Summer Writing-Teaching Grant — Final Report
Developing Technical Communication Skills in Entering
Information Systems Students
Raja Sooriamurthi
Clinical Assistant Professor of Information Systems
Kelley School of Business, 540-D
raja@indiana.edu
855-4254
http://www.kelley.iu.edu/raja
1 Background
I serve as the undergraduate advisor, CIS club advisor, and the Alpha Iota Delta honor
society faculty advisor in the Information Systems department at the Kelley School of
Business. From these positions I have been able to observe the needs of various corporations and what they seek in a student from our business school when they hire for a job
or an internship. The top three desiderata of most companies are:
i. a good GPA (typically 3.0+)
ii. leadership and decision making skills as demonstrated by active participation in
clubs, community service etc.
iii. the ability to communicate clearly and effectively in all situations (as demonstrated
during the interview process, participation in case-competitions, membership in
Toastmasters etc).
Given my background in computer science, I exclusively teach technology oriented
courses in the Information System department both at the undergraduate and masters
level. S308 (Business Application Development) is our introductory course on programming and software development for business students in general and information systems majors in particular. The goals of the course as a whole are described in the next
section. At this point I want to emphasize an obvious and important characteristic of
technology that partly motivated the work supported by this grant: change!
Consider by some to be the bane of technology and consider by others (including
my self) to be a boon, change permeates technology. The half-life period of any new
technology hardly seems to be a few years before it is supplanted by something newer.
As the engineers and managers of tomorrow, todays students of Information Systems will
need to evaluate, assimilate and disseminate the rapidly evolving trends of Information
Technology. In order to succeed, in addition to their hard skills (technical skills) students
will also need to master soft skills: effective written and oral communication, teamwork
etc.
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The grant from the Campus Writing Program helped me to enhance a curricular component of S308 to develop and exercise written technical skills.
2 Course Goals
In the Fall of 2002, when I joined the Information Systems department of the Kelley School
of business, I was assigned the task of restructuring, revamping, and re-invigorating our
introductory course on programming and software development. Following are the objectives I had in mind for the redesigned course:
1. First and foremost, to cultivate the process of algorithmic thinking
2. To learn to express algorithms in a modern language (e.g., Visual Basic.net, C#)
3. To gain an introduction to the process of software development
4. To understand the foundations of the object-oriented paradigm
5. To gain an appreciation of the principles of good design that transcends all design
activity: modularity and abstraction
6. To gain a better appreciation of the bigger picture of technology in the real world.
The above objectives are to be attained in the overall framework of how an information
system can enhance the productivity of and add value to a business. With this in mind
the implemented pedagogical innovations for the past two years include:
An emphasis on algorithmic thinking but with an early introduction of the concepts
of object-orientation and how to use objects (as opposed to how to create objects).
Students learn about thinking the object-oriented way on day one of the course.
To facilitate active learning, the course was restructured into two 50 minute lecture
sessions and a 75 minute lab section. (The course used to be delivered as two 75
minute lecture sessions.)
This was supported in part by an active learning grant from Indiana University.
To further enhance instructor student interaction each lecture section of 30 students
is split into two lab sections of 15 each.
An increased emphasis on the reading and writing of programs. Although an introductory course, by semester end, students are working with programs with 400–600
line of code.
Innovative use of analogies, metaphors and graphics to illustrate the concepts.
An exposure to the bigger picture of succeeding in the business world: viz., the softskills of written and oral communication. Students are required to write essays as
well as give peer evaluated oral presentations on (a) an influential person in the IT
field and (b) an emerging technology.
This component was supported by the grant from the Campus Writing Program.
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3 The Grant Supported Work
Information Technology is a very broad and fun field! Along with technology skills, as
business majors, our students will also need to hone their communication skills — both
written and oral. As part of S308, students are required to write two essays. Following is
an extract from the syllabus:
1. A Profile of an IT Person: The field of information technology is full of many fascinating people, many of whom are still alive, given the nascent nature of the field.
