![[photo of Dr. Howard Rosenbaum]](https://www.soic.indiana.edu/img/news/slis/sn-rosenbaum20.jpg)
![[Techpoint Mira Awards logo]](https://www.soic.indiana.edu/img/news/slis/sn-techpoint_mira_logo.gif){kind=logo}
By Tiana Tew
Indiana's technology elite recently recognized SLIS Associate Professor Howard Rosenbaum, Ph.D., as one of the state's "technology supernovas."
Dr. Rosenbaum received a 2003 TechPoint Mira Award for Education during the black tie Mira Awards Gala, held at the Indiana Roof Ballroom on Friday, May 16, 2003.
"It was a little like the Oscars of technology awards," remarked Rosenbaum.
TechPoint, Indiana's leading non-profit technology advocacy and member organization (the entity created from the merger of the Indiana Technology Partnership and INITA, the Indiana Information Technology Association), sponsors the annual Mira Awards (formerly CyberStar Awards) to honor Indiana's technology-related firms and showcase technology's role in Indiana's economic future.
Winners and finalists were part of an impressive field of 51 nominees in five categories, including: Advanced Manufacturing Company, Information Technology Company, Gazelle Company, Professional Service Provider, and Educational Program/Department.
"This award was truly unique because it is statewide recognition from high-tech companies," Rosenbaum explained. "This is an award from entrepreneurs, who didn't assess the nominees solely on their pedagogical merits, but on their ability to teach students how businesses work and provide hands-on experience with technology."
![[photo of Dr. Rosenbaum receiving his MIRA award]](/images/news/sn-rosenbaum_mira.jpg)
Dr. Rosenbaum was nominated for his e-commerce course, L561: The Information Industry. He commented that his course is distinctive because of its global focus and realistic simulation of real-world experiences, in addition to its use of advanced technology.
Dr. Rosenbaum has been teaching the graduate class in e-commerce in Indiana University's School of Library and Information Science since 1996. In 1999, with an Ameritech Fellows grant (now SBC) and a Sun Microsystems Academic Equipment Grant (a Sun Enterprise server), he redesigned the class using a novel pedagogical strategy, problem based learning, and a complex technological simulation of a competitive free-market, a web-based "virtual economy." In 2002, his work was recognized with the Indiana Partnership for Statewide Education Award for Innovation in teaching with Technology.
This class is one of four such simulations in the US and the only one that provides an open global marketplace with real shoppers who are not at the same university as the student store owners. Students develop and use web services and experience the rapid e-business start up cycle. Working in teams, they create business plans outlining their product lines and services, describing business operations and forecasting their profitability. These plans are presented to "venture capitalists" (colleagues) who invest in the businesses. This investment allows the teams to manage their costs (purchasing advertising space on a portal page, paying hosting costs, purchasing market research about the shoppers, and charges for technical consulting). At the end of the semester, the VCs are repaid and costs are subtracted from each store's revenues. The team with the most profit wins and receives a bonus added to their grade. The team with the most transactions receives a smaller bonus.
"There is a global focus associated with economic development in Indiana, and this course is definitely an exercise in globalization. SLIS students work with other students across the world," Rosenbaum commented.
On the inclusion of Education as an award category Rosenbaum observed, "TechPoint and other companies aren't interested in technical training. They are focused on training people for work in high-tech industries at more than just entry-level positions. They want students who are prepared to enter the technology industry as managers and developers, with a wealth of skills and experience, not just a bare minimum. And they are looking to SLIS to produce them."
[NOTE: See the ADDENDUM below for additional details on Dr. Rosenbaum and his ecommerce project.]
Those nominated for the MIRA Award for Educational Program/Department included:
Dennis C. Jacobs: University of Notre Dame
A Professor of Chemistry, Jacobs was chosen as the 2002 U.S. Doctoral and Research Universities Professor of the Year. Jacobs redesigned introductory chemistry courses to promote teaching approaches responsive to a variety of learning styles, which resulted in a 50 percent increase in the number of science majors.
