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Your grade on class participation is based on your showing up prepared for class discussion and participating in the class e-mail list. During class discussions, I expect you to show evidence that you have read the assigned readings for that day by being able to talk about them intelligently in class and asking intelligent questions if you don't understand something. This doesn't, however, mean you have to memorize every factoid in each and every article. But I do expect you to be familiar with the basic structure of the article or chapters and to be able to summarize the author's points and main line of argument. The majority of the text for this course are fairly easy reading. However, some theory-related articles and those detailing results of empirical research studies may be a little more difficult. Don't worry. We'll get through all the readings together by asking and answering questions based on our readings of the texts.
To extend our class discussions, I've put together a class email list that I hope you'll find useful during the semester grouptech@iastate.edu. In addition to serving as conduit for exchanging ideas and questions, we'll also use this list to virtually host outside visitors from business and industry who have experience with self-directed work teams and computer technology. I'm still working on scheduling for these guests, but so far I've got two people who've agreed to entertain our questions about their company's use of self-directed work teams.
As Senior Director of Information Architecture, Karen works with a lot with web site design teams in Razorfish's various North American offices. Though she is based in company's New York headquarters, she will be joining us this semester mostly from their Los Angeles office or from wherever her laptop finds her. As such, she'll be in a hurry, but says she has a lot to say about workgroups and their use of technology:
"Razorfish makes extensive use of self-directed work teams and I have a LOT of ideas about how these teams should be structured. The technological aspects are particularly interesting, and frustrating."
Karen will be joining us during the week of September 11th, so before then, you might want to take a look at the company's web site to familiarize yourself with Razorfish, which was a central focus of a recent story on dot.com companies by 60 Minutes II's Bob Simon.
An Instructional Designer, Wendy works with a variety of Allen's clients to develop corporate training programs, both in traditional formats, but more and more using Web-based tools. Her work involves managing a number of instructional design teams, who use email and the Web for project management and communications. Allen recently merged with Mentergy Corporation.