approached, and been granted, a
short interview with Professor Serge Evraert, Professor of accounting at
the University of Bordeaux. Serge is not only a longstanding supporter
of the EAA, including acting as Chair of the EAA following the 20th
Annual EAA Congress in 1998 held in Bordeaux, but has just become the
President of the IAAER. It seemed appropriate therefore to question him
on the relationship between the EAA and other national accounting
associations and the role of the IAAER. Does it make sense for us to be
members of both organisations?
Editor :
Serge, you have been elected for a two years term as President of the
IAAER at the 9th World Congress of Accounting Educators in Hong Kong in
November. What are you first impressions of your new role?
Prof. Evraert: I would say that, given the quality of the organizers,
this 9th Congress of the Association since its creation fourteen years
ago was a success both from a research and education perspective with
participation of more than 450 colleagues from 50 countries and the
active involvement of the delegates of the professional institutions
members of the Association. Eleven technical panels and seven
educational panels were held and 150 papers were selected, 130 of them
for main session presentations and about 20 for research forum
presentations. Also of special interest were the joint IAAER/AAA
Globalization Roundtable held just before the opening of the Congress
which evoked the setting of priorities for improvement of Accounting
Education in Asia, Latin America, Africa and Eastern Europe and the
Seminar for Directors of Education which addressed advanced topics in
accounting education such as multimedia and distance learning, computer
based professional examinations, multi disciplinary cases studies ,
technical versus non- technical professional education for accountants.
Editor: It
sounds like this was an excellent event but could you briefly introduce
the IAAER and some of its achievements for the education and research
community?
Prof. Evraert: IAAER is a not-for-profit organization whose mission is
to promote excellence in accounting education and research on a
worldwide basis. It is the only global association in the area of
accounting education and research. Current membership includes nearly
700 individuals, schools and institutions and 48 Accounting and
Practitioners' regional or national academic and professional
associations - including the EAA. The Executive Committee usually meets
twice a year at the EAA and the AAA annual meetings. This network also
acts as a federation of accounting associations on a worldwide basis and
we wish to extend its role by promoting joint programs and conferences
on a national or regional level.
Editor:
Perhaps you could give us some specific examples of recent achievements
for the education and research community IAAER has undertaken?
Prof. Evraert: We have had task forces on several projects whose reports
are available on our web site www.IAAER.org
. One such task force was devoted to developing an implementation plan
for IFAC IEG N° 9, another to developing a global code of ethics for
accounting educators. We also have a task force devoted to participation
in the global competencies project and the last so far was the project
on "The impact of Globalization on Accounting Education" which
has been conducted by Gert Karreman of the Netherlands and supported by
the IASM. The results of this study have been published by the
International Accounting Standards Board. Our website is also very
useful to the network and of course the Cosmos Accountancy Chronicle is
delivered twice a year to our members giving them full details of our
activities as well as other information.
Editor: What
are you hopes for the future role of IAAER ?
Prof. Evraert: Recently, financial scandals have seriously impacted
public confidence on the alleged benefits of a self-regulated free
market economy and it is fair to say that, as accountants, we are
concerned about this. Also the move towards global accounting standards
for certain type of companies is underway. Thus, our academic and
professional organizations have a unique opportunity to act together,
pulling in the same direction, but taking advantage of their distinctive
competencies, to join our efforts together to think out of the box and
foster ethical and innovative attitudes for the benefits of our
students, scholars and the whole accounting profession. IAAER provides a
wonderful environment in which to take this global view and I would very
much encourage EAA members to consider becoming involved in what we do
in addition to their membership of the EAA and its corporate involvement
in IAAER. |
Questions
What is the literal definition of Googol? (the source of the trade name
Google)
Who were the two Stanford University graduate students who invented Google?
How does Google make its profits by providing a free search engine to the world?
Hint: It's not the advertising revenue.
Answers:
“Googol” is the mathematical term for the number one followed by a hundred
zeros.
The geeks who invented Google
were the following 22-year old graduate students at Stanford University:
Larry Page was an
all-American type (geek variety) whose dad taught computer science in Lansing,
Mich.
Sergey Brin, with the
dark brooding looks of a chess prodigy, emigrated from Russia at the age of 6:
his father was a math professor.
The main source of revenue is from
licensing fees to huge companies like Yahoo and AOL who in turn use Google's
licensed corporate services.
