We are privileged to have a discussion with Dr. Tony Bates, author of Managing Technological Change. During the upcoming week, we will discuss a number of issues suggested by Dr. Bates's insights and ideas.

The importance of focus and brevity: As we have seen the combined minds and voices of this class can lead to very long threads. We do not want to overwhelm Dr. Bates with our volume of posts. We should audit all the discussions, but post only to those threads that are most important to us. During this week of discussions, let us all make a particularly diligent attempt to review the dialog and avoid redundant postings.

Specifically:

· We should limit our responses to 3 of the threads, posting only once in each thread.
· The thread should be no more 3 paragraphs that are limited to a max of 8 lines in length.
· For ease of reading, there should be double space in-between paragraphs.

Please keep focused on the themes of each thread.

Let us be mindful of our guest speaker's time and energy. To that end we are asking that no one in the class email Dr. Bates directly.

Let us also use this area for any additional discussion our group might need to have, rather than clutter the thematic discussion areas with off topic concerns.

-- Anonymous, February 11, 2001

Answers

Many thanks, Judith, both for your very gracious welcome, and the ground rules. I do appreciate the concern about workload, which is an issue perhaps we need to discuss in this forum: does online teaching mean more work for faculty?

I look forward to the discussions in the different topics.

-- Anonymous, February 13, 2001