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The Syllabus MBA 504 - eSkills for Management - Spring 2006 other course pages welcome | course | case | bistro | reports | roundtable | news software toolkit | newsletters this page schedule at a glance night-by-night Tuesday | Thursday April 6 | 11 | 18 | 20 | 25 | 27 May 2 | 4 | 9 | 11 | 16 | 18 | 23 | 25 | 30 June 1 | 6 | 8 basic skills | Saturday sessions | learning styles | video | podcasting

This is a good page to

The links on this syllabus will take you on divergent paths. I don't expect any of you to read -- or to need -- all of it. However, if you're going to progress towards the course objectives, I do expect all of you to read -- and to need -- much of it. It's up to you to balance your learning style against these resources.

Beats and Tunes

Blind Tuner

AccuRadio - Internet radio YOU control!

JazzFM - 102.2 FM from London, England

Jazz-Radio.fm - All That Jazz with Brian Parker from Spain

Where else can you use your wireless laptop? Buffalo's Wi-Fi Hotspots including the Marina and Cathedral Park

Schedule at a glance

For the things that we have to learn before we can learn them, we learn by doing them.
-- Aristotle

Homework at a glance

Getting Started - homework details

Operating System - homework details

Webmaking - homework details

Webtop Services - homework details

Business Media - homework details

Collaboration - homework details

Office Productivity - homework details

Moving On - homework details

Roundtable

Learning Styles - due ASAP

Teamwork - due April 18

Risk-taking - due April 18

What Is the Internet? - due April 20

Ego Surfing - due April 20

Sweeping Searchlights - due May 11 (research) and June 6 (finished report)

Take This Paycheck and ... - due May 11

Mid-course Review - due May 11

Second Internet - due June 6

Oral Presentations - due June 1

Saturday Sessions

Tentative schedule. Please suggest changes. Bring other questions. Bring bagels. Have fun.

Every Saturday morning 10 until noon. We have ten Saturdays when the building will be open for our use.

Beating your head against the wall burns 150 calories per day.
-- Anonymous

Night-by-Night

Thursday, April 6

Professional Expectations
how geeky are you?

One goal of this course is to help you make the transition from the PC as a fancy book to the PC as a fancy pencil. It's the transition from reading to writing. I'm not talking only about using word processors or spreadsheets, those fancy typewriters and adding machines. I'm talking more about the transition to writing in the broader senses of:

information design and visual design and publishing

interpersonal communication, one to one, one to many, and many to many

To prosper in the 21st century organization, you must become a web maker and online collaborator. To effectively make these transitions, you first need the same command of your computer (PC / laptop / handheld) that carpenters have of their hammers. It will not happen in the next nine weeks. This course will provide a framework for your continued growth and a good start, mostly by helping you change your mental models about information and communication and networks. The accuracy of your mental models and their continual adaptation to changing technology will provide the competitive edge that will help make you a leader in your organization.

Your employer will have performance standards as well as some expectations about your attitudes and some software and vocabulary that a newly minted MBA should be able to use comfortably.

This is a good time to note the required self-assessment. You might also want to note the previous student webs at Parkside Plaza to see where you're headed. Ann Geiger's is a terrific model.

8:45 PM

Anatomy of a laptop
hardware, software, and wetware

Gizmos, Inc., Toolkit -- most of the information you'll need for this course

PC Workshop's Getting Started with a new PC or laptop

Three mental models:

tree hierarchy on your hard drive | in a document

Understanding this nested hierarchy is the first necessary step to effective file management as well as HTML coding. For many students, file management is the single hardest part of this course.

Fighting (with) Hierarchies
By Gerd Waloszek
SAP Design Guild, March 9, 2002

tools vs jobs
proprietary vs open

These two are the keys to liberating yourself from the clutches of Microsoft's marketing department.

Slogans and Mantras

the network is the computer

hyperlinks subvert hierarchy

9:15 PM

Let's Get Geeky!
making your first web page

Could this be you? Read the lecture I'm not giving tonight. (You're welcome!) Instead, we're going to make a web page.

skills

The Basics: Reading and Writing Web Pages

reading the web

Go up one level in Ricci Street.

Right now, you're viewing the syllabus.htm file in the mba 504 folder. Look at the URL in your browser's address space:

http://RicciStreet.net/dwares/lane/mba504/syllabus.htm

This is a URL, uniform resource locator. The http part, hypertext transport protocol, distinguishes this protocol from others, such as ftp and smtp. The RicciStreet.net part is the domain name registered with the domain name system (DNS) to correspond to one and only one computer somewhere on the Internet. In this case, it's in North Carolina and is owned by Advanced Internet Technologies. The domain name is not case-sensitive. The rest of the URL is the file path on the hard drive on the computer in North Carolina. It uses the Linux operating system and the folder names -- dwares/lane/mba504/ -- and file name -- syllabus.htm -- are case-sensitive.

