Fifth Class: Writing a Chapter on Communication Technologies for Managers

Today we will review how we could write one of the chapters of the book. As an example, I have taken a topic, which everyone is familiar with - Communication Technologies. The objective is not to teach you Communication technologies but to understand "how a team will write the chapter in a collaborative environment - the methodology that they need to follow"

We will first start by checking out what knowledge is already available about the subject in the world. Let's start from the Encyclopedia created by collaborative efforts of hundreds of thousands of experts worldwide. Search for "Communication Technologies" for an existing Wikipedia article. You get directed to "Information and Communication Technologies" When you start reading this article, you will notice that several technologies that are relevant to your chapter are already listed in this article. Bookmark this article on Delicious. Tag it with your course "BIM520". Also tag it with your group "Gr99" (substitute 99 with your 2 digit group code). Also tag with subjects "Communications" and "Technologies". I suppose, by this time, you must have already created network of team members on Delicious. The way you have identified relevant knowledge available from Wikipedia similarly your other team members will research information from other sources of knowledge and share bookmarks with you.

The sources for knowledge are books. Amazon is good place to start searching for books. When you find a book, read through the few pages of the book that are available for reading for free. These pages give an excellent overview of what knowledge it contains. Either you can create Delicious bookmarks or create a wish list and share it with your team members.








Similarly you will find many other sources of knowledge. Libraries, Software vendor sites, Professional organizations websites etc. etc. Divide the search amongst all your team members and generate a large pool of bookmarks.

You now need to do some brain storming and "outline" the chapter. Use Microsoft Word template and create an outline of your Chapter. Here is one example that you can down load from this link.

Next you divide the subtopics that each team member will write. Transfer the outline you have created to Google shared Docs and let each team member start writing their part of about 2 to 4 pages each. When all team members have finished writing the complete chapter will be about 20 to 40 pages long.

All team members should now work upon some other areas of the chapter like Learning Objectives, Review Questions, Exercises, References, Learning Objectives, Images, lists of figures and tables etc. etc.

Now the authors from your team should take control of your chapter. Carefully edit all the contents. Bring in some level of consistency, make it readable, avoid duplication, improve formatting, check that there are no copy right violations. The rest of the team members should continue reviewing the product and advice the editors of any suggestions.

When your product is ready give it to the Quality Assuarance Team who will further have some testers to identify and correct defects.