Civil War at Harvard over Textbook Costs

Eye-opening article in yesterday's Boston Globe re: student concerns over the textbook cost issue at Harvard,with a headline that reads: " In Harvard Square, a war over words". The first paragraph says that "A battle over book prices is raging in Harvard Square between student leaders and the Harvard Coop, the book store created by students 125 years ago to cut down on costs." Take a look.

For me, one of the most interesting parts of the article was the number of states that are introducing legislation in attempts to give students some relief: "Prices of college texts have spiked so severely across the country that since January, 86 bills to make them more affordable have been filed in 27 states, including Massachusetts, according to a national college bookstore group. College students on average spend $700 to $1,000 a year on textbooks, according to a May 2007 report by a congressional advisory committee, which also recommended various solutions to reduce prices, including creating online book databases easily accessible to students".

Is this a sea change or what?

-Don

Two Proposed Bills to Help with Textbook Costs in California

The September 24 edition of Inside Higher Education had the following story on two bills wending their way to Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger's desk:

"Competing bills to deal with student complaints about textbook prices have arrived on the governor’s desk in California, the Los Angeles Times reported. Both bills would require more disclosure about changes made from one edition to another, but one bill (backed by student groups) would require more than the other (backed by publishers)". If you click on the LA Times link you'll get the entire story. The Guv is to make his decision on whether or not to sign either bill by October 12.

- Don

Global Text Momentum Report - September 15, 2007

We have had another month of steady development.

• Progress continues on the two proof of concept books. Information Systems, while not yet complete, is far enough along that substantial parts of it will soon be in pilot test in classrooms at Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia and Atma Jaya Yogyakarta University in Indonesia. Business Fundamentals has four chapters in review and work continues on the remaining fourteen chapters. It is planned to be ready for the classroom in early 2008.


• Some modifications to the editor of the Drupal content management system (CMS) should be completed by the end of the month. Assisted by students at the University of Georgia, we have developed stylesheets for authors and will be linking these with Drupal's editor. The goal is to have consistent style names across chapter development and editing.


• Thanks to an introduction from friends at 3M Corporation, where our colleague Roberto Evaristo is Manager of Global Knowledge Management, Sajan http://marketing.sajan.com has agreed to assist the project through the provision of translation support software.


• A team of students at the University of Denver (DU), led by PhD student Rahul Choudaha, created the following databases: (1) contact persons at three to four universities in each fourteen developing economies, and (2) over 1000 book titles relevant to the first two years of undergraduate education on 38 academic disciplines. A condensed list of business books is posted on the Business Books page of the website. Please review the list and volunteer as an editor-in-chief, or refer us to a qualified colleague, active or emeritus.


• The students at DU also developed a communications and promotions plan that we will be evaluating and executing in the coming weeks.


• We added a list of universities participating in the project to the Community page of the Web site. It’s an impressive list. If you are participating in content creation in any way and your school’s name is not there, please let us know.


• Mark Huber of the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia is using one of his classes this semester to develop a detailed outline for a project management text.


• Ted Stohr of Stevens Institute of Technology has initiated creation of a Special Interest Group (SIG) of the Association for Information Systems focused on Information and Communications Technology (ICT) in Global Development. The Global Text Project will be an active participant in this SIG.


• We have the following speaking engagements on the calendar:
• A keynote speech at the 47th Annual Information Association for Computer Information Systems in Vancouver on October 5 (Rick)


• A panel presentation on Intellectual Property in a Digital World, sponsored by the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce (RSA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, hosted by the British Consulate, on October 10. (Don)


• We have had a paper on the Global Text Project accepted for The Fourth Annual Conference of Learning International Network Consortium in Jordan in October. (Rick will present)

Cheers,

- Don

A Refreshing New Take on Academic Research

The AACSB recently released a report on the Impact of Research. Click on the link to download a copy. The contents of the report are summarized nicely in this article from Economist.com, which might be a good place to start. Briefly, the report urges business school faculty to put more emphasis in their research on issues that have practical value in the real world, e.g. for practicing managers and/or for the public good. One of the issues we have been facing in the Global Text Project is how to incent volunteers when their time is limited and their contributions don't "count" for tenure and promotion. The recommendations in the AACSB report would go a long way towards helping. For example, quoting from the Economist.com, "The most controversial recommendation in AACSB's draft report (which was sent round to administrators for their comment) is that the schools be required to demonstrate the value of their faculties' research not simply by listing its citations in journals, but by demonstrating the impact it has in the workaday world". Let's hope the recommendations are adopted.

