The Graduate School of Management (GSM) is one of the top business management schools in Australia, with over 800 enrolled students, and a constantly expanding teaching program through strategic alliances with other Schools in Australia and Asia. The expansion of activities has brought a great need to apply innovative techniques for the delivery of information across the GSM Network for its personnel, both in Staff co-ordination and in the application of new teaching technologies for new paradigms of learning. The Mosaic provides a vehicle to allow users the ability to exchange information and hyper linked documents across the LANs. Internal staff communication notices, and proceedings of events recorded in sound and video from across the wider University campuses, will be made available to all staff. In Teaching, as part of the GSM Quality Teaching CD-ROM Project, and the application of the CU-SeeMe Video-Conferencing application, the Mosaic is being prepared as the future delivery vehicle to update and inform our users on demand. On applying the Mosaic to the GSM, the key issue has been the developing of new skills and mind sets at all levels in the appreciation of this powerful new technology. In real life the questions have come down to the practical and managerial, building up knowledge and expertise in HTML page design, the necessary hardware/software requirements on different computing platforms, the management and updating of the content in the Mosaic Server, and the challenge to communicate the "vision" to all parts of the organisation.
Australia, with over 800 current enrolled students and constantly expanding its teaching programs through strategic alliances with other schools in Australia and Asia.
The Graduate School recently formulated an Information Technology Strategy for teaching as part of an on-going process to promote innovative teaching and research techniques. The School believes that the focus should be on the information content and that the technology is merely a vehicle. The emerging technology of multimedia and telecommunications provides exciting new opportunities for visualising information in teaching and research. The foundations of the strategy include: developing case studies and lecture presentations utilising multimedia technology; accessing information from across the world by staff and students; and forming strategic alliances with corporate Australia to remain in touch with applied business practice.
A range of Masters degree programs are now taught in both Singapore and Hong Kong reflecting the School's commitment to the internationalisation of its program. One of the key plans is to establish collaborative network between participating business schools so as to enable the new standards in teaching and management education.
The expansion of activities presents an opportunity to apply innovative techniques for the delivery of information across the GSM /Macquarie University Network for its personnel be it in Administrative/Faculty staff co-ordination or in the application of new teaching technologies for new paradigms of learning.
The Mosaic provides a vehicle to allow users the ability to exchange information and hyper linked documents across local and international computer networks.
To run Mosaic, one requires a TCP/IP connection either through a dedicated network connection or via a modem dial up (SLIP) connection. To open our Mosaic to the widest audience, we will take advantage of the growing number of installed CD-ROM drives in Macintosh and Window machines.
In essence this duel approach, Mosaic with CD-ROM, will provide a seamless interface be it if a network connection or a CDROM drive; the same look and feel will exist no matter what the computing platform.
The Mosaic technology will be deployed into three areas: Teaching, Research and Administration. A critical dimension will be the need to develop an Information Policy within the GSM and wider Macquarie University about the need to save, store and collect information in digital form. The reality of an Information Policy will be the construction and availability of searchable knowledge bases of program details, procedures, research data, image and sound libraries to the local and international community.
The key paradigm in our thinking will be need to build an Information Architecture which gives us maximum use of the data. This new access to information has profound impact on the way we conduct, communicate and co-ordinate work.
Mosaic provides a delivery vehicle to present the reader with a rich way of navigating information drawn from anywhere in the world. The key focus will be shifting the whole paradigm of how we teach, by allowing the students to explore a rich world of information through all forms of media at any time, any place. Mosaic as a tool for teaching must be seen as complimentary to our existing, conventional forms of face to face classroom interaction.
By creating course materials, notes, videos etc and storing them online, then we can take advantage of the digital convergence of and transport them through Mosaic, across the GSM /Macquarie University or to any Internet port in the world. The video will then be digitised, broken down into small files and saved in Quicktime format. These will be displayed to clients in an index like fashion, so that user can select a particular piece of video to watch.
An early prototype, based on an audio recording of a GSM Research Seminar held at the school has been built to visualise the concept. A picture of the speaker along with a sound recording stored in (au) format was created for each speaker. The User is able to read some notes about the speaker and then hear the opinions on a particular subject. A problem we encountered earlier in this project, was the need to give to the user some way of knowing before they downloaded the sound file was some sense of its content. As part of the Information Policy Lecture/class presentations and materials will be recorded ondisc.
We are know beginning work on a second prototype lecture: The Networked Organisation. This will involve adding additional notes from the speakers and quicktime /mpeg video segments.
The next phase of our work has seen us move to adapting an existing MBA course in Human Resource Management (HRM). The current vision is for course materials, and links to HRM Internet resources to be presented to students. Ultimately the aim is to move students to form virtual syndicate work groups, with other students across the globe so that they can experience first-hand how traditional communication and co-ordination might work in a virtual organisation.