Note that the mba504/ folder is in the lane/ folder, which in turn is nested in the dwares/ folder. So let's go up one level to the Lantern Lane home page.

http://RicciStreet.net/dwares/lane/index.html

View source, i.e., view the source code of this web page.

Two methods: 1) right click on open area of a web page and select View Source; 2) pull down the browser's View menu and select Source.

As opposed to, for example, a Microsoft Word file in .doc format, the source code of which is proprietary, an HTML file in .htm format is open source. This HTML source code is the text file that gets sent from the server to your computer. (The images are separate files.)

The source code tells the browser what to do. So that you can view and edit it, it will open in Notepad, the text editor that comes with Windows.

Parse the HTML - Hypertext Markup Language

All the HTML codes are between angle braces: < and >. In HTML, case doesn't matter but spelling and spacing are crucial.

We're going to isolate the parts of the HTML document index.html and then delete them until all we have remaining is the bare bones structure common to (almost) every web page.

Starting there, we will then write a web page.

writing

Your first web page

What is HTML?

Anatomy of a Web Page

hierarchy of a web page: The html tag pair -- think of it as a "container" -- is parent to two children: the head and the body. The head tag pair contains -- is parent to -- the title tag and various meta tags and tags to include extra information like style sheets and scripts. The head tag pair contains -- is parent to -- the headings, subheadings, paragraphs, images, and lists that display on the page n the browser.

Working backward, the stuff that displays on the page is child to the body which is sibling with the head. They are children to the html container -- some call all these containers "objects".

Look out, Gutenberg! Publishing your web page via File Transfer Protocol

10:10 PM

Don't let me forget. I want to demonstrate downloading from the Internet to your laptop. You are going to download Ipswitch's WS_FTP-LE 5.08 and install it on your laptop.

WS_FTP LE is ... shareware, available for free to educational users, government employees (U.S. local, state, federal and military) or to non-business home users only.

That's you: educational users. Version 5.08 is not the latest and greatest from Ipswitch. Nor is it the fancy version that you have to pay for if you're going to be do webmaking for a living; the LE stands for Limited Edition. However, this old limited edition does everything you need to do because FTPing is a very simple process, a brute transfer of files, nothing fancy required.

Those of you who have downloaded before, feel free to download this on your own. Then you can help someone else during class.

Learn more: Webmaking ftp

10:20 PM

Start your weather report, though you are welcome to post messages at any time during class.

to do before the next class

Saturday | This Saturday, I will be in our classroom starting at 10 AM and staying until at least noon.

Finish your weather report for tonight, April 6. Read everyone else's.

How did it go tonight? What was the cloudiest part? The clearest?

Read this weekend! What Is the Internet?

Explore Ricci Street and the WWW beyond.

Most of the webs you have visited were designed for the first-time or one-time visitor. Many were designed to draw you through a product catalog toward the check-out page. They provided few off-site links to let you stray once they had you in the store. Lots of pictures. Some flashy wizbang. Slick and quick, lean and mean were the design mantras.

Ricci Street is more of a customer service web, perhaps customer service library is more accurate. It was designed for the captive audience -- you! It has mostly text, not many visuals. Some of the pages are verrrrrry long. There are tens of thousands of off-site links. It encourages exploration and discovery and reflection and contemplation.

Designing it, I had the luxury of building an elaborate navigation metaphor. It takes a while to learn, but once you do, it's much easier to navigate because you can use the Ricci Street metaphor as a memory palace, which is why it's named after Matteo Ricci in the first place.

Think of it like moving to a new city. You can study all the maps you want. The only way to learn the city is to walk and drive around. With Ricci Street, that means to keep clicking. The best place to get an overview is the Ricci Street home page at < http://RicciStreet.net >. It would be a good page to bookmark.

If you expand the menus on the right and left columns of the home page, you'll be able to see two or three levels into the hierarchy. Plunge in anywhere.

A good place to start is this course web's Welcome page. Note that the course web has five other pages -- course | case | reports | roundtable | news -- in addition to the one you are reading now: syllabus. These are the pages on Ricci Street that are unique to this course and contain the information that I would hand out on paper if I weren't using the Web. Note the URL (web address) for all of them:

http://RicciStreet.net/dwares/lane/mba504/

The syllabus page (the one you're reading now) is another good page to bookmark. It and the reports page change all the time; they are what I did as oral lectures and paper handouts before I started using the Web in 1995. Most of the course material, what would have been in a printed ink-on-paper textbook, is at the Gizmos, Inc., Toolkit. Student webs are at Ricci Street's Parkside Plaza section, where yours will be.

