A change of blogs

As you might expect of the descendants of Scots, we are quite keen to save money. We have moved the Global Text Project to Google's free Blogger. All the old posts have been moved and the original date of the posting noted.

-Don and Rick

Open Access and the Evil Empire (2007.02.03)

As readers of this blog well know, making intellectual property freely available over the Internet is what the Global Text Project is all about. When you look at the "open" movement, it has three major aspects: First came open source, (e.g. Linux); next came open content (e.g. Wikipedia) and, finally, open access. Open access, according to Wikipedia (naturally), means "free on-line access to digital scholarly material". You may not know this, but university library subscriptions to scholarly journals can cost many thousands of dollars. Thus, like textbooks, they are not accessible to all who might benefit from having access to them, particularly students and professors in developing countries. The Wikipedia article is quite well-done if you'd like to learn more.

Now we learn that the Association of American Publishers has hired a "pit-bull" PR firm to make the case to the public that open access is bad for us. Read the entire article in the January 24, 2007 on-line edition of Nature. According to the article, the PR firm's name is Denzenhall Resources. One of its previous clients was Jeff Skilling of Enron fame. We hope for similar success with their new client.

-Don

Computers for Ethiopia—and much more (2007.01.21)

Not surprisingly, the Global Text Project attracts many who are interested in helping their fellow global citizens. On Friday, I had the opportunity to meet Solomon Negash, one of the many fine people involved in the Global Text Project. After some 20 years in industry, Solomon is now an assistant professor in the Computer Science and Information Systems department at Kennesaw State University, which is 32 kms (20 miles) north of Atlanta.

Ethiopia, Solomon's home country, has 71 million people, a per capita income of USD160, and 95,000 computers according the to World Bank. In 2001, Solomon started the Bethany Negash Memorial Foundation, a non-profit, "to promote the diffusion of education that supports economic self-sufficiency in Africa, starting with Ethiopia."

The foundation has shipped three containers of computers to Ethiopia, a total of 1,200 computers. The main targets are schools and colleges. Solomon has instituted a cost recovery process to recoup all the costs associated with shipping the computers, including customs and VAT. He expects that this project will be self sustaining by the end of 2007.Solomon has volunteered to pilot the adoption of the Information Systems text in Ethiopia in the latter half of 2007, be the editor-in-chief for a Systems Analysis and Design text, and pilot a project for converting Ethiopian K-12 texts to the Global Text library.One can only be greatly impressed by Solomon's generosity of time, energy, and thought.

Rick

How About K-12? (2007.01.07)

Since Rick and I began talking about Global Text, we always found that people loved the idea, but frequently noted that an even greater need was for free textbooks for K-12 students, and not only in developing countries, but also in poor school districts in the US As just one example, when I described Global Text to the Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning on my campus, she commented on the K-12 need in the Denver Public Schools. She said that many textbooks were badly out of date, and there are not even enough of them so that every student had one to take home at night to do their homework.

While noting the K-12 need, our ties are with the higher ed community, and since the community develops the content, we could see how we could engage the higher ed community in writing texts, but it would be harder for us to engage the K-12 community. We also noted that others are focused on the K-12 problem, both here and abroad.

Having said that, we have had conversations with potential partners in the K-12 community, who do have the requisite ties to the K-12 academic community and concern for the problem, world-wide. As one example, I had a long conversation last week with a K-12 academic administrator who is on the board of a foundation that focuses on helping K-12 schools in sub-Saharan Africa. He told me about a middle school in rural Ethiopia they helped build. One of the ways they continue to support this particular school is to round up surplus textbooks in the US and ship them to the school. While this is helpful, it has two downsides: 1) the texts are often out-of-date, and 2) the process is expensive. He could see how Global Text offers a better model: Current, high-quality texts that are free. This man has the necessary ties to the K-12 community and the ability to engage them. We left it that he will contact the school in Ethiopia to find a subject where the need is greatest, and then recruit a group of academics to create a text using the Global Text model. If this comes to fruition, it could serve as a model for extending Global Text to K-12, with their foundation perhaps buying Sony eReaders for the students. They like the Sony eReader as a potential repository for textbooks in the right locations (and so do I).


