Newsletter, Fall 2020

Dear Professor,

Our best wishes to you in these challenging times. We hope that some of the information in today’s newsletter could possibly ease or enhance your teaching efforts this term or next.

Innovative New SA&D and Database Textbooks are Available Now

Both of these books have been very well received. A quick recap:

Systems Analysis & Design in an Age of Options by Spurrier and Topi recognizes the broad range of modern systems development options available and how to select and implement the best approach for each project.

Database Systems: Introduction to Databases and Data Warehouses by Jukic et al., Edition 2.0 thoroughly covers both transactional databases and data warehouses which are essential for data analytics. 

Insights from these books were presented at well-attended workshops at the AMCIS virtual conference in August. AIS recorded these virtual events and has made videos available at their eLibrary. You can use the hot links below to check them out:

• Workshop: A Holistic SA&D Approach to Agile, Plan-Driven and Hybrid Systems Project Options 
   
• Workshop: Using Free Data Modeling Web Software in Assignments and Projects for Operational and Analytical Database Courses

New Big Data Technologies and Data Communications Textbooks
will be Available to Adopt for Spring 2021

A few years ago, the Gartner research firm predicted an expected shortage of 100,000 data scientists. Arben Asllani wrote Big Data Technologies for Business to help address this need by presenting essential techniques in a manner accessible to non-technical managers, business students, and other professionals. This is the first textbook explicitly designed for this purpose. It should greatly advance the thoughtful use of big data technologies and the productive influence of data collected in this way for business strategy and management. The book is currently being typeset and will be available for review this fall. Keep an eye on our website or send me a quick e mail if you would like to be certain to receive an electronic review copy once it is available.

Manish Agrawal and his colleague Clinton Daniel have comprehensively updated their textbook Business Data Communications and IT Infrastructures. Most centrally, this Edition 3.0 includes access to a new custom VM lab, developed to accompany the text. This is exceedingly timely given the focus on virtualization in industry. This VM lab also helps facilitate providing this hands-on course in distance and hybrid formats. This book is currently in the final stages of production and will be available for use for Spring 2021. Again, keep an eye on our website or send me a quick e-mail if you would like to be certain to receive an electronic review copy once it is available.

Innovative Intro IS Teaching Ideas: A New Discussion Group on LinkedIn

We have created another tool that might help you this semester. Prospect Press has set up a discussion group on LinkedIn entitled Intro to IS Course -- Experiential Learning Group. This LinkedIn group grew out of the numerous class participation activities in our book Information Systems for Business: An Experiential Approach by Belanger, Van Slyke & Crossler. It is designed for professors to share new ideas about teaching online, especially given the new challenges responding to Covid-19. Adding experiential elements to your course could prove useful even if you are not using an experiential textbook. Membership is limited to professors. If you would like to participate in this group, send me a quick email, and I will invite you to join. Or go directly to the LinkedIn site and request membership at https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8973213/.

Virtual Conferences

Covid-19 has changed the landscape of professional meetings. This is a serious loss to the field, however, service organizations have been creatively pivoting to virtual meetings. AMCIS 2020 had record attendance! We strongly recommend attending these meetings. These virtual meetings actually have several advantages. They are really inexpensive! Organizations have cut their registration fees and attendance no longer requires paying for travel or lodging! Another advantage is that you can check out a session and discretely leave without worrying about having to walk across a room. Indeed, I found that it is possible to actually be in two places at the same time in order to catch parts of two sessions, virtually.

Prospect Press will be sponsoring workshops at a couple of upcoming conferences. We hope to see you virtually this fall!

• SIGITE, October 7-9, Workshop on SA&D Innovations
   
• EDSIGCON, November 4-6, three workshops:
  Teaching Database in the Data Analytics Curriculum
  Teaching Big Data Technologies
  Teaching Data Comm with a VM

New and Revised Titles Forthcoming Soon

The following textbook and revised editions are in development and will be published next Spring:

• Information Systems for Business: An Experiential Approach, Edition 4.0,
  by France Belanger, Craig Van Slyke, and Robert E. Crossler
   
• Information Systems for Managers, Edition 5.0,
  by Gabriele Piccoli and Federico Pigni

• Web Development with ASP.NET, C#, HTML, CSS, & Bootstrap
  by Jakob Iversen and George C. Philip

My best wishes to you for a productive, healthy, and fun fall term. I hope that some of this information will prove useful to you. Don’t hesitate to contact me directly with any questions or comments.

-- Beth

Beth Lang Golub, President & Editor
Beth@ProspectPressVT.com
802-862-4684