Teaching OS – ConJunction

Five points I tell my students about citing and using Wikipedia

While most academics and journalists, just like everybody else, heavily relies on Wikipedia for both private and professional purposes, it is quite common in among both these groups to scold anyone who openly admits doing so. For example, many lecturers tend to make fun of students citing Wikipedia and pride themselves in educating them that “Wikipedia is not a source” and, thus, cannot be cited in a seminar paper.

I not only strongly disagree with both tone and substance of such statements, but I regularly have to deal with insecurity and uncertainty among students with respect to the proper use of Wikipedia. The following list presents the five main points I try to bring across in such situations.

Continue reading →

LehrePlus!-Preis 2020 für den Kurs “Organizing in Times of Crisis: The Case of Covid19”

Alle zwei Jahre werden an der Universität Innsbruck Preise für exzellente Lehre vergeben. Und angesichts von insgesamt 44 hochkarätigen Einreichungen freut es mich ganz besonders, dieses Jahr den Hauptpreis erhalten zu haben – und zwar für den mit Elke Schüßler von der Universität Linz gemeinsam konzipierten Kurs “Organizing in Times of Crisis: The Case of Covid19”. Vielen Dank auch an alle anderen, die zum Gelingen des Kurses beigetragen haben!

Continue reading →

Aspen Institute’s ‘Ideas Worth Teaching Award’ for the Course ‘Organizing in Times of Crisis’

Hosted by the the Business & Society Program within the renowned Aspen Institute, the “Ideas Worth Teaching Award” is one of the most prestigious awards for teaching in business and management education. And I am very happy and proud to announce that the collaborative open course “Organizing in Times of Crisis” is among the winners of the 2020 competition – selected out of over 100 nominations.

As recipients of the award, Elke Schüßler (University of Linz) and myself had the honor to introduce our joint course in no longer than 45 seconds:

Check out the official press report by University of Innsbruck as well as articles on the university’s website in English and German.

“Organizing in Times of Crisis”: Collaborative Open Course on the Case of Covid-19

Every summer term I offer the master-level elective module “Current Issues in Theory and Practice of Organizations”. Last year I focused on “Open Organizations and Organizing Openness” with a wiki-based flipped-classroom approach (check out the open access course wiki). In 2020, however, there is no issue more current than the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. As result, I teamed up with Elke Schüßler (University of Linz) to design a collaborative open course on “Organizing in Times of Crisis: The Case of Covid-19”. From the course description:

The worldwide spread of the Covid19 virus poses a grand social challenge. Seriously threatening the health of the world’s population and accompanied by huge social and economic disruption, it is one of the largest immediate crises for Western societies since World War II and a humanitarian disaster for humankind around the world. Drawing on classic and contemporary organization theory, this course aims to illuminate many pressing questions surrounding the pandemic, such as how supply chains can be organized to ensure adequate supplies of health material, the strengths and difficulties of open science approaches to the development of a vaccine or capabilities of different forms of organization and coordination to quickly and adequately respond in times of crisis.

Continue reading →

New Course Syllabus: »Organizing the Digital in the Public Sphere«

Last year our Faculty of Business and Management launched the new master’s program “Digital Business”. As part of this program I had the opportunity to design the course “Organizing the Digital in the Public Sphere”. From the syllabus, which I am happy to make available as a PDF download (licensed CC BY):

Digitalization is affecting not just private sector businesses but also the public sector. At the same time, the whole notion of “public” is changing in the course of ongoing digital transformations. By referring to the “Public Sphere”, this course seeks to capture both these dynamics. Consequently, the course comprises two main parts. The first part focuses on the digital transformation of public sector institutions such as public administrations, public service providers and public utilities. The second part addresses the public more broadly and looks at new forms of platform-based publics as well as provision of public goods with private means.

Didactically this is the first course that I designed following a point-counterpoint format: in each session two students will open with talks representing oppositional viewpoints on the subject before we enter into a joint plenary discussion of the readings.

Study Questions for Article on »Financialization as Strategy« Courtesy of Dirk Bezemer

Today I received a surprising and pleasant e-mail by Dirk Bezemer from University of Groningen in the Netherlands. He had come across the recently published article of Sebastian Botzem and myself on “Financialization as strategy: Accounting for inter-organizational value creation in the European real estate industry” (see also a summary of key points). And he not only read the paper but also chose to use it as a teaching case.

And I am very grateful that Dirk agreed to sharing his teaching questions on this blog (DOC/PDF), thereby effectively turning a research paper into a teaching case.

Continue reading “Study Questions for Article on »Financialization as Strategy« Courtesy of Dirk Bezemer” →

LehrePlus!-Preis in der Kategorie e-Learning für Kurs “Open Organizations and Organizing Openness”

lehre-plus-cut Alle zwei Jahre werden an der Universität Innsbruck unter dem Titel “LehrePlus!” Preise für exzellente Lehre vergeben. In der Kategorie e-Learning wurde 2016 Leonhard Dobusch für seine wiki-basierte Lehrveranstaltung mit dem Titel “Open Organizations and Organizing Openness” ausgezeichnet (vgl. zu den Hintergründen des Kurses einen englischen Beitrag bei governance across borders). Die Preisverleihung in der Aula der Universität Innsbruck findet am 10. November 2016 um 17 Uhr statt (Einladungsflyer).

Continue reading “LehrePlus!-Preis in der Kategorie e-Learning für Kurs “Open Organizations and Organizing Openness”” →

Learning from Your Students: Tools for Digital Interactivity in Class

When presenting in class, students in my courses are required to include at least one “interactive part” involving their fellow class mates. The main goal of this rule is to foster experience-based learning and to make student presentations more varied. How the students involve their colleagues is entirely up to them; collateral benefit of this openness is that I profit immensely from the creativity and diversity of ideas and techniques put forward by the students.

Over the course of the past semester, for instance, I not only saw but experienced various tools for digital interactivity – some of which were really helpful in raising attention levels and understanding. Please find below a selection of three such digital tools, all of which are browser-based and work on laptops, tablets and smartphones alike:

screenshot-kahoot

Kahoot: the mobile-friendly tool provides an easy way to set up competitive quizzes, where participants get points for correct and fast answers. In the end, there is a ranking and a winner. According to Kahoot’s website, the tool works with up to 500 participants. In a German blog post, Daniel Giere describes his experiences with Kahoot in the field of history. Continue reading “Learning from Your Students: Tools for Digital Interactivity in Class” →

4 Open: Wiki-based Course on “Open Organizations and Organizing Openness”

On February 1st I joined the Department of Organization and Learning at University of Innsbruck as a professor of business administration with a focus on organization. One of the most challenging and, at the same time, tempting tasks as a newly appointed professor is the opportunity to design at least some new courses from scratch. In particular, I was so lucky to being offered to teach the module on “Current Issues in Organization Studies”, which allowed me to design a course I have been wanting to give for a long time: “Open Organizations and Organizing Openness“.

The overall rationale for the structure of the course follows the imperative formulated by Tkacz (2012: 404, PDF) in his “critique of open politics”:

To describe the political organisation of all things open requires leaving the rhetoric of open behind.

As a consequence, the lecture part of the course is organized around different aspects or dimensions of organizational openness such as boundaries, transparency, participation or emergence. The respective readings only peripherally address the issue of openness but rather shall provide the building blocks for arriving at a more precise and theoretically grounded understanding of openness.

Read the rest of this entry at governance across borders >>