MEDAILLE COLLEGE
AGASSIZ CIRCLE
BUFFALO, NEW YORK 14214

COURSE DISCLOSURE STATEMENT - Fall 2005
MBA 504 - eSkills for Management

Section 11-K Monday / Wednesday 8:15 - 10:20
Number of Credits 3

Instructor: Douglas Anderson
Instructor Availability: office, H105
Hours: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday 7:30 - 8:15 PM; Saturday 10 - noon; anytime at Doug@RicciStreet.net
course web, http://RicciStreet.net/dwares/lane/mba504/
course discussion forum, http://RicciStreet.net/cgi-bin/bistro/Ultimate.cgi

CATALOG DESCRIPTION OF COURSE

This course surveys the computer and public-speaking skills needed to prosper in today's networked organizations. By designing and running a laptop-based communications center, you will gain more control over popular software tools. You will demonstrate your competencies during oral presentations.

OBJECTIVES

After completing this course, ...

you will better understand

management practices

- software learning styles
- online collaborative work environments
- taking the tool to the job rather than taking the job to the tool
- file management on both a local PC and remote server
- proprietary software / open source software
- the digital document and the graphical user interface (GUI)
- Internet etiquette and abuses

distributed networks

- atoms / bits; analog / digital; old media / new media
- the history and current capabilities of computer software
- the history and current capabilities of computer networks
- Internet architecture and metrics, especially demographics
- transmission protocols, especially HTTP, FTP, and SMTP
- the Geek Factor: formatting, coding, scripting, programming
- the future of embedded networks and information appliances

systems development

- the digital development process
- the digital development toolkit
- software learning styles

you will have used

- operating system: software programs bundled with or added to the operating system to extend its usefulness
- web making tools: common software tools and utilities to design, assemble, optimize, and run a laptop-based communications center and World Wide Web site
- collaboration tools: the Web for research, presentations, team meetings, discussions, calendaring, shared whiteboards, individual and group emails, conferencing, and Internet telephony; hand-held and other embedded and portable devices
- business media software: slide shows, web sites, charts and graphs, and images both still and moving, including music and audio
- Webtop tools: software programs on the Web designed to be used on the Web
- office productivity software packages: especially spreadsheets, to process and display words, numbers, data sets, and images

COURSE CONTENT

Rather than structure the course around a textbook or a set of lectures, I'm structuring the course around your laptop. What do you need to know about using it? What do you need to be able to do with it in order to prosper in today's business organizations?

The skills of information retrieval, manipulation, exchange, and presentation that you develop here are used throughout organizations. They are transferable skills; you can take them from the marketing department, to production, to finance, to personnel. You can take them home.

Underlying these skills is the computer technology, knowledge of which is not only transferable. It's daunting if not downright scary.

Pedagogy in this course

Project Based Learning
The Buck Institute for Education < www.bie.org/pbl/ >

"Project-based learning is a teaching and learning model that focuses on the central concepts and principles of a discipline, involves students in problem-solving and other meaningful tasks, allows students to work autonomously to construct their own learning, and culminates in realistic, student-generated products."

As a group, we need to come to consensus on a chart that profiles today's and tomorrow's communication skills. Employees and their supervisors will be able to use the chart to measure their progress.

To do any job, you need to be a content expert, whether it be finance, marketing, operations, human resources, or whatever. These general functions would be supplemented with industry- and company-specific expertise. Thus, you might be a marketing person who works for Dunlop Tire; before long, you would have great expertise in marketing parts for the automotive industry. Your skillset would be only partly transferable to a marketing job for Westwood Pharmaceuticals. It would be highly transferable to a marketing job for Firestone.

What do managers need to know above and beyond their functions in the organization? Does the marketer need to know finance? Does the accountant need to know training? Does the production-line supervisor need to know public relations? Can they stay in their own silos, or do they need to work together on teams? Where does one department's territory end and another's begin?

In addition, no matter what job you do, you need other skills: problem-solving, decision-making, teamworking, interpersonal communication, and more formal communication skills. These skills are less industry- and company-specific; they are yours and you take them from job to job. In general, they develop over decades, not months.

It is the more formal communication skills that you must address. If you look at the provocative ideas on the course web's welcome page, you may agree that computers are putting unreasonable demands upon management. Is your boss a dinosaur? Are you co-workers ostriches? The formal communication skills fall into four big groups.

- oral presentations
- information retrieval, creation, and manipulation: research, writing, spreadsheets, images, charts
- information design and display: printed documents, presentations, webs
- information technology: computer hardware and software tools

Another way of grouping these skills is the traditional college majors that would address them. Please note that the list below does not have a one-to-one correspondence with the list above.

- English rhetoric (writing and speaking)
- psychology
- art (visual design)
- computers

Yet another way is to ask what you have to know to do your job, be it marketing, accounting, human resources, or in my case, teaching. Do you have to be able to:

- crunch numbers with a spreadsheet?
- give an oral presentation supplemented by visual aids?
- find information on the Internet?
- design and write web pages?
- maintain a web site?
- collaborate online with co-workers and customers?

Even harder to answer is how well you need to perform these new media communication skills. If you look around, you'll see that many managers don't perform these skills at all if they can avoid them. Others do perform them, but not well.

Note | Everything on the above list assumes self-sufficiency with your computer and its operating system. Experience tells me that most incoming MBA's, even those who use computers every day, are not self-sufficient.

If you were in charge, what would you expect your folks to do and what would you hand off to a specialist, either in-house or out-sourced? When the new hires can do these previously out-sourced things themselves, will you give them more salary? How will you integrate those new workers, skilled enough to run their own web sites and make terrifically entertaining oral presentations, with the more experienced workers who can't or won't learn the new skills?