You will write a 2 page essay profiling a person who has made a significant contribution to the field of IT. Some candidates could be: Steve Jobs, Shawn Fanning,
Linus Torvalds, Andy Grove, Gary Kildall etc.
2. An Emerging Technology: Pick a personally fascinating technology and write a 4
page essay on it. The format is up to you. You may want to explore some of the
technology’s history, its impact on society, what the future may hold for it etc. Some
possible themes could be:
napster and other peer to peer services
the legal issues associated with sharing music online (alternatives such as itunes)
history of the Web
computer viruses
biometrics
wireless networks
computer game playing
virtual reality
nanocomputing
quantum computing
open source software
voice over IP
computer art / music
For both of these essays, there are numerous sources on the web such as www.slashdot.
com, www.wired.com, the technology sections of The New York Times, Fortune, CNN, etc..
that can provide starting points as you explore possible topics.
4 Expectations and Feedback
For the profile essay I was primarily looking for “interestingness”. Some motivating questions I asked my students to consider when framing the essay were:
Why is this person a leader in the IT field?
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What has been the contributions of this person so far?
In your opinion, what do you think makes this person tick?
What do you think we can learn from how this person operates? (Everyone has
different management styles.)
Anything about the personal side of this person (hobbies, charity involvement etc)
The early life of this person. Is he/she a “rags to riches” story?
What seems to have been some of the crucibles in this persons life?
Since, all of this will most likely be culled from other articles, books etc be sure to cite
all your sources.
A sample of the set of people profiled in the students essays included:
Person
Brad McQuaid
Shawn Fanning
Dean Kamen
Steve Jobs
Edgar Codd
Bill Gates
Michael Dell
John Swainson
Thomas Watson Sr
Richard Stallman
Tim Berners-Lee
Linus Torvalds
Claim to fame
Game designer
Napster
Segway transportation system
Apple, NeXT, Pixar
RDBS, Turing awar winner
Microsoft founder
Innovative computer sales
CEO Computer Associates International
Founder of IBM
Free Software Foundation
The world wide web
Linux
5 Post-mortem and Evaluation
In Spring 2004 I had required students to give oral presentations on an emerging technology of their choice. In Fall 2004 and Spring 2005 I implemented the grant supported
course enhancements. Both the student response as well as quality of the work as been
across the spectrum (as one would possibly expect).
In writing as well as speaking a common dictum is “write/talk about what you know”.
Contrary to this, my personal view has always been to write/talk about something you
don’t know. I encouraged students to view this exercise as an opportunity to read up on
and write about something (either a leader in the IT field or an an emerging technology)
that they personally fond very interesting and influential. I was quite pleased that the
range of IT people spanned historic figures like Thomas Watson Sr (founder of IBM) to
business leaders such as Michael Dell and Steve Jobs to technology innovators such as
Dean Kamen and Linus Torvalds.
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At the end of the semester, in addition to the required university course evaluation
I asked my students to submit a more detailed evaluation of the various course components including the two written exercises. Some students did view this as an opportunity
to explore an area on their own but some were not at all enthusiastic about the activity.
S308 is a technology based course whose primary purpose is teach software development.
Some students viewed the writing exercise as being tangential to the primary purpose of
the course.
I would like to try these exercises again next semester with some organizational changes.
The IT profile essay was due around midterm time and the emerging technology essay
was due at the end of the term. Though the course requirement of the four page essay
on the emerging technology was announced on day one, due to its late due date many
students delayed on it till the end of the semester. The students who seem to have enjoyed the exercise the most and who also said that they benefited from it were those who
started working on the essay well in advance. Next time this exercise is given I think it
may be beneficial to have milestones along the way (e.g., require students to submit a one
paragraph summary of the technology they plan to write about etc).
In November I will be presenting the paper, Introduction to Programming and Software
Development: an Interactive, Incremental and Iterative Approach at the annual meeting of the
decision sciences institute (www.dsi2005.org) on the pedagogical innovations in S308.
S308 is an evolving course. Given the business background of the students in S308, the
aim of these two writing exercises is to help students get a better appreciation for the
boarder nature of the field. I gratefully acknowledge the support of the campus-writing
program for this course component.
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