Nice job, Dons! We made the list of Top 10 universities nationwide for Fulbright Scholars in 2009-10. The occasion provided USF with another excuse to post a stunning JP Allen photo on the newly designed website.
My upcoming faculty exchange to the Azores starts in April.
The second installment of our new Freshman Seminar class, “Social Networking and Online Community”, wrapped up this week. Check out these great projects from our first-year business majors:
San FREEcisco
A user-generated collection of free things to do in the city, targeting primarily San Francisco’s 72,000 students at 23 colleges and universities. Users will be able to express interest in events, invite others, and comment on events, while friends can subscribe to events and pictures flagged by their social network. Advertising and merchandise are the main revenue sources for this low-cost business idea.
Resume 2.0
A facebook application for uploading resumes and finding internships for college students. Despite facebook being the hub for college student interaction, there is no serious competition for this application yet. Resume 2.0 will offer templates and automatic upload of existing resumes, along with a possibility for instant video interviews. Revenue will come from premium services and advertising.
San Francisco Volunteer Network
An online community focused on volunteer opportunities for San Francisco high school students required to perform community service. No other destination is focused on making high school community service opportunities easy to find, and helping students and organizations track volunteer hours. Users will be able to see which volunteer opportunities their friends are participating in.
YouMix
Like at popular Asian sites such as SongTaste and K8, users will be able to make their own karaoke mixes, upload vocals from their computers, and comment on other users’ mixes. Revenue will come from ads, and a paid iPhone application.
Congrats to Peggy Takahashi and the entire Freshman Launch Program team for creating an outstanding first year business major experience from scratch. Given the quality of work we’ve seen from the students, we now know we can do a lot more with them during their entire four years at the McLaren College of Business.
The Syllabus and Readings for the Social Networking and Online Communities seminar are available under open content licenses, so take a look and grab anything that might be useful. Again, the idea was to provide an introduction to business that examined both ‘traditional’ and ‘digital’ business. Last semester’s experience was written up in this previous post.
Does our Information Technology match our values? That’s not a question you typically hear companies asking. They usually ask: does the technology match my business and technical requirements?
Requirements are the right way to think about technology needs, the argument goes, because requirements are objective, consistent, and can be ‘frozen’ to prevent changes. If someone were crazy enough to base technology decisions on an organization’s values, it would be doomed to failure, because values are fuzzy, changing, and usually self-contradictory.
But what if values are the bedrock that doesn’t change, while requirements come and go? Or, what if our attempts to define away conflicting values as ‘fixed’ requirements just don’t match reality? Can we find practical ways to accommodate differences between values (deeply-held beliefs about priorities) and goals (the temporarily negotiated requirements that allow work to continue) that do not go away?
I’m working on a new project with Karin Hedström at the Swedish Business School, Örebro University on how to cope with technology values in a practical way. She’s written extensively on technology values in health care, where values like quality care, administrative efficiency, and medical records security battle for supremacy in a very messy and complicated environment. I’m writing about the openness vs. accuracy tensions in new web communities such as wikipedia, where the technology builds in support for discussing how to resolve value conflicts.
Karin and her PhD student Ella Kolkowska were in San Francisco last week as Visiting Scholars at USF. It was wonderful having them here. Thanks to the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education (STINT) for sponsoring their visit.
Our pictures were on page A7 of the Western edition of the Wall Street Journal, 3/5/08. Of course, mine was a paid placement for our fine Executive MBA program…
Now, who do you want answering those emails at 3 AM?
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