Sunday, November 11, 2007

Momentum report - November 12 2007

I apologize for the lack of a report in October. We were busy preparing for the Quality Assurance Board meeting and getting the Information Systems in shape. Since we last reported the following has happened.

  • The second meeting of the Quality Assurance Board was held near the Munich Airport in the last week of October. The minutes of the meeting will be published soon.
  • Information Systems has been released. See http://ocp.uni-passau.de/drupal/. We had some problems getting Drupal to create a quality pdf so the decision was made to put the book together using OpenOffice. The first edition has already undergone several releases to improve quality, and another release will be made soon. We treat books like software and release patches to correct errors or add material.
  • Pilots of Information Systems are underway at the Addis Adaba University in Ethiopia and Atma Jaya Yogyakarta University in Indonesia. As part of the project, Peter Sclavos, a University of Georgia undergraduate, has worked with me to establish procedures for the operation of Student Quality Circles (SQCs), who will provide feedback for improving individual chapters. More details are on the project's Web site.
  • Initial drafts of chapters for Business Fundamentals have started to come in. Reviews have been started and, as of this date, one chapter has been completely reviewed. Don estimates that a realistic date for completion is now late March or early April 2008.
  • Don was a panel member at a symposium on Intellectual Property and the Trend Towards Openness held in Cambridge, MA on October 10. It was co-sponsored by the RSA and the British Consulate.
  • I was a keynote speaker on the Global Text Project at the International Association for Computer Information Systems in Vancouver in early October.
  • John Taylor " Ike" Williams, a partner in Fish & Richardson, PC, the oldest IP firm in the US, has joined the Quality Assurance Board.
  • I spoke on the project at the Fourth Annual Conference of Learning International Networks Consortium (LINC), a meeting organized by MIT at the Dead Sea in Jordan. This was a good opportunity to make some important contacts, particularly in the Arabic academic community, and I met some senior scholars from Jordanian and Egyptian universities who are most willing to help with the project.
  • Martin Dougimas, the lead developer of Moodle, an open source course management system, spoke at the LINC conference, and we are now looking at how Moodle can fit into the general scheme of the project. Interestingly, Doug and I both grew up in Western Australia and were educated in Perth.
  • We are refining the process by which we turn submitted chapters into books to increase the efficiency of the process so we can scale the project. We are still very much in the learning mode on how to streamline the system, which is really the intent of this phase, proof-of-concept, of the project.
  • Anders Gronstedt and Clarke Caywood have agreed to co-edit Integrated marketing and communications. The goal is to cover the introductory level classes of the rapidly converging fields of marketing , marketing communications and corporate communications. Anders is President of the Gronstedt Group and Clarke is the Director of the Graduate Program in Public Relations at the Medill Graduate School at Northwestern University.
  • Doug Broadbent has signed up to be editor-in-chief of a chemistry book. He has extensive academic and industrial experience gain over a long career and now holds a visiting professorship at Bishop's University in Quebec, Canada
Rick