Thoughts about software, process, teaching, and design

Just grading some papers and find myself using a combination of digital and paper methods that seems to work pretty well:

I print out the papers and add my comments in pen as I read them. Perhaps some of this is habit but I find it very efficient to work this way. Even the best digital annotation tools I have used do not have the fluid interface that a pen on paper has. And there is something about paper and ink that invites informal scribbling which is a way to give some additional visual feedback about the passages I find most interesting.

I enter grades into the online gradebook. At BU’s school of management we use Sakai (an open source courseware system).

And (this is the new part): then I scan the papers and email the digital version back to the student. This works well in my current course which has a small enrollment. Not sure if this would be as efficient for a larger class. But this is what I like about it: I don’t have to remember to hand out the papers in class and I don’t need to take class time for that. If someone is absent I don’t have a paper floating around in my briefcase and possibly vanishing into a large pile of other stuff. And if somehow a paper gets lost I always have the scanned copy to go back to.

This hybrid approach echoes something I read recently (can’t remember where) which is that digital v. paper is not an either/or. Something can be stored longterm in digital form but still get printed out when paper suits better.

There is, of course, the issue of the environmental cost of using paper in this way. Yes, I recycle but avoiding the printout entirely would be even better. But in this case the value of paper in my grading process is enough to keep me in this hybrid mode. At least for now.

I do a lot of my teaching in the MS-MBA program at Boston University’s School of Management (SMG). The program offers students the chance to get an MBA and a Master’s Degree in Information Systems during the same two year time frame as a regular MBA program. This is accomplished by having students take a number of additional courses, many of which are offered as intensives. For example, students take 8 credits worth of technology courses at the start of the summer between their first and second year. I will probably say more in another post about these intensives which I have had a big hand in developing, but for now I want to say a word or two about why I think this is an interesting and useful program.

The MS-MBA program was championed by SMG former dean Lou Lataif and I always liked the way he described it. Rather than framing it as a “high tech” or “techno” MBA, aimed at students who need to understand technology in order to be in the technology space, Dean Lataif always made the argument that a deeper understanding of technology was part of an emerging skill set for 21st century managers. The idea is that you need to understand technology not to run a technology company or be an IT specialist but to be a better manager.

I will have more to say about this in future posts but in the meantime I can say that it is an interesting challenge to teach in this program in that students have a high expectation that the technology they teach will be managerially relevant. A ground rule I set in my classes is that students are welcome to challenge me to tie the technical material I am teaching to managerial concerns at any point in the discussion. Given that at various moments I am teaching binary arithmetic, virtual memory management, and basic programming this can lead to some interesting discussions, but ones that I actually relish since this challenge leads to making some useful connections.

For example, a discussion of binary arithmetic seems as far removed from a manager’s world as one can imagine, but it is part of a broader discussion about how information is represented and how a choice of representation has implications for what you can do with information and at what cost. This leads in turn to a reflection about the importance of managers having a shared language for describing and sharing the information they use in their work. While this latter information is at a much higher level than ones and zeros, some of the underlying principles we uncover in talking about bits show up at this higher level.

I look forward to exploring some of the content we explore in the MS-MBA program in future posts.

I am teaching a brief session on web analytics tomorrow and am going to use a demo site I set up early this semester, so I am going to post the link to it here (and then click on it). Here goes:

http://is323homework1demo.wordpress.com/

I have done this on Facebook and Twitter. Now off to tumblr.