COURSE NOTES -
WEEK THREE - October 17-23, 2005
Blackboard for posted readings. Return to Schedule
Monday, October 17 and Wednesday, October 19
You have been assigned a very long reading by Friedman from his best selling book, The World Is Flat (still number 1 on the New York Times Book Review non-fiction list). The chapter selected identifies the ten forces what Friedman claims to be the primary flattening forces.
The first three forces are primarily historic. They are:
- The fall of the Berlin Wall - 1989 and the Windows operating system - 1990. These two led to great advances in personal empowerment.
- Netscape's web browser in 1995 made the expanded web available to everyman.
- XML and other ways to tag content that is increasingly digitized.
The next six forces represent new forms of collaboration.
- Open-Sourcing including both the
intellectual
commons movment
(self-organizing groups) and the free software movement
- Outsourcing - example, India -- having another company perform
a
function previously done in-house
- Offshoring - ex., China -- moving manufacturing activities to
other
countries
- Supply-Chaining -- ex., Wal-Mart and RFID. Buying -
Manufacturing -
Recording - Delivery - Sorting - Packing - Distributing - Buying - ...
- In-Sourcing - ex., UPS -- another company coming inside to
redesign
and manage the whole supply chain
- In-Forming -- examples, Google, Yahoo, Amazon, TiVo --
universal
access to knowledge
The last force Friedman calls "The Steroids." Here he is talking about technology that amplify all the trends listed above. Some of these "steroids" include wireless communication, digitization of all analog content, virtual reality enabled by manipulation and transmission of digital content almost instantaneously, file-sharing, VoIP, video conferencing, and more.
Please select one of the six new forms of collaboration or one or more of "the steroides" and read that section more thoroughly. What can you add to it? How do your personal experiences confirm or dispute Friedman's claims? What does it mean for the kind of information professional career you and your peers may have? Formulate your answer as a comment to a Blog thread that I will start on Friedman's forces.
Today in class we will begin with a discussion and
comparison of the assignment that is due today. Please bring a copy of your paper to class even if you have
already sent it to me by email.
You have a reading by Marcus and Gould that looks at the
very famous list of cultural differences developed by Hofstede. The
authors infer certain expectations of what these cultural differences
might mean in Web design. We will examine some of their assertions and
see if we agree with them. To prepare for our discussion, please select
one or two favorite websites from your home country (they can be in a
different language) and bring the URLs to class.
I will want to get your reactions to the blog and all the
other communication tools we are using for this class. If you have
questions or comments about the Friedman reading or about either of
Lennart's lecture topics, we can talk about those as well.
Our fall break begins this afternoon at 5pm. I know some
of you are joining the ILSSA Washington trip. Others may have other
plans. Whatever they are, I hope you enjoy this little respite from the
daily round of classes.
Revised Oct. 20, 2005.
Wednesday, October 19
If you have questions or suggestions, please
contact
Evelyn Daniel