Using Technology to Connect Students with Emotional Disabilities to General Education

This case follows a high-school special-education teacher who teaches in a program for students with emotional disturbance (ED) in a large, comprehensive high school. Many of her students cannot attend general-education classes because of anxiety or behavioral issues, but as a special educator, she does not have the subject-area expertise to provide them with the academic education they need to be prepared for life after high school. She hopes that through the use of a video connection to general-education classes her students can be exposed to the highly qualified content-area teachers while remaining in the safe environment of the ED classroom. She believes that virtual attendance in a class could help her students feel comfortable enough to make the move to the actual classroom and be included with their peers to gain academic knowledge and social skills.

Legal Truth and Consequences for a Failed ERP Implementation

This case is inspired by a complaint and response filed in the U.S. court system. One of the case’s authors served as an expert witness in the case. Because the suit settled before going to trial, some of the details of the case are not part of the public record; therefore, the names of the companies involved have been changed and certain details disguised to protect the identity of the litigants. However, the essentials of the case remain faithful to the actual circumstances and provide a basis for analysis of decision points and a discussion of costs and responsibilities for the issues in the case. A leading manufacturer of building materials in the United States selected an integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to install on its existing hardware infrastructure. This case describes the ERP selection, implementation and migration challenges, impaired functionality, and the business and legal issues that ensued due to the software’s incompatibility with the hardware. With the software not performing as expected, the vendor withdrawing its software support, and costs escalating, the manufacturer sought legal counsel.

Suspicions of Cheating in an Online Class

Dr. John Dobson is an Assistant Professor of Education Leadership at Northern New England State University (NNESU) who teaches traditional classes and online classes for his department. As the level of state financial support has decreased, online classes have become increasingly important to NNESU. They are one of the few growing revenue streams at the institution. While teaching a summer online course, Dr. Dobson comes to believe that one of his students is cheating. In this case, Dr. Dobson attempts to navigate the process of proving that the student is cheating, holding the student accountable for his/her actions, and garnering the institutional support necessary to hold the student accountable.

Road Safety 2.0

The aim of this case study is first, to determine the extent to which web 2.0 can be the technology that would enable a strong relationship between government and its citizens to develop in managing road safety and second, to examine the endeavours of the WA Office of Road Safety (ORS) in fostering the relationship. It shows that in ORS’ road safety strategy for 2008-2020, community engagement is strongly advocated for the successful development and execution of its road safety plan but the potential of web 2.0 approaches in achieving it is not recognised. This would involve the use of blogs and RSS as suitable push strategies to get road safety information to the public. Online civic engagement would harness collective intelligence (‘the wisdom of crowds’) and, by enabling the public to annotate information on wikis, layers of value could be added so that the public become co-developers of road safety strategy and policy. The case identifies three major challenges confronting the ORS to become Road Safety 2.0 ready: how to gain the publics’ attention in competition with other government agencies, how to respond internally to online citizen engagement, and how to manage governmental politics.

GPS

This case examines GPS navigation as a case-in-point of what technology, sold on the promise of what it can do for society, is also doing to society. Conventional wisdom insists that there are better things to do than find directions from here to there without turn by turn directions. While it may be true that losing the ability to find one’s own way may be no great loss, as a tributary feeding into the river of what’s going on across the board of human skill erosion, it’s a symptom of far more serious summing going on.

Breaking the Ice

This case explores the challenges of implementing an enterprise system (ES) across a university with a diverse organizational culture. This teaching case describes the process through which Southern University sought to implement the Delta student management system (SMS) and the challenges encountered due to the university’s organizational culture. The project team ran into a change resistant culture with organizational units that enjoyed autonomy in their business processes. Rather than attend to various needs by customizing the system, the project team implemented a plain version of the system. Although this approach ensured the project team was able to complete the implementation on time and within budget, it left behind many dissatisfied users and organizational members, and created resistance within the organization toward the system. Therefore, this case provides opportunities for students to discuss the impact of organizational culture and user resistance on IS implementations as well as the merits and limitations of the strategies employed by the project team to ensure the new system was implemented on time and within budget.

Adoption of Computer-Based Formative Assessment in a High School Mathematics Classroom

This case follows a high school mathematics teacher who is new to the classroom and is looking to adopt computer-based formative assessment as a part of his curriculum. Working within the confines of the school environment, this requires navigating a shrinking budget, colleagues that do not share his value of technology, restricted time, student issues, and limited resources. He must examine all aspects of the available computer-based formative assessment systems and weigh the pros and cons to insure the best academic outcomes for his students.

Does the Introduction of RFID Technology Improve Livestock Subsidy Management?

While the expected benefits and challenges of RFID technology have been well studied in the manufacturing and service sectors at the private organization level, little understanding exists of these two issues when exploring RFID adoption in the agricultural field and at the public organizational level. Previous tracking programs in Kuwait have been unsuccessful in reducing illegal activities that lead to fraud and the wasting of public money in animal feed programs. To alleviate these problems, an RFID program, supported by information systems, was designed to help monitor and control feed distribution and animal tracking. Unlike previous studies, this case describes the application of RFID for the tracking and monitoring of livestock by the Kuwait Public Authority of Agriculture Affairs and Fish Resources. It reviewed the subsidy process before and after RFID adoption and found a large reduction in the actual number of animals claimed after RFID adoption, which reduced fraud and increased animal accountability.

Emerging Forms of Covert Surveillance Using GPS-Enabled Devices

This case presents the possibility that commercial mobile tracking and monitoring solutions will become widely adopted for the practice of non-traditional covert surveillance within a community setting, resulting in community members engaging in the covert observation of family, friends, or acquaintances. This case investigates five stakeholder relationships using scenarios to demonstrate the potential socio-ethical implications that tracking and monitoring will have on society. The five stakeholder types explored in this case include: (i) husband-wife (partner-partner), (ii) parent-child, (iii) employer-employee, (iv) friend-friend, and (v) stranger-stranger. Mobile technologies like mobile camera phones, global positioning system data loggers, spatial street databases, radio-frequency identification, and other pervasive computing can be used to gather real-time, detailed evidence for or against a given position in a given context. Limited laws and ethical guidelines exist for members of the community to follow when it comes to what is permitted when using unobtrusive technologies to capture multimedia and other data (e.g., longitude and latitude waypoints) that can be electronically chronicled. In this case, the evident risks associated with such practices are presented and explored.

Inter-Sector Practices Reform for e-Government Integration Efficacy

Electronic services have become a critical force in service oriented economies introducing new paradigms like connected governance, ubiquitous and ambient public services, knowledge-based administration, and participatory budgeting. The success of e-Government integration requires the modernization of current governmental processes and services under three different perspectives, namely governmental business processes reengineering, legal framework reformation and technical solution effectiveness. The study proposes a knowledge guide for approaching, analyzing and defining government-wide architectural practices when building large scale enterprise governmental frameworks. A set of fundamental design and implementation principles are specified for increasing government organizations’ agility and ensuring that end-users perceive the quality of the provided services.