George K. Stookey: Indiana University School of Dentistry
Director of the Oral Health Research Institute, Stookey is on the forefront of dental research, including the use of Quantitative Light Fluorescence (QLF) for early cavity detection. He also formed a company, Therametric Technologies Inc., to provide state-of-the-art technologies to dental practitioners.
361 Initiatives: DePauw University
DePauw created a national technology center and launched initiatives to prepare students for leadership in the digital age. The initiatives, funded by a Lilly Endowment Grant, prepare students to use IT in all aspects of their lives.
Access Technology Across Indiana (ATAIN)
A not-for-profit statewide alliance of universities, research institutions and business, ATAIN facilitates interaction between the corporate and educational worlds, accelerates transfer of technologies to Indiana industries, and bolsters IT economic development efforts.
Indiana University School of Nursing
Known for its innovative use of IT, the school is ranked in the top-20 nursing school's nationwide, and aims to improve public health by incorporating advanced IT into current nursing practices.
Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration (CILC)
This not-for-profit enhances education through two-way, interactive video distance learning technologies. The CILC-developed broadband video network, Vision Athena, facilitates services through an innovative distance learning concept.
Butler University Health and Counseling Center
Butler's Clinical Outreach system offers discrete, user-centered modules of specialized information, which serve as self-help guides and improve information coverage during or after clinical activity.
I-Light Indiana's Optical Fiber Initiative (IUPUI)
An ultra-high-speed optical fiber network, I-Light connects IUB, IUPUI and Purdue University to one another, and to Internet2. This is the first fully operational network of its kind in Indiana, and will help strengthen statewide advances in IT.
School of Technology: Indiana State University
Offering some 25 technology-related degrees and more than 30 specialized laboratories for technological study, ISU has some of the most advance technology programs in the country.
Ball State University: IT Training Program
Using some $1.1 million in federal grants, this program has provided free IT training and certification to more than 570 displaced workers from 25 Indiana counties. Training participants have an 85 percent job placement rate.
School of Technology: Purdue University
A student organization committed to developing female leaders in the School of Technology, Women in Technology, provides networking, support, mentoring and outreach.
Related Links:
- TechPoint MIRA Awards
Related SLIS News Stories:
- What Would You Do With $2,000 Rosen-Bucks To Spend?
- PRESS RELEASE: 'And The Award For Innovation In Teaching With Technology Goes To...' SLIS Professor Howard Rosenbaum At Indiana University
ADDENDUM:
(NOTE: The following background information will add substantive details to understanding the development of Dr. Rosenbaum's ecommerce course and his accomplishments. It was used as part of the descriptive information submitted to the 2003 MIRA awards committee in early 2003. -- Diane J. Squire, Director of Marketing and Communications, SLIS)
Dr. Howard Rosenbaum joined the faculty of the School of Library and Information Science in 1993. He studies social informatics and ecommerce and presents his work nationally and internationally. He teaches classes on e-commerce, information architecture, intellectual freedom, and information organizations, and workshops in XML, CSS, and web page design. He has won many awards for excellence in teaching and for his use of technology in teaching. He is a Fellow in the Center for Social Informatics at Indiana University and the Center for Digital Commerce at Syracuse University.
L561: The Information Industry Course At SLIS
In this class (described in the main SLIS news story above), students face a complex and ill structured problem — starting up and operating an information-based e-business. Teams build and stock the stores for six weeks. Shoppers come to the VE (virtual economy) for nine weeks and purchase real digital products and services with (fake) digital cash. Store teams are responsible for logistics and delivery, and customer relationship management. In spring 2002, five stores competed for the business of 410 shoppers from business schools at 11 universities in 4 countries.
The learning environment is supported by a technical infrastructure, a working, robust, and web-based virtual economy (VE) that is a powerful tool for teaching students about e-business. The VE is built with Cold Fusion, HTML, and an Oracle database running on a Sun Enterprise server.