Homework #GS1 due ASAP

How geeky are you?

Respond to and send this form that asks about your computer skills. This is an assessment, not a test. It will help me understand how to pace the course. The aggregate results will also help you see how you compare to your classmates.

Homework #GS2, post message, due April 18

Start contributing to the course web

At the Ground Zero Bistro, register and introduce yourself by posting a message in the MBA 504 General Discussion forum.

What is/was your job?
How wired is the company?
How geeky/wired/into ebiz does the company have to be to compete? To prosper?
How geeky is your job?
How geeky do you have to be to do your job at all? To prosper?

Will you measure whether the glass is half-full or half-empty? That is, will you measure your company and job against what they were or against what they could become?

In your message, try to use a smilie, and styled, bulleted text. You'll find instructions on the Bistro Code page or clicking on the Bistro code link next to your message reply box.

Spellcheck your Bistro messages

Ricci Street is a public web site. Take a minute before you post messages to right-click and check your spelling. Download and install ieSpell. Don't embarrass yourself again!

ieSpell is a free Internet Explorer browser extension that spell checks text input boxes on a web page. It should come in particularly handy for users who do a lot of web-based text entry (e.g. web mails, forums, blogs, diaries.

ieSpell is not spyware or adware. It's free for personal and not-for-profit use.

Homework #GS3, send email, due April 18

Class Directory Info

Send me an email at Doug@RicciStreet.net with your class directory info, which will be on the reports page with your picture: Bistro user name and preferred email address.

Also, please add a statement about why you're in the MBA program. If a current student influenced your decision, let us know his or her name, too. We're trying to get a handle on how important word-of-mouth is when you're making your decision about going to graduate school.

Homework #GS4, send email due April 18

Resume

Send me an email at Doug@RicciStreet.net with a zipped attachment -- your resume in .txt format. If your resume is in Word's .doc or some other proprietary format, please wash it in a text editor such as NotePad or NoteTab (recommended) to take away the formatting instructions and compress it using WinZip or your Windows zipping utility before you send it to me.

Please note that attaching your resume in .txt format directly to an email is not the same as zipping it first and attaching the .zip file. Most email software will incorporate the .txt resume into the email because they are both simple text files. As a result, any minimal formatting you have done will be lost. However, the copy in the .zip file will retain the formatting when you unzip it. Since both HR departments and job applicants are having a hard time adjusting from paper resumes to electronic resumes, job applicants aren't doing themselves any favors by letting the email software mess up their formatting. To see what I mean, email your text resume to yourself.

The worst that can happen is that the company will ask you to put your resume into a form box and submit it that way. What will yours look like when it gets there? I hope that your writing at the Bistro will give you some experience formatting text on Web page forms.

Look at Torin Monahan's resume.

IM stands for Instant Messenger. AOL Instant Messenger or AIM is the most popular instant messaging software and some of you already have it with your AOL accounts. Your AOL screen name is also your IM screen name. You don't need an AOL account to use AIM or to communicate with those who do have an AOL account. You can download the AIM software at AOL's web site.

Unfortunately, Microsoft's IM protocol is not compatible with AOL's. And neither is compatible with the third most common, Yahoo Messenger. To say nothing of the original IRC (Internet Relay Chat), still used by millions of people.

Why get a separate Hotmail account?

One advantage of a Hotmail account is that the email and any attachments sit on Microsoft's computers until you retrieve it via your web browser. While it's there, Microsoft scans all the mail and any attachments for viruses. Another advantage is that you can quickly create an email account that you can use for:

online forms, to be able to attract the spam when the proprietors of the web site sell your email address.

temporary purposes, to be able to get email for a limited time for a limited purpose, such as a job hunt.

Microsoft would like you to pay for the Hotmail account, but if you're careful where you click, you can get it for free, which I highly recommend.

Homework #GS5, send email due April 18

See below under April 11

Download and install the software toolkit, as needed.

The most important is Notetab to use instead of Notepad. Next is WS_FTP, see below. And finally, the Firefox browser, especially because of its built-in newreader.

Before class on Monday August 30, please download WS_FTP-LE 5.08 to your laptop. If you install it, too, that would be good. Note that you are getting an older, limited version (LE), which is free (highly recommended). You'll use WS_FTP to "publish" files to your web folder on Ricci Street.

WinZip should come with Windows XP. To make sure, right-click on an icon on your desktop. One of the options should have the word "zip". If it doesn't, download and install WinZip, too. You'll use it to combine and compress files for attachment to email.

