Momentum report - 2008.08.30

• Don hosted Cesar Guerrero, the Sony executive in charge of strategic marketing of Sony’s reader to the education market, at the University of Denver for two days in late May. Cesar held informal get acquainted meetings with faculty from the Daniels College of Business, the Morgridge College of Education, Arts and Humanities, Penrose Library, the Center for Teaching and Learning, and the University Bookstore. Arrangements were made for a classroom pilot run of the Sony Reader in the fall using the Global Text IS book.
• Rick gave a presentation on Global Text at the European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD) conference in Oslo on June 9. As a result, he was invited to repeat his talk at a plenary session at the joint AACSB/EFMD Conference to be held in Barcelona this November. He also met Howard Davies, who has subsequently had students work on a book on Business in China. Howard is an associate dean at Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
• Rick, Don, Franz, and Mike Dowling (representing the Quality Assurance Board) met with Simon Sommer of the Jacobs Foundation in Zurich on June 13 to report progress on the project.
• Don gave a presentation on the project at the 21st Bled Electronic Commerce Project in Bled, Slovenia on June 16th. He received commitments for books from long-time academic colleagues from Australia.
• Rick and Don traveled to Palo Alto on June 30 to meet with representatives from the Hewlett Foundation. Aaron Ciszek, from the University of Denver’s Institutional Advancement office, arranged the meeting. Hewlett has been an active supporter of Open Educational Resources initiatives for some time. We were introduced to faculty from the De Anza Foothills Community College, which is playing a prominent role in the open content textbook space. We also met with involved faculty at De Anza on this trip. Finally, as a result of these meetings, Don plans to attend the Open Educational Resources Conference at Utah State University in late September.
• We are in final stages of arranging for our first corporate-sponsored textbook, a Principles of Accounting text. Many thanks to our long-time colleague and Global text Project advisor, Tom Clark, for making this possible. Tom is President of Strategy Associates, LLC in Denver, former Dean of the Ourso College of Business at Louisiana State University, and a productive IS academic.
• We have signed Memoranda of Understandings with the Alternative Media Access Center (AMAC) at the University of Georgia and the Merlot African Network (MAN). AMAC is charged with "removing barriers and providing access to knowledge for individuals with physical, sensory, and learning print-related disabilities." We will meet with AMAC personnel on a regular basis to find opportunities to cooperate. AMAC has provided us with access to its high speed scanner on several occasions. MAN is "a networked partnerships between African and US educational institutions affiliated with the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching (MERLOT) and leading Global eLearning Providers with development programs targeting Sub-Saharan Africa." We will work with MAN to creating awareness of our texts and also identify required educational material.
• We are in the process of upgrading to O3Spaces professional for the distributed management of documents.
• A proposal to establish the Arabic Center for the Global Text Project in partnership with Birzeit University is under consideration by a major foundation.

- Don and Rick