"The World According to Google,"
by Steven Levy, Newsweek, December 16, 2002 --- http://www.msnbc.com/news/844175.asp?0dm=-118K
THE DESKTOP
ORACLE OF DELPHI
Internet-search engines have been around for the
better part of a decade, but with the emergence of Google, something profound
has happened. Because of its seemingly uncanny ability to provide curious
minds with the exact information they seek, a dot-com survivor has
supercharged the entire category of search, transforming the masses into
data-miners and becoming a cultural phenomenon in the process. By a winning
combination of smart algorithms, hyperactive Web crawlers and 10,000
silicon-churning computer servers, Google has become a high-tech version of
the Oracle of Delphi, positioning everyone a mouseclick away from the answers
to the most arcane questions—and delivering simple answers so efficiently
that the process becomes addictive. Google cofounder Sergey Brin puts it
succinctly: “I’d like to get to a state where people think that if
you’ve Googled something, you’ve researched it, and otherwise you
haven’t and that’s it.” We’re almost there now. With virtually no
marketing, Google is now the fourth most popular Web site in the world—and
the Nos. 1 and 3 sites (AOL, Yahoo) both license Google technology for their
Web searches. About half of all Web searches in the world are performed
with —Google, which has been translated into 86 languages. The big reason
for the success? It works. Not only does Google dramatically speed the
process of finding things in the vast storehouse of the Web, but its power
encourages people to make searches they previously wouldn’t have bothered
with. Getting the skinny from Google is so common that the company name has
become a verb. The usage has even been anointed by an instantly renowned New
Yorker cartoon, where a barfly admits to a friend that “I can’t explain
it—it’s just a funny feeling I’m being Googled.”
. . .
THE GOOGLE
MYSTIQUE
When
Judge Richard Posner wrote a book recently to identify the world’s leading
intellectuals, he used Google hits as a key criterion. When the Chinese
government decided that the Web offered its citizenry an overly intimate view
of the world outside its borders, what better way to pull down the shades than
to block Google? (Within a week the Chinese changed direction; Google was too
useful to withhold.) Companies that do business online have become justifiably
obsessed with Google’s power. “If you drop down on Google, your business
can come to a screeching halt,” says Greg Boser of WebGuerilla, an Internet
consultancy. And if two clashing egos want to see whose Google is bigger, they
need only venture to a Web site like GoogleFight to compare results.
Google was the brainchild of two
Stanford graduate students who refused to accept the conventional wisdom that
Internet searching was either a solved problem or not very interesting. Larry
Page was an all-American type (geek variety) whose dad taught computer science
in Lansing, Mich. Sergey Brin, with the dark brooding looks of a chess
prodigy, emigrated from Russia at the age of 6: his father was a math
professor. Brin and Page, who met as 22-year-old doctoral candidates in
computer science in 1995, began with an academic research project that morphed
into an experiment on Web searching.
Their big idea was something they
called PageRank (named after Larry), which took into account not just the
title or text on a Web site but the other sites linked to it. “Our intention
of doing the ranking properly was that you should get the site you meant to
get,” says Page. Basically, the system exploited the dizzyingly complex
linking network of the Web itself—and the collective intelligence of the
millions who surfed the Web—so that when you searched, you could follow in
the pathways of others who were interested in that same information.
. . .
TOO MUCH OF
A GOOD THING?
For researchers, of course, Google is a
dream tool. “I can’t imagine writing a nonfiction book without it,” says
author Steven Johnson. Some even wonder if Google might be too much of a good
thing. “I use it myself, every day,” says Joe Janes, assistant professor
in the information school of the University of Washington. “But I worry
about how over reliance on it might affect the skill-set of librarians.”
New uses emerge almost as quickly
as the typical 0.3 seconds it takes to get Google results. People find
long-lost relatives, recall old song lyrics and locate parts for old MGs.
College instructors sniffing for plagiarism type in suspiciously accomplished
phrases from the papers of otherwise inarticulate students. Computer
programmers type in error-code numbers to find out which Windows function
crashed their program. Google can even save your life. When Terry Chilton, of
Plattsburgh, N.Y., felt a pressure in his chest one morning, he Googled heart
attacks, and quickly was directed to a detailed list of symptoms on the
American Heart Association site. “I better get my butt to the hospital,”
he told himself, and within hours he was in life-saving surgery.
Eleven years ago computer scientist
David Gelernter wrote of the emergence of “mirror worlds,” computer-based
reflections of physical reality that can increase our understanding and
mastery of the real world. Google is the ultimate mirror world, reflecting the
aggregate brilliance of the World Wide Web, on which is stored everything:
cookie-bake results, Weblogs, weather reports and the Constitution. And
because Google is now the default means of accessing such information, the
contents of Google’s world matter very much in the real world.
The Google advanced search page is
at http://www.google.com/advanced_search?hl=en
Bob Jensen's search engine helpers
are at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on Weblogs are
at http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm#WeblogBlog
|
