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Preface
The Ethics Guide in Chapter 1 introduces the categorical imperative, and the guide in
Chapter 2 introduces utilitarianism. If you choose to use these perspectives, you will need to as-
sign both of those guides.

2026?

Every chapter concludes with a question labeled “2026?” This section presents our guesses about
how the subject of that chapter is likely to change between now and 2026. Clearly, if we had a
crystal ball that would give good answers to that question, we wouldn’t be writing textbooks.
However, we make what we believe is a reasonable stab at an answer. You will probably have
different ideas, and we hope students will have different ideas as well. The goal of these sections is
to prompt students to think, wonder, assess, and project about future technology. These sections
usually produce some of the most lively in-class discussions.

Why Might You Want Your Students to Use
SharePoint?

The difficult part of teaching collaboration is knowing how to assess it. Collaboration assessment
is not simply finding out which students did the bulk of the work. It also involves assessing feed-
back and iteration; that is, identifying who provided feedback, who benefited from the feedback,
and how well the work product evolved over time.
Microsoft SharePoint is a tool that can help assess collaboration. It automatically maintains de-
tailed records of all changes that have been made to a SharePoint site. It tracks document versions,
along with the date, time, and version author. It also maintains records of user activity—who visited
the site, how often, what site features they visited, what work they did, what contributions they made,
and so forth. SharePoint makes it easy to determine which students were making sincere efforts to
collaborate by giving and receiving critical feedback throughout the project assignment and which stu-
dents were making a single contribution 5 minutes before midnight the day before the project was due.
Additionally, SharePoint has built-in facilities for team surveys, team wikis, and member
blogs as well as document and list libraries. All of this capability is backed up by a rich and flexible
security system. To be clear, we do not use SharePoint to run our classes; we use either Blackboard
or Canvas for that purpose. However, we do require students to use SharePoint for their collabora-
tive projects. A side benefit is that they can claim, rightfully, experience and knowledge of using
SharePoint in their job interviews.
You might also want to use Office 365 because it includes Skype, hosted Exchange, 1TB on-
line storage, and SharePoint Online as an add-on. Microsoft offers Office 365 to academic institu-
tions as a whole or to students directly at reduced educational rates.

Why Are the Chapters Organized by Questions?

3
The chapters of Using MIS are organized by questions. According to Marilla Svinicki, a leading
researcher on student learning at the University of Texas, we should not give reading assignments
such as “Read pages 50 through 70.” The reason is that today’s students need help organizing
their time. With such a reading assignment, they will fiddle with pages 50 through 70 while tex-
ting their friends, surfing the Internet, and listening to their iPods. After 30 or 45 minutes, they
will conclude they have fiddled enough and will believe they have completed the assignment.
Instead, Svinicki states we should give students a list of questions and tell them their job is to
answer those questions, treating pages 50 through 70 as a resource for that purpose. When stu-
dents can answer the questions, they have finished the assignment.