A description of the VE is here:
www.slis.indiana.edu/hrosenba/www/L561/syll/new_ecomm00.html
The syllabus for the spring 2003 version of the course is here:
www.slis.indiana.edu/hrosenba/www/L561/syll/syll8.html
In terms of its technical structure, the VE is a password-protected web space where storeowners and shoppers conduct business under conditions simulating real-world business-to-consumer e-commerce. Stores sell real digital information products of varying types (annotated lists of websites, collections of online papers, bibliographies, legislative and policy summaries, consulting and editing services, research-on-demand services, and entertainment) to shoppers who spend digital money.
The VE has three main components. The portal is the gateway to the digital marketplace. All traversal to storefronts occurs through clickthroughs on portal page store banners. Shoppers are registered, receive passwords and digital bank accounts, and then access the VE through the login page. They then click through to the stores and conduct their transactions. When finished in a given store, they return to the portal to explore other stores.
The second component is the storefront. All stores start with the same basic template — a page with a custom Cold Fusion tag. This tag calls a complex script containing a product catalog, a shopping cart, and a checkout procedure. The product catalog allows multiple views of a store's products and services. All product and product category information is entered through a web-based form. Two levels of product and service information can be displayed. The first level is displayed on the product category page and uses three fields, one for a 200 character description of the product, a second for the price, and the third for the URL of an image. This page has a "quickbuy" option similar to Amazon's "one-click ordering." There is a link that leads to a page about the single product. This second level is a dynamically generated page with a more detailed product description, the image, and pricing information. This page has a "add to cart" button that allows shoppers to add the item to their shopping cart.
When in the product catalog, shoppers can check their sales histories by clicking an "account status" button at the bottom of page. The resulting report displays all of their purchases at all of the stores in reverse chronological order. After filling their shopping carts, shoppers click on the "buy" button to check out. The checkout page displays the products in the shopping cart, quantity totals, individual prices, and the total price. There is a table indicating how much money shoppers have left in their accounts. They can complete the transaction, change quantities, remove items from the cart, or opt out of the entire transaction. Upon completing the transaction, they see a page confirming their purchase; simultaneously, email is sent to the storeowners informing them that a purchase has taken place. Recent additions to the virtual economy include an auction module (VEBay) that store teams can purchase and use to run Ebay-style auctions in their stores and a modular search engine that can be customized for individual stores.
The third component is a digital bank. When shoppers are registered, they are given a bank account with $2000 in digital cash. Each store also has an account in the bank and receives money on the basis of the successful presentation of their business plan (in Spring 2002, stores received between $35-45,000). When a shopper makes a purchase, the amount of the purchase is deducted from his or her account and added to the appropriate store's account. The bank is relatively secure — shoppers and storeowners can check their balances but cannot make changes; they also do not have access to each other's accounts.
Dr. Rosenbaum's Accomplishments During The Past Few Years
In April, 2002, Dr. Rosenbaum was awarded one of two "Indiana Partnership for Statewide Education Awards for Innovation in Teaching with Technology" from the Indiana Higher Education Telecommunications System. This award recognized his work creating and managing the ecommerce course described above. The review committee examined his course materials and the virtual economy and described the course as unique in higher education. They were impressed with the ways in which the class provides students with a rich and deep experience of the relationships between information and communication technologies and small business development.
This award and previous recognition for this work on the Bloomington Campus led to his being asked to chair the Indiana University Task Force on Teaching and Learning with Information Technology, a major committee that advises Dr. Garland Elmore, the Associate Vice President and Dean in the Office of the Vice President for Information Technology (in University Information Technology Services (UITS). As Chair of the Task Force, he will be guiding and working with a multi-campus group of faculty and administrators as they engage in analysis and discussion of the major technological and pedagogical issues facing the University. Thus far, they have been focusing our attention on the development of the Information Commons, a multi-media work space under construction in the Undergraduate Library in Bloomington and on the question of the extent of UITS' involvement in the development of electronic portfolios.