You're going to need an RSS client. You might also think seriously about using a browser other than Microsoft's. The browser I use is Firefox. For email, staying away from Microsoft Outlook is a good thing if you want to avoid viruses, etc. I use Thunderbird for email -- I can get all my email accounts aggregated there. Thunderbird also has an easy-to-use function for RSS. Another option is a dedicated feed reader such as SharpReader or AmphetaDesk or FeedDemon.

Practice what we did in class

Your first web has all the information for basic literacy: how to read and write HTML. Get into the habit of viewing the source code for a web page.

Roundtable

I may not get to talk about these in class the first night

Learning Styles - due ASAP

Teamwork - due April 18

Risk-taking - due April 18

What Is the Internet? - due April 20

Ego Surfing - due April 20

Note that What Is the Internet? involves some reading. The Roundtable is due April 20 but the in-class game on these ideas will take place on April 18. That's next Wednesday, so don't delay starting this reading.

Saturday, April 8

Starting at 10 AM, I will be in 85 Humboldt to help you with basic skills:

set up your laptop
download, compress, and attach files
make web pages with a text editor

These are relaxed, come and go sessions. They are not required. After the course is over, many students comment that the help they received and gave on Saturdays made all the difference in this course.

Tuesday, April 11

To help build your resume, give some thought to participating with the MBA Student Organization. Don't think, "I'm new around here." No one stays very long; you're already a veteran. Is it time to step up? Talk about it at the Bistro.

Port 80's Customhouse
concepts and buzzwords

Excuse me, but what do you see in your head while you're thinking? That's not something we're used to talking about. Of course, we know how to organize things in the "real" world. For instance, we can fit blocks through holes or rearrange the living room furniture.

What about larger spaces, such as Buffalo? How do you find your way around? I'll bet that your mental map of Buffalo is different from mine, which looks south and is centered around the mile-long street, Parkside Avenue, between my house and my classrooms.

What about ideas? How do you arrange them in your head?

Concept maps: models | mental models | business models

The tree hierarchy used on your laptop and on a web server can be displayed as a kind of concept map representing the mental model in your head. You have to accept this model and all the rules that accompany it.

Bits and atoms are terms used to understand the difference between the "real" world and the "virtual" world, along with analog/digital and old media/new media.

What's behind it all? It's scalable and extensible. Moore's Law

8:30 PM

On a piece of paper, draw the Internet. How big is it? What shape is it? Where is it?

New Media aka Distributed Networks

What is the Internet

Who Runs the Internet?

The Driving Forces of the Internet

Where is the US?

Broadband Reality Check: The FCC ignores America’s Digital Divide
by S. Derek Turner
Free Press, August 2005

Why do MBA's need to know HTML?

We Are the Web by Kevin Kelly, Wired 13.08, August 2005

How could we create so much, so fast, so well? In fewer than 4,000 days, we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective story and put them in front of 1 billion people, or one-sixth of the world's population. ...

By 2015, desktop operating systems will be largely irrelevant. The Web will be the only OS worth coding for. It won't matter what device you use, as long as it runs on the Web OS.

Generation WWW: Kids Create Web Sites
by Ellen Edwards
Washington Post, March 24, 2004

Peter Grunwald of the Internet research firm Grunwald Associates estimates there are about 2 million sites created by kids age 6 to 17. ... Further, he estimates that 9 percent of kids age 9 to 12 have their own sites. ...

"If you're 12 or 14 and you don't know HTML, your friends won't respect you," Riehle says. "There is 'a cool geek factor.' Smart is cool again."

Kids are learning HTML code to create their own sites, not necessarily an easy thing for the pencil-and-paper generation to accept. ...

Now schools and camps teach HTML, and kids buy software to help them design pages. Karen Rosenbaum, who runs the TIC (Technology Is Cool) summer camp in Bethesda, says teaching kids HTML is easy. "Even young kids can learn it in an afternoon," she says.

When these kids hit the job market, you're going to be their boss.

9:00 PM

What to call this stuff

Port 80 is a web. Dwares is a separate web. Just like a book has pages, so does a web. Just like a book has chapters, so a web can have subdirectories. They're like little webs but we don't really have a name for that. Subweb?

A site is a collection of pages, perhaps a collection of webs, that all have the same domain name. Ricci Street is a web site. Port 80 is a web. Thus Ricci Street is a collection of webs. We can also speak of Ricci Street as a web.

A page is one file, usually ending in .htm (or .cfm or .asp if it's coming from a database). Your browser displays one page at a time.

You'll often hear people use page when they mean site and vice versa. Listen closely and be careful with your own usage.

Rather than the book metaphor, we can use the Ricci Street metaphor. Ricci Street has neighborhoods: Ricci Green, Digital Wares, Gizmos Inc.,  and Port 80. I hope it will grow. Each of these neighborhoods has what I'll call "sections" because I don't have a better word. Or I can call the sections "webs". In that sense, Port 80 has six webs: Customhouse, Charthouse, Boardwalk, Lighthouse, Shoreline, Docks.