There ar e a number of interesting examples of using Mosaic for Teaching located at the University of Texas in the US.
In research Mosaic provides a global data space of links to information resources. The Research Library is not simply thousands of pages of text but actual video and sound, allowing the student to see, here and read about their subject. Links to all forms of internet sessions and files are being collected and catalogued under headings for use. The use of subject groupings is being supplemented with the ability to search the contents of the server for a particular phrase. The keyword searching function complements the traditional forms of navigating the Mosaic, via buttons.
The database being organised is to be browsed and searched with the results being returned as html files. At this point in time we are building links to other business schools and companies make use of Mosaic.
Internal staff communication notices, knowledge bases of work practices, procedure manuals can be created and made available through the Mosaic. News and information gathered from across campus will also be available.
Testing the placement of how internal communication might appear online.
The availability of the A key design in our Internet operations in general, is to always experiment.
An idea may fail, it being to complex,to demanding on network resources or on the contrary it might work brilliantly, the important thing is that you attempt and share the experiences.
Our approach in developing Internet Servers has been to build
a battery of Information Knowledge bases for our internal staff and students, and the broader international networked community. Each, Internet Server has a particular application, be its ease of operation or simply its maintenance. The driving force behind all our work is the need to make information from all media available to our colleagues no matter where they might be.
On applying the Mosaic to the GSM, the key issue has been the developing of new skills and mind sets at all levels in the appreciation of this powerful new
technology. There are two areas: Technical Issues and Issues for Managing in a Networked Organisation.
The acquisition of knowledge about how to construct HTML has come mainly servers. The process of "tagging" paragraphs has been achieved through the use of the Macintosh 'HTML.edit' program and/or straight up coding of text in a simple editor. Perhaps one of the most demanding aspects has been the need to standardise the tags for our documents, by creating a default layout. The page design adopted has sort to give the user a metaphor from which to navigate the information space.
Updating and managing the data in the server has become a critical focus. The usefulness of any form of online system will be the currency and accuracy of its data. The development of the Web server at the GSM came about because of a vision of a few staff members. In planning the design, the goal was to utilise all the capabilities of Mosaic - incorporating video, sound, graphics and text.
Macquarie University is located in Sydney Australia one of the great sailing centres of the world and as the University adopted Macquarie Lighthouse with the star Sirius (which guided mariners to the south seas) a nautical theme for the Web server was adopted. This thematic approach is seen throughout our entire server.
Once the design and theme were in place a structure was planned. The importance of the structures becomes apparent as the server becomes more complex and grows.
Our HTTP server is currently running on an Apple Centris 650 80 Mb HDD, 8Mb system. The software in use is MacHTTP written by Chuck Shotten. The search ability is being trialled with AppleSearch, and Tr-www, which both provide wais-like search results.
We have a mixed platform of Mac and PC systems. The Mac and Windows Mosaic clients will be installed in the School's Computer Room and staff machines. Remote access to Mosaic is provided at the present by means of dial-up access to a unix host on which Lynx can be executed. In the next few months SLIP and PPP connections will be introduced.
When computers first came into organisations they paralleled the discrete boundaries of how information was stored in the enterprise. It confirmed the knowledge power structures in the organisations since "their" operation, required a specialist skill in itself.
In recent years, the information technology has matured, it now allows information in any media to be managed by anyone and moved anywhere anytime cheaply. Unfortunately the traditional organisational hierarchies have not kept pace with the new abilities of the information technology and now constrain communication in the organisation.
As we have been building these Internet servers we have come to employ a wide variety of information technologies to facilitate frequent, fast and robust communication between ourselves and the wider Internet community. As we have needed to get things done we have tracked down colleagues and formed working relationships with others who have had the relevant working expertise and commitment, using the Net.
The global network tools like Mosaic, WAIS, Listserv and the like, allow you to empower knowledge workers, and co-ordinate work in a way unknown before. The challenge will be to use these tools in organisations to tap your greatest asset: intellectual capital.
The Graduate School: How Mosaic, Listserv, Gopher, WAIS, and See-Me fit together.
Some Issues for Introducing Mosaic into Organisations:
The Technical Issues:
The User Interface
"System Transparency is the ultimate, ideal measure of
computer usability. It is achieved when a system's overall
design is so compatible with the way the user thinks, talks,
listens, remembers, perceives, processess, asks questions,
makes decisions and solves problems, that the system itself
requires none of the users's attention and, in effect, becomes
invisible. It happens in the same way that a reader curled up
with a good book becomes unaware of the paper, the typeface,
the book itself, or the room around him."
HTML page design
Content in the Server
Some Design and Planning Criteria
The Mac HTTP Server
Conclusion: Working in the Networked Organisation
Please address all Email to John.Brien@mq.edu.au