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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.

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.

In last night’s IS 6100 lecture, I mentioned Google Apps. This is a free web-based application suite that offers email, calendar, contacts, word processing and spreadsheet functions. No software installation is required, other than a Web browser like Firefox or Internet Explorer.

According to this Yahoo article and this Google site, Google will offer a business version of this suite for US$50 per seat per year. This version includes customization, support for specific domain names in e-mail addresses, and 10 GB of hosted storage per seat.

Google is aiming squarely at Microsoft Office, which is a major cash cow for Microsoft. Businesses that don’t need a full office suite on every employee’s hard drive can save money by using Google’s web-based apps. Google updates its software on its own servers, as it is operating as an application service provider (ASP), so Microsoft Update isn’t needed to patch the apps.

Google also offers an education version for universities. A university like HPU could offer students Gmail with an hpu.edu e-mail address. Google Apps allows users to share and edit DOC and XLS files, which would be very handy for group projects.

Finally, there are various free office suites available, including OpenOffice. Some of these require installation to a hard drive. I prefer web-based solutions, even when they don’t support PowerPoint files.