How, where and why GIS is taught has been debated heavily in the geography literature. This article is a contribution to that debate, because it offers a new perspective from which to teach GIS: problem-based learning. In a problem-based learning classroom, theoretical foundations and the real world of problems are understood as constitutive of…

The 2004 recipient of NCA's Gerald M. Phillips Award for Distinguish Applied Scholarship, Brent Ruben's professional record spans more than three decades and has focused in four major areas: organizational development, communication/information systems, medical/health communication, and intercultural communication. In this commentary, Ruben…

Once upon a time, there was the mainframe. Only a handful of applications were available on this great big computer. A few hearty users took advantage of these applications, often accessing them one at a time. Folks generally did not expect to use any application with another. Why would they? Now, of course, the world is very different. College…

The author of this article describes the central IT structure of her institution, the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Based on her experiences, she observes that building and maintaining a community of support that spans the central IT organization and the distributed IT support providers presents real challenges. As such, she believes that…

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, organizations are reexamining their strategies for ensuring the continuity of their core operations. Business continuity has become a focus for higher education institutions nationwide as they watch Gulf Coast administrators who are experiencing the very real problems of recovering from a natural disaster. For…

To help track whether students are being prepared for further education and work, many states are trying to connect their data systems from preschool through postsecondary education. But a national forum on the topic held June 13, 2006 suggests there's a long way to go. In preparation for the meeting, Peter Ewell, the vice president of the…

Technological growth in developed and developing countries in the 20th century has lent a great deal of importance to scientific reasoning in the management of human affairs. An important outgrowth has been the development of systems thinking to organize the workplace. The business reengineering process and the enterprise resource planning system…

Geospatial technology refers to a system that is used to acquire, store, analyze, and output data in two or three dimensions. This data is referenced to the earth by some type of coordinate system, such as a map projection. Geospatial systems include thematic mapping, the Global Positioning System (GPS), remote sensing (RS), telemetry, and…

When a mid-sized public college made a politically unpopular decision to purchase new student information system software, a team of fourteen people from across campus was assembled and charged with facilitating the transition from the home-grown system. This case report describes the challenges they faced as they worked to understand their…

Although many universities require courses in management information systems for their business majors, little information exists as to what objectives should be included in the course, and the course topics vary greatly across institutions. Differences in course objectives even exist within schools if multiple sections of the course are taught by…

As developing countries gradually rely less upon agriculture for rural income, rural economies require new solutions to access knowledge and information systems for rural development. Non-agricultural rural knowledge and information systems can play a significant role in developing and disseminating successful strategies to escape rural poverty.…

Soft skills are attitudes and behaviors displayed in interactions among individuals that affect the outcomes of such encounters. These differ from hard skills, which are the technical knowledge and abilities required to perform specific job-related tasks more formally stated in job descriptions. In the past, it was felt that managers and employees…

This study examines existent and new methods for evaluating the success of information retrieval systems. The theory underlying current methods is not robust enough to allow testing retrieval using different meta-tagging schema's. Traditional measures rely on judgments of whether a document is relevant to a particular question. A good system…

In this article, the authors build upon the use of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) in U.S. history and in current demographic studies, using examples from co-author Herschel Sarnoff's classroom in the Watts section of Los Angeles. They discuss theoretical and conceptual approaches that support student learning with GIS and provide resources…

While preparing to migrate from Innovative Interfaces' text-based serials module to its new Millennium Serials product, the author, a manager of technical services operations in a small academic library, found herself faced with a number of decisions regarding how to store holdings information. Holdings data is information about individual items…