He is also on the Learning to Teach with Technology Studio FIPSE Grant Advisory Board. He was asked to participate by Dr. Tom Duffy because of his expertise in ecommerce and use of technology in pedagogy. The Board met in January to determine the next steps for the project, which is mandated to achieve self-sufficiency by the end of its upcoming third year. Dr Rosenbaum was centrally involved in the discussions and planning efforts as the project leaders worked through the intricacies of setting up an ecommerce storefront to operate as part of their website.
Since becoming a Fellow in the first round of grants in 2000, he has continued to participate in the SBC (formerly Ameritech) Fellows Program and have been a proposal reviewer for two years.
Business Partnerships That Enabled The Nominee's Success
The initial partnership that made this class possible involved working with SBC (then Ameritech) and Sun Microsystems. In 2000, both companies offered a round of competitive grants for projects that involved innovative uses of technology in education. Early in 2000, Dr. Rosenbaum applied for and received an SBC Fellowship and cash award that allowed him to begin developing the technical and pedagogical foundations of the Virtual Economy. Later that year, he applied for and received an Academic Equipment Grant from Sun Microsystems, an Enterprise server valued at $30,000, on which the Virtual Economy is hosted.
The partnerships involved in this class are with faculty at other institutions around the world. They work with Dr. Rosenbaum to align their class assignments so that their students have a reason to shop in the VE. Most of the student shoppers have been in ecommerce and related courses and their experiences in the VE have been integrated into their class discussions and projects. Some students analyzed the business models of the stores, others assessed their usability, others have purchased articles from stores that helped them with their research, and some students have used their money to purchases and participate in games and contests.
Over the years, the shoppers have come from business and engineering schools at:
Australia
UK/Scotland
Germany
US
- Georgia College and State University
- North Carolina Ag & Tech State University
- Lehigh University
- The Citadel
- Indiana University of Pennsylvania
- West Virginia University
- Duquesne University
- St. Cloud State University
More recently, Dr. Rosenbaum has signed a formal partnership agreement with the STAR Center in Bloomington, a Small Business Development Center that has allowed him to pair up student teams in an Advanced Information Architecture class with small businesses in Bloomington that needed redesigns of their web sites.
Dr. Rosenbaum's Leadership Skills
Dr. Rosenbaum has been a technology leader in the School of Library and Information Science. He was responsible for introducing the first course dealing focusing on the Internet in the School in 1993. L571, "Information Networking", was a hands-on lab course that taught students how to use command line FTP, Telnet, Gopher, WAIS and other technologies. The course has changed since then and is still being taught, although it is now called" Information Architecture for the Web" and covers CSS, Javascript, XHTML, and web design. In 1995, he designed and taught L547 "The Organizational Information Resource," a class in which students used a user-based approach to design, build, and implement an intranet for the School. In 1996, he designed and taught L561, "Electronic Commerce," the first such course in the IU system. He has also taught workshops, beginning with HTML in 1994, and moving to CSS, and now XML, providing SLIS students and students from other departments with technical expertise that they could not find elsewhere in the system.
As an additional indicator of leadership by example, he has been recognized within the School as an excellent teacher, receiving the Teaching Excellence Recognition Award for three consecutive years beginning with the initial award in 1997 and again in 2001.
Dr. Rosenbaum has taken a leadership role in the development of the Masters in Information Science degree program in SLIS since its inception. He was an active participant in a series of retreats in 1994 and 1995 where the basic structure requirements and courses were put in place. He suggested, argued for, and ended up designing one of the MIS core courses, L547 "The Organizational Information Resource," a new course for the School. The program began admitting students in 1996 and has grown steadily each year. With Cronin and Kling, he described this experience in a 1997 article "Charting A New Course: Developing and Implementing a Curriculum for a Masters of Information Science Degree"
Dr. Rosenbaum has been a leading member of the SLIS Curriculum Steering Committee for four years. All new courses and workshops must be submitted to the Committee for review before they can be taught. His responsibility is to critically examine all course and workshop proposals and suggest revisions, additions and/or deletions. He has made substantive contributions to many course and workshop syllabi that have passed through the Committee that have had a positive impact on the quality of teaching in the School.
