billso.com

I wish I was making this story up, but it’s true.

According to the AP, the University of Chicago, one of the world’s leading business schools, will require each MBA applicant to include a four-slide PowerPoint presentation with their portfolio.

Slideshows can be good tools when they’re used well. I hope the Chicago MBA admissions staff will use the slideshows as just one piece of supporting evidence. that seems to be their intent, according to associate dean Rose Martinelli: the slideshow is just “four blank pieces of paper” that lets an applicant have a broader canvas to state their case. I do agree with John Koetsier that PowerPoint is a “traditional application”.  Grade school students can build a basic PPT file, after all.

Perhaps applicants should try building something more elegant, like a well-constructed wiki site or a blog on a specific topic.

What I fear is a mad rush of adoption, as other business schools ask applicants to tack on a PPT file. PowerPoint slides without speakers notes or supporting documentation can be worse than useless. A show full of overly animated slides and random fonts won’t impress me much.

According to Erika Engle in this morning’s Honolulu Star-Bulletin, KM Communications has received some interesting news from the Federal Communications Commission.

The commission assigns call letters for all radio and television stations in the United States, and has given KM’s new TV station on Maui the rather unfortunate call letters (I had to edit this because at least one ISP was blocking this post.)

Families can learn a lot from television

KM also received KWTF for a new station in Arizona.

The company’s management is shocked, absolutely shocked, about this development, and has asked the FCC to change the letters for both stations:

From Skokie, Ill., comes a sincere apology “to anyone that was offended,” said Kevin Bae, vice president of KM Communications Inc., who requested and received It is “extremely embarrassing for me and my company and we will file to change those call letters immediately.”

Back in 2005, an FM radio station in Aspen, Colorado got permission to use KCUF.

Read it backwards, people… the station claims it means “Keeping Colorado Uniquely Free”. Yeah, right!

UPDATED on 27 July 207 at 11 am HST. See also:

• TVsquad.com
• In Media Res
• MSN TV Blog
• The Sniper
• Technorati.com

On this date 38 years ago, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. It still boggles my mind that some people still believe thew moon landings did not happen.

Here’s a picture of Neil during the first lunar excursion. If you look at the visor, you’ll see a reflection of the photographer, who was Buzz Aldrin, of course.

I do remember watching the moon landings on my family’s Zenith black-and-white television. Last year I set up a Facebook group for people who watched one of the six Apollo landings on television when it happened. For the youngsters, there’s always the “When I was your age, Pluto was a planet” group. Maybe I should I start a “Skylab sucked” Facebook group, because Skylab really did suck.

My Spring 2007 course materials are no longer available on this web site. I’ve archived most of the PowerPoint and PDF files for my Spring 2007 IS 6100 and IS 7010 courses. Some of the old links are still active, but they will retrieve blank files.

I call this a spring cleaning

I usually make some changes to the syllabi and assignments between terms. Fall 2007 students would not benefit by seeing the old assignments, presentations and syllabi, even though both courses will use the same textbooks that I used earlier this year.

During the next few weeks, I will finish the syllabi, course schedules and web sites for the Fall 2007 courses. When these resources are available, I will post links in the IS 6100 and IS 7010 Fall 2007 course pages on this blog.

WebCT or TurnItIn.com? That’s the question I face

There is a very good chance that I will use WebCT instead of TurnItIn.com to manage the courses gradebooks and assignments. While TurnItIn.com is an excellent course management system, it cannot deliver multiple choice exams.

If I do use WebCT, I’ll include some short quizzes and objective exams in my courses. There will still be several written assignments that will be analyzed by TurnItIn.com. I’ll also build a dedicated page in each course that shows all of the relevant blog posts from this web site.

I’ve found a tool that lets me embed streaming videos in my blog articles.

I used it yesterday to add a 1994 industrial film about the Web to a post I had written earlier in the day.

Here’s a CBC report from the same era. It’s about Videotron, which wasn’t the Web. It was just butt ugly.