Faced with the challenge of keeping up with the rapidly changing field of information systems, author and teacher John Gallaugher opted to write an open source textbook with a new online company, Flat World Knowledge (FWK). Gallaugher's open source textbook, "Information Systems: A Manager's Guide to Harnessing Technology", has an expected…

The Internet has revolutionized the social and economic environment in which people live by providing an alternative or supplemental channel for communication, gathering and disseminating information, entertainment, commerce, and education. Household use of high-speed, or broadband, Internet services has risen dramatically during this decade which…

Over the past decade and a half, free access to computers and the Internet in U.S. public libraries evolved from a rare commodity into a core service. Now, people from all walks of life rely on this service every day to look for jobs, find health care, and read the latest news. As the nation struggled through a historic recession, nearly one-third…

The global rise of Internet-based education is discussed in relation to models drawn from social studies and epidemiology. Experiential and data density models are highlighted, also the capacity for technological change, and phenomena observed in the spread of disease. The lesson of these illustrations is that even apparently permanent phenomena…