Learn more webmaking terms at Port 80's Customhouse.

9:15 PM

We're going to return to working on your first web pages.

We'll also learn how to FTP it to your Plaza web. How's that for a new verb: FTP. "I FTP'd it." "Will you FTP this for me?"

10:15 PM

Don't let me forget. I want to demonstrate zipping (compressing) a document and attaching it to an email. To follow along, you will use the zip program that comes with WindowsXP Professional. If you don't have it on your laptop or home PC, you can download and install WinZip.

10:20 PM

Start your weather report, though I encourage you to post messages at any time during class. I'm especially interested in the "cloudy", more negative comments.

Featured software

Windows Explorer file manager, Internet Explorer browser -- personally, I use Firefox for browsing and Thunderbird for email.

Notepad text editor comes with Windows -- personally, I use NoteTab

WinZip (not needed with XP Professional)

WS_FTP-LE 5.08

to do before the next class

Finish your weather report for Tuesday, April 11; read everyone else's

How did it go tonight? What was the cloudiest part? The clearest?

Click around on your laptop's hard drive

Optimize and personalize your operating system. The first round of demos starting April 20 will investigate these options in detail.

software toolkit 

Download and install the parts that you don't have.

Homework #GS5, send one email, due April 20

Newsletters

People ask me, "Where do you come up with all these web sites? You must spend all day on the Internet!" My secret weapon: newsletters and RSS feeds.

I would even go so far as to say that there are two kinds of research. One is when I intentionally search for something. The other is when I expose myself to things that may be of interest but I didn't even know to look for them. The Internet makes it easy to subscribe to newsletters and RSS feeds that appear in your mailbox regularly. You can quickly scan them for information of interest. You can stuff them into a folder and search the folder.

Tip | You might want to get a separate Hotmail or other free account just for this sort of stuff to keep your main personal email box less cluttered.

You're going to need an RSS client. You might also think seriously about using a browser other than Microsoft's. The browser I use is Firefox. For email, staying away from Microsoft Outlook is a good thing if you want to avoid viruses, etc. I use Thunderbird for email -- I can get all my email accounts aggregated there. Thunderbird also has an easy-to-use function for RSS. Another option is a dedicated feed reader such as SharpReader or AmphetaDesk or FeedDemon.

At these half-dozen web sites, you should sign up for the newsletter by submitting your email address or subscribe to the RSS feed by copying the URL and pasting it into your feed reader aka news aggregator or RSS client.

Wired magazine's Wired News. On the newsletter sign-up page or the RSS feed page, you'll have a bunch of choices. The newsletter I want you to read is Wired News, in either plain text or web page (HTML) format. If any of the other newsletters interests you, feel free to subscribe to them, too.

As Wired News says, it provides "daily reports on the changing digital world". Scanning it will be like scanning the headlines in a print newspaper. Even if you don't have time to read any of the Wired News articles, at least you'll get a sense of what's going on days and often weeks ahead of when you'll see it in the print newspapers.

Boing Boing - a directory of wonderful things - RSS

Lockergnome's Windows Fanatics

Freeware, useful Web sites, original PC tips & tricks, critical updates, jargon definitions, and general help for consumers. Tech support with a personal touch!

others

Tara Calishain's ResearchBuzz - sign up on left of home page
Charles Kessler's Cool Tricks and Trinkets; newsletter subscription email link in green box on left. A "blank email" means don't worry about a subject line and content. Just send the email and you'll get an automatic reply in return. AOL users may have to copy-and-paste the address: cool-tricks-join-request@list.adventive.com
PCWorld.com - for great software downloads, subscribe to their newsletters

They will send email newsletters on a regular schedule. How will you harvest interesting information and manage it once it's on your computer?

After you begin receiving these newsletters, forward the headers to me all in one email.

Example of header:

Subj: [langalist] LangaList Standard Edition (2001-01-22)
Date: 1/22/01 12:55:02 AM Eastern Standard Time
From: fred@langa.com (Fred Langa)
Reply-to: listreply_std@langa.com
To: langalist@lists.dundee.net (The LangaList (Standard Edition))

If you don't get an issue of the newsletter before the homework assignment is due, the email acknowledging your sign-up will do. If you send them to her all at once, she'd appreciate it. Zip and attach them to an email.

Roundtable

Teamwork - due April 18

Risk-taking - due April 18

What Is the Internet? - due April 20

Ego Surfing - due April 20

Sweeping Searchlights - due May 11 (research) and June 6 (finished report)

Dig deeper

If you want to go to the next level of technical detail about the Internet, you might try this half-hour slide show: Internet and Web Technologies. It's from the University of Virginia's Darden Business School, circa 1999, but the narrator is speaking about such basic ideas that it's still useful.