-Don

Rick Watson Receives AIS Fellows Award (2006.12.27)

Rick received an AISFellows Award at the recent International Conference on Information Systems. "The AIS Fellows Award recognizes individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the development and maintenance of the international community of InformationSystems academics". Here is the wording of Rick's award:

"Dr. Richard Watson is the J. Rex Fuqua Distinguished Chair for Internet Strategy, Director of the Center for Information Systems Leadership, and Interim Head of MIS in the Terry College at the University of Georgia. He has published more than 100 journal articles and written texts on electronic commerce and data management. His work has been accepted by leading academic and practitioner journals and has been translated into several languages. He has given invited seminars in more than 20 countries.

Dr. Watson has served as President of AIS, co-conference chair for ICIS in 2004, and as a senior editor for MIS Quarterly. While a senior editor for MIS Quarterly, he established its Review section.

In 2001, John Wiley & Sons appointed Dr. Watson as its consulting editor for its net-enhanced organization (NEO) series. He is a visiting professor at Agder University College in Norway and Fudan University in China. He is also an honorary advisor to the Neusoft Institute for Information, China.

With Don McCubbrey, Dr. Watson is co-leading the Global Text Project. The goal of the project is to create 1,000 open content texts for university students in the developing world, and the first book will be an introductory Information Systems text.

Dr. Watson received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota, where he studied on a Fulbright award, and his MBA from Monash University in Australia. In addition he holds a Diploma in Computation and a Bachelor of Science in mathematics from the University of Western Australia".

Congratulations, Rick, on this well deserved recognition from your colleagues!


-Don

Cranking the numbers (2006.11.30)

Are there enough resources to create 1,000 texts?

There are about 8 million professors in the world according to the World Bank's statistics. Let's assume each book has 20 chapters. Therefore, we need 20,000 professors to each volunteer to write one chapter. In other words, 1 in every 400 professors needs to write one chapter, or 0.25% of the world's professors must volunteer. Clearly, there should be more than enough altruistic professors who have the discretionary time to each write a single chapter.

Furthermore, professors can engage their students in writing a chapter, or a book, because their work is for the benefit of world's community of 132 million university students.

The resources are there, so the next question is how to create the infrastructure to engage tens of thousands of professors and their students in this massive collective global endeavor.

Rick

Sustainability (2006.11.14)

There is almost universal recognition that global warming is occuring, and some organizations are taking steps to create sustainable enterprises as a means of reducing their energy usage and costs. According to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, sustainability is conserving an ecological balance by avoiding depletion of natural resources.

Don and I had the good fortune to hear recently Ray Anderson, Chairman and Founder of Interface, give a keynote address on his reinvention of Interface as a green business. You can read the story in his book, Mid-Course Correction: Toward a Sustainable Enterprise: The Interface Model.

As a consequence of Anderson's inspiring talk, I propose that every book in the Global Text series should, where appropriate, have a chapter on sustainability. It is very appropriate for a project that is global in scope and goals to advance the cause of sustainability. I have taken action by asking Peter Sclavos, a University of Georgia freshman assisting the Global Text Project, to help me write a chapter for the Information Systems book on sustainability.

Global warming and sustainability are everyone's problems, and we should all look to find some way of contributing to reducing global warming and creating a sustainable society. For my part, I've driven a Toyota Prius for the last two years and shifted to a mainly vegetarian diet. However, as someone who travels by air about once a month, I need to do some carbon trading. I am looking for ways to plant trees that will cover my carbon expenditures.

Rick

Applying business fundamentals (2006.10.16)

Business benefits society in two ways. Directly, business creates jobs. Indirectly, business develops technology to manage the creation, marketing, and distribution of goods and services. It is the application of the latter that we address in this brief discussion of the Global Text Project, whose vision is to develop 1,000 university texts for students in the developing world.

If the Global Text Project is to fulfill its vision, it needs to develop a brand and production, marketing, and distribution systems. It is no different from a traditional business in this respect and thus needs to apply exactly the same business principles if it is to be an agent of change.

Branding
Brands inform consumers about the characteristics of a product and reduce search costs. There are a number of projects creating open content for university students and potential adopters have to find these sites and then judge the quality of their products. Global Text must create a brand that stands for credible authoritative books that have strong editorial control. Each chapter will be under the control of a topic expert who will insure that the chapter is complete and screen all contributions before acceptance. By promoting the brand and what it means, Global Text, will provide a central repository where suitable texts can be found.

