Distinguished
Speaker Series

Dr. Bruce J. Avolio,
Clifton Chair in Leadership
Director, Gallup Leadership Institute
College of Business Administration
University of Nebraska - Lincoln

Linking Leadership, Ownership and Sustainable Organizational Performance: examining how leadership drives a sense of ownership in followers in organizations and the impact such ownership has on enhancing sustainable performance

BIO: Dr. Avolio has published nine books and over a hundred articles on leadership and related areas. His books include Transformational and Charismatic Leadership: The Road Ahead (Elsevier Science, 2002), Full Leadership Development: Building the Vital Forces in Organizations (Sage Publications, 1999), and Developing Potential Across a Full Range of Leadership: Cases on Transactional and Transformational Leadership (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2000). His newest books are Leadership Development in Balance: Made/Born (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, February 2005), The High Impact Leader: Moments Matter in Authentic Leadership Development (McGraw-Hill 2006) and Psychological capital: Developing the human competitive edge (Oxford Press, 2007) with Fred Luthans and Carolyn Youssef.

Dr. M. Scott Poole,
Department of Speech Communication
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Adaptive Structuration Theory:Debates and New Direction

ABSTRACT: Developed in the early 1990s, Adaptive Structuration Theory (AST) was originally designed to explain and understand the use and implementation of advanced Information Technologies, such as groupware and group support systems.  AST has been applied subsequently to a wide range of phenomena, including geographic support systems, virtual teams, online communities, inter-organizational ventures, quality improvement, and leadership.  This presentation takes stock of AST as it currently stands and suggests some new directions.  It will focus on several critiques and debates revolving around AST and other social theories of IT, including the nature of structure and structuration, the status of the spirit concept, the nature and role of agency, and the role of power in the structuring of IT.  These debates offer opportunities to further develop AST.  The presentation will discuss several modifications and additions that promise to better specify AST and will focus on their implications for Information Systems research and for the design of IS.

BIO: Marshall Scott Poole is Professor of Speech Communication and Senior Research Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He received his Ph.D in 1980 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Scott has taught at the University of Illinois, the University of Minnesota, and Texas A&M University. His research interests include group and organizational communication, information systems, collaboration technologies, organizational innovation, and theory construction. He is the author of over 100 articles and book chapters. His articles have appeared in Communication Monographs, Human Communication Research, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication Research, Small Group Research, Management Science, Organization Science, Information Systems Research, MIS Quarterly, and Academy of Management Review, among others. Scott has co-authored or edited ten books including Communication and Group Decision-Making, Theories of Small Groups: Interdisiplinary Perspectives, Organizational Change and Innovation Processes: Theory and Methods for Research, and The Handbook of Organizational Change and Innovation. Scott has been named a Fellow of the International Communication Association and a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association.

Scott Poole Power Point Presentation

Jay F. Nunamaker, Jr.
Regents and Soldwedel Professor of MIS, Computer Science and Communication
University of Arizona
Tucson, Arizona

Collaboration Technology and the Last Research Mile:
An approach to achieving high visibility and high impact

Collaboration technology is one of the most important forces in the business world and will be discussed in terms of lessons learned and prospects for the future.  An approach to achieving high visibility and high impact research will be discussed.

Traveling the Last Research Mile in IT means going from an idea to acceptance in the marketplace and having achieved wide spread use of the IT artifact.  However, it is all too common to generate an idea, a concept, and a theory, develop a model, develop a prototype to test in the lab, write an article, dust off your hands and the task is complete.  “The rest is just trivial details.”  Yet the best academic adventure lies in traveling “the Last Research Mile.”  The moon is 238,000 miles from Earth.  Would you go 237,999 miles on a trip to the moon and then abandon the expedition if by going one last mile, you could find out what the moon is really made of?  You might prove that Newton was right about a lot of things—a feather really will fall as fast as a cannon ball in a vacuum, and you really can jump six times higher on the moon.  If you don’t go that last mile, you leave many key questions unanswered.  Sometimes as you contemplate the Last Research Mile, the effort it requires may seem to be all uphill and fraught with problems, but it is certainly worth doing.  It is in the Last Research Mile that the deepest insights and understandings emerge.  It is the Last Research Mile that makes an enduring difference to society.  This talk will explore the role of going the Last Research Mile by examining the benefits and sharing the insights gained from over 40 years of traveling the Last Research Mile.

This talk will describe the benefits derived and problems encountered from the collaboration technology journey in reaching the Last Research Mile.  I will present a framework with the steps involved and give examples from my collaboration technology research in traveling the Last Research Mile.  I will describe the stages one goes through in traveling the Last Research Mile – Proof of Concept, Proof of Value and Proof of (wide spread) Use. To go the Last Research Mile one must use Design Science methodology to integrate theory, systems development, lab experiments, and field experiments.  Lab and field experiments then inform theory and systems development and the cycle continues.  Lessons learned and insights to the future of collaboration technology will be presented.

Jay Nunamaker Power Point Presentation

Mr. Howard M. Brown

Critical Thinking, Collaborative Learning, and Computers:
An Iconoclast’s View of Classroom Dynamics

Mr. Brown is an original thinker and whose creative solutions have born fruit in the inner-city classrooms of Washington, D.C.  In the early 1990s, before the national push to wire schools for the Internet, Mr. Brown equipped classrooms in D.C. Public Schools with networks of computers, although he does not believe that computers in an of themselves improve learning.  Rather, he argues, when used judiciously, they can support unconventional but effective learning experiences that would be difficult to conduct without computers.   He has demonstrated, among other things that:

• Most people can learn to touch type in 2 hours;
• Learners who regularly collaborate by electronic means to solve real problems exceed their peers in the conventional classroom in reading, writing, and problem-solving skills—often by as much as two years; and,
• At-risk learners whose classrooms invoke frequent collaborative critical thinking rarely drop out of school.

Howard Brown PowerPoint Presentation