Looking ahead

There are some upcoming homework assignments that you might want to get a jump on now.  (Homework #CB1) Instant messaging (IM) is really a cinch, especially if you have an AOL account where it's built-in. If you add me to your buddy list, you can chat with me when I'm online. Chat with your classmates, too. If you're used to exchanging text messages in that way, then ask yourself this? What's the difference between exchanging text messages and exchanging video streams -- that is, videoconferencing?

Answer: quantity of bits. Remember, the Internet is stupid. It's just a bit pipe. To the Internet, the only difference between text IM and video conferencing is the quantity of bits.

Tuesday, April 18

8:15 PM

Learning in this course is both divergent and recursive. Everyone learns things in a unique order.

Review: on Thursday, you were very polite to sit there while I ranted about the Internet. To review, it is a network of computers with several features that distinguish it from other networks:

digital as opposed to analog (C-A-T as opposed to a picture of a cat)

binary, which means two (ones and zeros; on/off pulses), as opposed to other digital systems such as DNA, which has four "letters", or our English alphanumeric system, which has about forty if you toss in a few punctuation marks.

Yes, DNA is a four-letter digital language. It enables organic growth. So does the Internet. Most organizations aren't organic; they're top-down hierarchical machines. The Internet is the driving force; the organization's structure is the restraining force. Which force are you aligned with in your organization?

packet-switched as opposed to the telephone's circuit-switched

distributed heterarchically like a fishnet as opposed to hierarchically like your employer's org chart

standardized on openly developed (as opposed to proprietary, secret) protocols such as transmission control protocol / Internet protocol (TCP/IP) and hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP)

The Internet is an open-source self-organizing adaptive many-to-many peer-to-peer international file-sharing public collaborative agreement based on human goodwill, which means it's teetering on anarchy. In the last forty thousand years of human culture, this commons has been the fertile ground of cultural innovation. In corporate terms, an agreement to share is a threat to hierarchical control structures, like record labels.

In this sense, the Internet differs from most business organizations, which are top-down, inflexible, information-hoarding, for-profit corporations with legal status. These organizations have been built over the last hundred years with legal protections and sanctions. The commercial code of laws and the regulations supporting them are voluminous, contradictory, overwhelming, confusing, and hard to follow in practice. And expensive. The cost is measured in the billions of dollars annually. Business has never been as regulated in the U.S. as it is now.

In contrast, the Internet has no legal status. You can't sue it. You can't enjoin its behavior. It is not regulated. Maybe I should say that it's not regulable, if that's a word, although many governments are trying. Your corporate network is regulated. The Internet is not because it's not a thing; it's an agreement to share.

learned helplessness - a mental state in which employees in non-IT departments are forced to bear aversive stimuli and thus become unable or unwilling to use their computers and the Internet, presumably through having learned that situational control is generally out of his or her hands.

You're afraid you'll break something, so you don't do much. Solution: drive out fear.

Why IT and Users Hate Each Other
by Christopher Koch
CIO.com, March 30, 2006

"The IT department at my company (approximately some 500 people) is showing signs of incompetence, and has been ignoring knowledgeable user input for about a year. Additionally, they haven't been able to sell needed changes to senior management. Unacceptable server down time, maxed network storage, and no backups systems have hit the bottom line, and those on top are starting to notice. We users are staging a revolt to make IT more responsive to users by creating a group from the company divisions and IT to discuss needs and solutions. What would you put in our charter? What services and responsibilities would you demand out of your IT department?"

"The non-IT employees at my company (approximately some 5,000,000,000 people) are showing signs of incompetence, and have been ignoring knowledgeable technology input for about a year. Additionally, they haven't been able to accept needed changes to senior management. Unacceptable computer usage, maxed bandwidth usage, and no common sense have hit the bottom line, and those on top are starting to notice. We geeks are staging a revolt to make users more responsible to IT by creating a group from the company divisions to discuss needs and solutions. What would you put in our meeting room to kill as many people as possible?"

The root cause of the problem - Organizations are trying to make the new world (self-organizing adaptive public collaborative agreement) behave like the old world (top-down, inflexible, information-hoarding) and using a double standard of privacy and security, holding the new world responsible for things we can't insure in the old world.

A web page is an HTML file, whether static (.htm, .html) or dynamically generated from a database (.asp, .cfm, .pl, .cgi, often followed by a question mark and a long string of database query language).

A web site is a linked group of web pages, usually with the same domain name, such as RicciStreet.net or ibm.com or Harvard.edu.

A web is a linked group of web pages with a common theme or purpose, for example, a course web or a presentation web or a sales transaction web. Your final project for this course will be a presentation web.