Production
Creating books is a production process, and Global Text needs to build a simple to use system that enables many to participate in the creation of a book. The technology needs to be author supportive so that potential contributors are not daunted by their lack of technical knowledge. Building this production system must address fundamentally the same issues facing any organization fashioning a web-based customer service system.

Marketing and distribution
All companies need to ensure that customers learn about and can get access to their products. In a global economy, distribution systems are wide and deep (e.g., a fast food chain or a parcel delivery firm), and Global Text needs a similar system. We will need to create a marketing network to get the word out about the books. For example, if we release a biology book how do we make every biology professor in the developing world aware of its existence within a few weeks? In our case, the marketing and distribution systems must be both Internet based in order to keep costs manageable.

Management team
As well as finding volunteers to edit and contribute to books, Global Text also needs to find within its volunteer community the skills necessary to build and manage a brand, create and manage an Internet-based production system (e.g., a wiki extended to meet the needs of texts), establish a marketing and distribution network. These volunteers will most probably come from within business schools or the business community, where one finds the knowledge and experience to run global enterprises.

The world's businesses have developed the expertise and talent to meet consumers' needs and wants. These same talents are required whether needs and wants are for music players or free texts. The Global Text Project is fundamentally a business, albeit one without a profit motive, and it needs to apply business thinking to meet a fundamental need for educating the leaders of the world's developing economies.

Rick

Reaction to Textbook Costs in the US (2006.10.14)

The Wall Street Journal printed an article entitled "Efforts Mount to Cut Costs of Textbooks" on September 28. If you do a Google search on the headline the first link that comes up is from the WSJ. It takes you to a page that tells you the article is restricted to subscribers. No big deal for me, I'm a subscriber, but it might be a problem for others. On the other hand, if you just scroll down a bit on the Google site, you come to a reprint of the article in the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. Click on that link and you get the article. Strange.

Anyway, it's a pretty good article about what some states in the US are doing to reduce the high cost of textbooks. For example, quoting from a sidebar in the article:

• "A new Virginia law addresses the bundling of textbooks with other materials
• Washington State requires bookstores to inform faculty of the costs and frequency of revisions
• Illinois is reviewing the feasibility of textbook-rental programs"

There's lots more. And thinking about business models.............

Don

More Publicity for Global Text (2006.09.04)

The University of Georgia's Office of Public Affairs sent out a news release on the Global Text project on September 1st. It was picked up by UPI, as well as by several other media outlets around the world. To our great pleasure, most of them are based in developing countries in Africa and Asia. Please log on to the Global Text Website at http://globaltext.org and click on the "In the press" tab for a complete list. In addition, Rick has been kept busy over the weekend responding to queries and offers of assistance from experts in several domains, ranging from agriculture to classical mechanics, higher education, open economics, and plant anatomy, as well as other IT and business-related topics.

Rick would have written this post, but he's been busy responding to the new contributors and the media.

Don

Insights from Alvin Toffler (2006.08.26)

The FT had an interesting article on Alvin Toffler's "big notion of the moment". It's in the August 19/20 edition, by Nathan Gardels, and bears the title "He has seen the future". Of course, we all know that Alvin Toffler and his wife Heidi saw the future quite clearly some 36 years ago when they published Future Shock, followed a few years later by The Third Wave. The thing that struck me about the FT piece was Toffler's comment that "new technologies are enabling the radical fusion of the producer and consumer into the "prosumer". And that, of course, is what the Global Text project is all about. The consumers of texts are the ones who are creating and maintaining them. Toffler goes on to say that "Even in the US, institutions out of synch with each other are caught in a "clash of speeds" between the old system and the new. Standardized education is among the slowest institutions to adapt. If you were a cop monitoring the speed of cars going by, you would clock the car of business, which changes rapidly under competitive pressures, at 100mph. But the car of education, which is supposedly preparing the young for the future, is only going at 10mph". Global Text will help get education up to speed by enabling prosumers to keep text content current. (One can only wonder if traditional businesses serving the education community will adapt.) By way of illustration, Rick Watson noted that "Wikipedia’s opening two sentences for Pluto when accessed on August 25, 2006 reads: Pluto is a dwarf planet in the solar system. It was classified as a planet until it was determined on August 24, 2006 that it is not a true planet". Now that's going 100mph!

Don