Two issues that came before the Committee in which he played an important role were the development of a standardized grading scheme for the School and the implementation of an online instrument for student evaluations. The hard work of the first issue was to create definitions of grades that were clear and mutually exclusive. The Committee spent many hours in spirited discussion and in the end arrived at a commonly agreed upon set of definitions that was adopted by the faculty in 1998. The issue of online evaluations took us into interesting debates over student and faculty privacy, where he argued strongly for the protection of all parties' privacy and a guarantee of student anonymity. This led to the development of a system where students log on with a one-time password allowing them to complete the evaluation; when they log off, the password is deleted and replaced with a random identity number, making the tracing of an evaluation to a particular student extremely difficult.
Examples Of Other Contributions Made Dr. Rosenbaum: Involvement In Trade Associations, Educational Support, Special Projects, Support For Government Initiatives, Charities, Etc.
Dr. Rosenbaum's contributions take place locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally. Locally, he is an elected 4-year member of the Board of Directors of Hoosiernet, a local community not-for-profit network in Bloomington. For the past two years, he has been the Treasurer, an Executive Committee member elected by the Board. He has been actively involved in the decision making that has led to Hoosiernet offering broadband services (DSL and satellite services) at very low cost to people and businesses in Monroe County.
This past fall, Dr. Rosenbaum developed a new course in the School of Library and Information Science, L597, Advanced Information Architecture. Students redesigned complex web sites for small businesses in Bloomington. He signed a partnership agreement with Brian Kleber, Director of the STAR Center in Bloomington, which allowed them to match up student teams with small businesses using the services of the SBDC (Small Business Development Center). They plan to continue this partnership because of the clear benefits to the students and local businesses.
Dr. Rosenbaum has been recognized for his excellence in teaching and has received his Schools' Teaching Excellence award in 1997, 1998, and 1999. He received the Trustee's Excellence in Teaching award in 2001.
At Indiana University, he has served on University committees that have set high-level policy for IU. In 1997-98, he was the sole faculty member on the IU Taskforce on the Academic Bulletin. In 1999-2000, he was the sole faculty member on the IU Internet Advertising Task Force, chaired by Christopher Simpson. They developed a system wide policy for regulating advertising on official web pages that was approved in summer 2000. Since then, he had been one of two faculty members on the IU Electronic Commerce Task Force, charged with developing a policy and procedures to standardize use of an ecommerce transaction system across the University.
He is on the Advisory Board of the Teaching and Learning with Technology Studio, a national project funded by FIPSE and run by Dr. Tom Duffy. He joined the Board to provide expertise in ecommerce. He is a member of the IU Latino Studies Board of Advisors. Since 2001, he has served on the Computer Science Advisory Board at Ivy Tech, Bloomington. He has been a fellow of the Center for Social Informatics at IU since 1997 and a fellow of the Center for Digital Commerce at Syracuse University since 1999.
He has delivered many local presentations to different groups on the IU campus and 91 regional presentations. Two of these have been keynote addresses at annual meetings. He has given 7 national presentations at information systems and computing conferences and 8 international presentations. For example, in May 2001 he gave an invited presentation on "IT and Global Change" at St. Andrews College and a presentation on "Regulation of Ecommerce" at the Napier University School of Business in Scotland. He also gave invited talks on "Teaching ecommerce in a virtual economy" at the University of Bath School of Business and the School of Engineering at the University of Greenwich in the UK.
Rosenbaum is also an active participant in his profession. He reviews papers for many journals, including the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Journal of Documentation, and Information Processing and Management. He referees papers for conferences including the American Society for Information Science and Technology Annual meetings, America's Conference on Information Systems and the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. He reviews books for several journals and publishers and site on the editorial boards of several journals.
Posted May 22, 2003