8:30 PM

Research on the Internet
turning data into information

web page search (View | Find)

PC / laptop search (Start | Find | Files) - try Google's desktop search

College library's online resources (student ID required)

Ricci Street Search and at the bottom of the site's home page

What is information? How much is there?

Why is it important?

Networked Collaborative Paperless Research

Port 80 Lighthouse's Research on the Internet

beyond the search engines - database searches

harvesting info - Roundtable's Sweeping Searchlights topic

desktop file management

News Is Free's News Maps - visually analyze the current headlines in an easy to use single graphical view

search engines

Google | Google Maps

Vivisimo

Ask Jeeves

Yahoo Search

A9 | A9 Maps

Teoma

MSN's Search Builder

new! - Exalead

Wikimedia

The Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization, operates Wikipedia and several other multilingual and free-content projects:

Google

Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Since a lot of the world's information isn't yet online, they're helping to get it there.

Google - Web - Images - Groups - News - Services and Tools

In addition to being the best, fastest general Web search service, Google also has a terrific image search and the latest headlines from around the world in its News search. Here's more ...

Soople - easy expert search using Google

Google Maps

Fly along, zoom in. Find your house.

Desktop Search

Windows comes with a function for you to search your computer (Start | Search), but it is slow. Google's desktop search is much faster, but it uses your computer's resources so intensively, that it can slow down other things you want to do.

Picasa

If you have a lot of images on your computer, this piece of software will sort them every which way as well as let you do the kind of light editing (cropping, brightening, red-eye, etc.) that will let you optimize your images for the Web.

Google Print

Google Print puts the content of books where you can find it most easily – right in Google search results.

Google Will Digitize and Search Millions of Books From 5 Leading Research Libraries
by Scott Carlson And Jeffrey R. Young
Chronicle of Higher Education, December 14, 2004

Five of the world's largest libraries have joined Google in a Herculean effort to digitize millions of books and make every sentence searchable.

The project, which Google officials plan to announce today, involves libraries at Harvard and Stanford Universities, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and the University of Oxford, as well as the New York Public Library. It could soon turn Google into the single largest holder of digitized published material, while also providing researchers and students with an unprecedented tool for finding information.

Global White Pages and Yellow Pages

Search for "phonebook:home depot norwalk, ct," Google instantly produces the address and phone number of the Norwalk Home Depot. This works with names ("phonebook:robert jones las vegas, NV") as well as businesses. Don't put any space after "phonebook."

Package tracker

Type a FedEx or UPS package number (just the digits); when you click Search, Google offers a link to its tracking information.

Calculator

Type in an equation ("32+2345*3-234="). Click Search to see the answer.

Units-of-measurement converter

Type "teaspoons in a gallon," for example, or "centimeters in a foot." Click Search to see the answer.

Stock ticker

Type in AAPL or MSFT, for example, to see a link to the current Apple or Microsoft stock price, graphs, financial news and so on.

Wal-Mart's computer

Type in a UPC bar code number, such as "036000250015," to see the description of the product you've just "scanned in."

Aviation buff

Type in a flight number like "United 22" for a link to a map of that flight's progress in the air. Or type in the tail number you see on an airplane for the full registration form for that plane.

Department of Motor Vehicles

Type in a VIN (vehicle identification number, which is etched onto a plate, usually on the door frame, of every car), like "JH4NA1157MT001832," to find out the car's year, make and model.

Learn more about Google

What's New at Google

Google Labs

Google Blog

9:00 PM

Let's Get Geeky!
publishing your first web

You have all the elements of the Web. You can make pages and link them. You can link to any web resource anywhere. You can embed images. You can put everything into one folder and publish it (FTP it) to the Parkside Plaza folder on the Ricci Street server.

You have the tools: a browser, a text editor, and an FTP client.

What's next? Now you need to learn how to developing a well-structured, visually pleasing document that is part of an easily navigable web.

If we have time tonight ...

all the software downloaded
FTP profile set
lastname folder created on the server

We'll start hand-coding someone's resume. Maybe yours.

the digital document

How is it different from ink on paper?

Web style guides

information design

What is information design? What do information designers do?

interface design

What is interface design?

9:15 PM

Alphabet Soup

With the advent of the Web, PowerPoint became "old media" not "new media". There's nothing you can do with PowerPoint you can't do with a web. There's many things you can do with a web you can't do with PowerPoint. What's PowerPoint's advantage, then? Lots of people know how to use it. It's comfortable and familiar.

So let's make that old dog learn a few new tricks.

What do you call this stuff?

Play this Jeopardy-like game on terminology from the Roundtable's What is the Internet? reading assignments about the Web and Internet basics and Geek speak, the lingo of the new economy.