The office's super-user, everyone's guru, is disdained as a dilettante by computer scientists, who are incomprehensible to the folks in their office.

Where do we draw the line?

To answer that question, you are going to participate in this virtual work group in half a dozen public ways.

TEXTBOOK

This is a learn-by-doing course, so your "textbook" is your shared experience taking this course. You will find much of the material that would be in a textbook at http://RicciStreet.net/ .

EVALUATION

I try to engage each of you in an ongoing discussion of your learning. If you aren't getting enough feedback from me, ask for more. As you'll see, I'm big on formative feedback and Socratic questioning.

I expect you to participate in both our physical classroom and our digital classroom. At a minimum, you should:

follow all the links on the syllabus, especially those on the To Do (homework) lists
contact me a dozen times via email, instant message, and NetMeeting
post at least a dozen messages at the Bistro, especially the Roundtable
maintain a web site at Parkside Plaza
complete the skills chart: Your Communications Profile and Plan
do the other homework on the reports page

Your course grade will come from doing the minimum above and from one individual presentation and one group presentation.

Except for private email, all the work you do for this course will be publicly available. It will all be linked from the home page of your Parkside Plaza web. In addition, I will chart your progress on the course web's reports page. Because these skills build on one another, it is very important that you do the homework in a timely manner.

This is graduate school and this is a learn-by-doing course. There is no final exam or convergent skill set for you to master. "This course is all about mistakes" is a phrase I often hear in self-assessments from students who are voracious learners. The idea of mistakes makes some students very nervous. They want to know the One Right Way of doing things and they aren't into taking chances. If I were using a more traditional grading method, you could not afford to make "mistakes" because you'd have a lower grade as a result. I try to reward mistakes and my biggest enemy is your fear of being hit by a low grade. Putting it off and doing it all at the end in a mad rush will not produce the learning you will need for other courses, especially MBA 600 and MBA 604. Thus:

If you do the minimum above in a timely manner and make the presentations in class, you'll get an A- for the course. That's what I expect most of you to get. Note that I don't mention how well you do them. Because your work is public, I expect that your personal pride will motivate you more than a grade. Nevertheless, I'm sure I'll get email after the course wondering why you got "only" an A-. I will reply to the email by directing you back to this web page.

If you do the work with flair and enthusiasm, you'll get an A, but that's exceptional. Your boss could show the web pages or presentation to a client or to the big boss as is. Your boss would remember them when discussing a promotion. It does not matter that you deserve an A+ because you worked hard and are an all-around wonderful person. I don't doubt that for a moment, but it has nothing to do with this course grade. No one has yet received an A.

If you don't do the minimum above in a timely manner or one of the presentations, you'll get no better than a B+ for the course. You will certainly be letting down your team members as well as hindering your own learning. If you don't do two, we need to talk about whether you have time for the course.

Please note that a "lousy" presentation will get the same A- as one I personally "like". However, that doesn't mean I don't have standards and you don't have pride. Note the criteria below as well as my philosophy of learning and grading available on the course web.

Policy | Because of the progression of the work, the groups, and the tight syllabus, I don't know how and where to fit in a realistic make-up of your oral presentations. Your web pages, Roundtable messages, and other homework, however, can get revised as often as you want after the original due date.

In addition to these presentations, please note that you have one other very important requirement. You must email a self-assessment after you have done all the other work for the course. I will not turn in a grade for you until I get that email.

Criteria

While grades are useless at best and statistically bogus, I'm a big fan of feedback, assessment, evaluation: better now in class than later on the job and better from many sources than from one. I expect you to seek feedback from your team and your classmates as well as from me. My evaluation of written and oral work asks four questions.

content - Is it logical, insightful, and visually interesting?
structure - Is it easy to follow and learn from?
language - Is it designed, written, illustrated, and presented in an appropriate business tone?
mechanics - Is it free of error and attractive to look at?

In short, does your work exhibit a command of business communications and its conventions, especially digital?

It comes down to this: If I were your boss, I would want to see documents, webs, and presentations that are attractive and accessible. Having your work available when I need it affects the quality component of my assessment. The quality of your work can be important at raise and promotion time.

These criteria are loaded with ambiguous and subjective terms: easy, appropriate, attractive, flair, enthusiasm. Such holistic characterizations come from observations colored by assumptions and prejudices. However, there are some generally agreed upon professional standards. We will discuss them in class and at the Bistro before your first presentation.

SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS OF COURSE

In order to prosper in business, you must be able to do many things other than write. These four also apply to meeting the course objectives listed above.

manage digital information
explore and discover
tolerate ambiguity
think big

Statement on Disabilities

Any student with a disability who believes he/she needs accommodation(s) in order to complete this course should contact the Office of Disability Services as soon as possible. The staff in the Office of Disability Services will determine what accommodations are appropriate and reasonable under the Americans with Disabilities Act. The Office of Disability Services is located in the Main Building, room 021 and can be reached by phone at (716) 884-3281, extension 280.

Academic Integrity

Medaille's faculty and administration expect all students to complete their academic assignments with honesty and integrity. Students who engage in any form of academic dishonesty (e.g., plagiarism, cheating on a test, forging a signature or an entire college document) will be dealt with severely, with penalties ranging from an F on a given assignment to failing a course or even academic suspension. Students should consult their Student Handbook for full details on the college's policy and procedures for handling formal charges of academic dishonesty.

please note

Grades on your papers will reflect standard English usage. The Modern Language Association's (MLA) bibliographic style is generally used at Medaille.