- Don

Interesting Possibility for Remote Printing of Books

IHT Tech News has an article about a new service HP created that could be used as an additional method of distributing Global Text books. It's called Cloudprint, and it's free. Basically, pdf documents are uploaded to an HP server. They can then be downloaded on demand from a cellphone and directed to a printer for printing locally. All users will need to download text is a cellphone, an access code, and a local printer. More details are available in the article. Seems to have possibilities for overcoming some of the Internet infrastructure issues in developing economies. There's lots of cellphones available there.

- Don

Global Text Momentum Report - August 13, 2007

We have moved forward on several fronts during the last few weeks. Important developments include:

• While teaching in Paris, Rick made contact with UNESCO. July was not a good time for visiting UNESCO because many people were on vacation, but we now have a link, and we can start to build a relationship with UNESCO as a result of the initial meeting.
  
• We have now worked for more than a month with Drupal, the content management system (CMS) recommended by Franz Lehner, our CTO, and Michael Scholz, one of his doctoral students. Books in English and Spanish are being uploaded. Michael is very adept as solving issues that we raise very quickly and Drupal has many of the features we need. The test site is http://ocp.uni-passau.de/drupal/
• Craig Piercy, a faculty member at the University of Georgia, and one of my undergraduate students, Kendal Lewis, are working on developing cascading style sheets (CSS) for use with printing books and displaying them on the screen. We will also develop a set of style sheets for authors so that the uploading of files to Drupal is efficient.
• Craig is also going to assign his Internet Technology class, part of a Masters of Internet Technology program, the task of outlining and starting a book on Internet technology.
  
• Don and I, while attending the Americas Conference on Information Systems last week, met with Ted Stohr of the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. Ted has agreed to be Editor-in-Chief of the Global Text Case Collection. In addition, we will be able to seed the collection with cases from Communications of the Association for Information Systems (CAIS). We can also use tutorials from CAIS to start the Global Text Tutorials Library. Anyone want to volunteer to be Editor-in-Chief?
• Please check out the Web site for some new content:
  * An article on Global Text in the August issue of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts Manufactures, and Commerce (RSA) Journal and two podcasts on the In the News page.
  * A listing of participating universities on the Community page.
• Don has received commitments for completion from all chapter editors Business Fundamentals, and some chapter reviewers have been lined up. If you would like to volunteer to review a chapter, please get in touch with Don.
• We expect the first release of Information Systems to be available within four weeks.
• Don and I visited with three large corporate foundations in July and came away with some good ideas on how to frame a case for corporate sponsorships.
  
  

~ Rick

Telecom Billionaire Establishes Low-Cost Laptop Program for Mexican Children

That's the headline on a news story from a posting on today's Philanthropy News Digest. Here's a couple of quotes along with a link to its source, which adds some additional perspectives:

"Saying that digital education holds the key to a better future for Mexico's poor, Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim has pledged to donate 250,000 low-cost laptops to the country's children by the end of the year and as many as a million in 2008, the Associated Press reports".

"With an estimated cost of $250 to $300 per machine, Slim would have to put up as much as $300 million for a million laptops, though he expects the costs to continue to fall. His plan initially would put the laptops in schools and libraries, where they would be lent out like books, he said, before eventually being given outright to students. In addition, his companies would help set up wireless networks for students to connect to the Internet".

"Slim, whose fortune may already have surpassed that of Bill Gates, said his goal is to build about a hundred "early stimulation" preschools within four years to give poor Mexican children training in math, language, and computers to improve their opportunities later in life. "The best investment one can make," he said, "is to reduce poverty."

I love it.

- Don