We need a volunteer scorekeeper.

to do before the next class

weather report for tonight's class -- Tuesday, April 18

How did it go tonight? What was the cloudiest part? The clearest?

Return to the to-do lists above for the first two class nights

Make sure you have done everything, especially the Learning Style questionnaire ASAP and the personal introduction at the General Discussion forum.

You aren't alone

In past mods, the students in MBA 504 have had the most questions about:

1. file management
2. FTP
3. nested tables
4. style sheets
5. directory structures (folders and subfolders)

keep exploring Ricci Street

Sections we have looked at in class:

Customhouse Internet basics bits / atoms Charthouse driving forces Lighthouse research	MBA 504 course web syllabus, reports Parkside Plaza student webs	Toolkit the text for the course	Bistro discussion forum

check your laptop's hardware

Do you know what all the parts and holes are and what they do? (Toshiba calls the parts "components" and the technical term for holes is "ports".) You might want to consult the printed (ugh!) documents that came with the laptop. A long card identifies the components and ports. Or try the Toshiba web site. Or search for your model name and number at Google.

looking ahead

your first presentation, Thursday, May 4

For your individual presentation, email me the URL of the web site that you want to show us. First come, first served. If you don't volunteer, I'm going to do it for you. To prepare, you should give some thought to who has the clicker.

Hand-code your resume

Industries have been built around helping people avoid the dreaded H-word: HTML. The horror!

FrontPage, for example, is a terrific tool if you know how to read and write HTML. If you don't, FrontPage, or any HTML editor, is confusing and hard to learn and very frustrating. Thus, I want you to practice writing a little HTML -- by hand!

For homework #WM1, due April 20, I want you to hand-code your resume in a text editor such as NotePad (Start | Programs | Accessories) or NoteTab, though if you want to try some document other than your resume, that's fine.

The review session the next two Saturdays, April 22 and 29, will be a good time to get help.

Roundtable

What Is the Internet? - due April 20

Ego Surfing - due April 20

Thursday, April 20

Make sure you have done everything, especially the Learning Style questionnaire ASAP - Please look at yours and make sure that the X's are readable.

Tip | If you're printing Ricci Street pages, remember that I change them frequently, especially this syllabus page. Remember to reprint and toss the old version.

the Skills form - How does your 504 class compare to the other ones?

Sweeping Searchlights

Homework forum - keep track of your own - start a topic named after you and then add to it. Or use a blog if you'd like to.

Operating System

the built-in software program that makes a computer work; hard drive and desktop; the software programs bundled with or added to the operating system to extend its usefulness

schedule

The school got your laptop in a generic state designed to suit the lowest common denominator of users. Everything has very safe, conservative settings designed more to minimize returns and tech-support calls than to deliver all the performance of which your laptop is capable. Now it's time to Get a Grip!

file management - acquiring, processing, storing, backing-up, and finding files

privacy and security - the porous wall between you and everyone else

There are eight pages in the Operating System section of the Toolkit. The welcome page lists the other seven. The first three have similar versions for Windows 98 and Windows XP. The links below go to the XP pages:

Get started with a new computer (XP)

Get started with the Windows operating system (XP)

Choose Windows options (XP)

Make Windows work for you

Windows security and privacy

Windows housekeeping

Advanced skills and tools

file management

Where do your files go when you save them?
How are you setting up your folders and files on your hard drive?
How are you organizing your web site?

Music Magic Found in the Shuffle
by Leander Kahney
Wired News, April 16, 2004

Napster revolutionized music distribution, but massive libraries of digital music and capacious players like the iPod are upending listening habits through something very simple but profound: random shuffle.

Randomly selecting tracks really comes into its own with giant music collections: libraries that stretch to tens of thousand of songs. In a giant library, random shuffle is a good way -- sometimes the only way -- to hear music that would otherwise go unplayed.

During a discussion of managing ever-growing music collections, one contributor noted his library stretches to 120 GB. Another counted the number of songs in his library he'd never heard: 20,000.

Lecturer Michael Bull, anointed the "world's leading expert on the social impact of personal stereo devices" by The New York Times, said random shuffle can turn large music libraries into an "Aladdin's cave" of aural surprises.

Featured software

Windows Explorer - This file management software comes with Windows. Right-click on your Start button and select Explore.

WinZip - download and install (not needed for XP Professional)

WS_FTP - download and install

How geeky are you?

How geeky are you? Your class (below) | Previous classes

How are your toolkit skills at the beginning of MBA 504? The tables linked above compile your responses to the computer skills form. This is an assessment, not a test. It will help me understand how to pace the course. The aggregate results will also help you see how you compare to your classmates. (Homework #GS1 due ASAP)