Teaching with technology

So, today I was thinking about how I use technology in my classroom and/or assignments. It's pretty typical in an intro MIS course to use MS Access to introduce students to databases. Excel is also a pretty common application - you can use it to teach ways to create simple decision support systems -  build a predictive model of stock prices, use pivot tables to do what if analysis, for example. But what about other things that might be useful in the working world?

In my class, there are several group assignments. This means, students need to learn how to collaborate. Despite my expectations, they don't actually already know how to use tools such as wikis or GoogleDocs to create content in a collaborative way. They stick with passing Word documents back and forth and seem to rely on the ability to meet in person. This is crazy - the world doesn't work like this anymore. I regularly collaborate with people all across North America. For a short time one summer (as a PhD student), I was working on a project with 4 people spread across 3 continents; one person in China, one in Turkey, one in Alberta (western Canada) and I was in western NY at a conference. Sure, it was a time-zone mess, but we had work to be done and timeliness mattered (I really felt for my colleague in China as he had just finished teaching all day and had to wait around until 9pm his time to connect with us).

What to do? Well, I guess I see it as my job to help students learn how to collaborate in new ways. I mean, I teach them about the need for collaboration and what types of applications might be used to collaborate, but I've never required them to actually use any of these tools before. And, like all time-pressed individuals, they just won't try something new if they don't have to. I guess it's about managing risk & reward - too risky to try a new way of working.

New this term, then, I have implemented a wiki (http://is251.openlearner.com) where each group will be developing their strategic IT report project. Here, they'll be writing about a company, identifying it's strategy, performing a value chain analysis, discovering the current IS in use and, ultimately, making some suggestions for future IS initiatives that make sense given the corporate strategy. The students will be presenting their findings in class (part of teaching them to be comfortable making presentations), but they'll be working together in public on content creation. Wish me luck.