E-Business

 

Spring Term 2008

 

 

Course Outline

 

(available online via the Informatics courses directory at www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/courses/eBusiness/)

 

NB that this year, for the first time, this course is officially two separate courses, one for final-year undergraduates and another for MSc students.  This outline applies to both courses, and there will be no difference in the teaching; but there will be separate unseen-exam papers for the two categories of students.

 

 

Tutor

 

Geoffrey Sampson

 

grs2@sussex.ac.uk

www.grsampson.net

 

 

Overview

 

The aims of the course are:

 

¥   to give student an understanding of the considerations – economic, technical, institutional, etc. – likely to be seen as relevant by people such as:

–   a venture capitalist considering whether to invest in an e-commerce start-up

–   a senior manager deciding whether to back an IT-based company-internal intiative, such as:

¥   a BPR (business process re-engineering) project

¥   development of new electronically-mediated relationships

+   with suppliers

+   or with customers (B2B or B2C)

 

¥   and to help provide training in some of the Òsoft skillsÓ – notably, organizing complex ideas systematically and writing reports in clear and persuasive English – which computing graduates will need in their careers at least as much as they will need technical knowledge.

 

(The term Òe-businessÓ includes Òe-commerceÓ but is much wider.  E-commerce refers to trading via the internet.  E-business covers that, but also covers the ways in which IT is changing the internal operations of companies – which in practice is an equally or more important topic.)

 

Some computing students still have an idea that, after graduating, they will move into jobs where their main duty will be hacking code or similar.  If you are thinking along those lines, there is bad news:  the supply of jobs like that is drying up fast – in Britain they have pretty well vanished.  One reason is overseas ÒoutsourcingÓ.  But by far the main reason is that business IT is moving away from developing purpose-built software, towards orchestrating the use of pre-existing packages.

 

People who know about developments in the job market agree about how things are moving.  The jobs available in future will be for people who combine a technical background with management and business skills.  Rather than just taking responsibility for ensuring that machines and software run, theyÕll need to be capable of thinking about the business logic of how software systems contribute to their companyÕs success.

 

¥   From the UK computing press in 2005:  ÒFive years ago, just 15% of IT job adverts mentioned management skills; today, 40% do.Ó

 

¥   In a 2005 survey of hundreds of British IT managers and directors, 80% said the most important step for company competitiveness is to equip IT staff with comprehensive business skills.

 

And for these purposes, Òsoft skillsÓ are at least as important as factual expertise. 

 

¥   a major Microsoft report on the future of British IT, 2007:  ÒThe balance of soft and hard skills is becoming more critical, with soft skills for IT graduates being of more importance than other disciplines. É The ÔtraditionalÕ CS degree with its emphasis on purely technical skills will not be enough on its own ÉÓ

 

I recently listened to someone who recruited graduates to work at Hewlett Packard UK, commenting that he preferred to take graduates of other subjects and teach them computing expertise on the job; British computing graduates were useless to him, because in his experience they are Òilliterate code monkeysÓ.  That was harsh and extreme; but it made a valid point.

 

In a one-term course, it is not possible to give students a comprehensive understanding of relevant business considerations and skills.  But you can get quite a long way towards grasping the basic issues, so that in job interviews and when you join a company you can be on their wavelength, rather than just treating business as a foreign country.

 

To give you a more direct feeling for business considerations, apart from lecturing to you as an academic I shall be inviting various visitors from the Òreal-worldÓ of e-business.

 

The course will refer to software systems, but students will not be introduced to technical details of software, or use such systems as part of the course.  These are such large (and expensive) systems that Òhands-onÓ experience would not be practical, but in any case it is not very desirable.  While there is plenty of disagreement about e-business trends, all well-informed commentators agree that (quoting Grant Norris et al. of PricewaterhouseCoopers, in E-Business and ERP):

 

ÒE-business is about strategy:  it is not about technology.Ó

 

The coursework will revolve round examining the nature and prospects of some e-business development of the studentÕs choice.

 

Contact Hours

 

The course will meet twice a week, Tuesdays at 9 in the Biology Lecture Theatre and Thursdays at 11 in Engineering 2–AS3, with all students in a single group.

 

¥   Most sessions will be lectures by the tutor (i.e. me)

¥   Some sessions will be seminars led by outside speakers

¥   Two sessions, preceding the two coursework deadlines, will be for student Q&A troubleshooting with the tutor

 

Attendance will be monitored and recorded on Sussex Direct at the visiting-speaker sessions and the Q&A sessions.

 

The course will not include small-group ÒworkshopÓ-type sessions.  That type of class meeting is commonly used in Informatics for working on solutions to technical problems; but in the business/commerce world, there are never Òcorrect answersÓ to be worked out logically.  (If there were, investors would have lost fewer millions in the year-2000–01 dotcom meltdown!)

 

On the other hand, I welcome questions in my lectures.  I am not good at timing things to leave a specific question period at the end, and anyway questions donÕt always come when I do that.  But if you put your hand up when I am in full flow, I shall stop and yield to you.  In past years, student questions have often led to very valuable points – either because what I was trying to say was reasonable but I had chosen a very unclear way of putting it, or because I really hadnÕt thought through my ideas properly (which certainly happens), or because a student knew about some relevant thing that I hadnÕt come across.

 

If you are thinking ÒIÕm not sure about what heÕs on about – IÕd like to query thatÓ, the odds are that many others in the audience will be feeling similarly unsatisfied, and they will bless you if you are the one who puts your hand up.  If none of you do, IÕll never realize there was an issue there.

 

Students should come equipped to take notes at all sessions.  Although my lectures will be supported with OHP foils, I shall not distribute copies of OHPs to students.  (Still less will I use PowerPoint, or make PowerPoint presentations available online.)  This is not because I am lazy; it is a deliberate policy to encourage more student learning.

 

Both experience and formal research show that learning any subject requires active involvement with the material:  passively hearing a lecture, or scanning documents even repeatedly, leaves little impression.  The act of making oneÕs own notes has a magic effect of stimulating thought and understanding.  Jotting down Òmain pointsÓ, or Òstriking pointsÓ, on paper achieves far more than passive listening, even if you throw the paper away after the class.  But donÕt throw it away; having made notes, on the lectures and on your further reading, keep them and use them as input when preparing for the unseen exam later in the year.  Any student who takes the course seriously will need to take his or her own notes on the lectures, on the textbook, and on further reading.

 

Lectures are no more than signposts into a complex subject; and OHP foils for a lecture reduce it further to a few brief, crude bullet points.  Students need to broaden their knowledge in all possible directions; distributing OHP foils would encourage you to think that those few bullet points are the entire subject – so it is a bad idea.  (If I thought that students would not use the foils in order to avoid making notes and reading the subject up properly, I might make them available; since I know from past experience that they would, I shall not create the temptation.)

 

PowerPoint is even worse (far worse) than OHP foils from this point of view.  PowerPoint is organized to work well for people such as government officials whose task is to get across to a captive audience Òthe way itÕs going to beÓ – no arguments, just commit this to memory.  That is the opposite of good university teaching.  On this issue, see e.g. Edward Tufte, ÒPower corrupts – PowerPoint corrupts absolutelyÓ, www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html, or read his pamphlet showing how PowerPoint was responsible for the 2003 Columbia disaster in which seven astronauts died (try googling for Tufte/NASA/Columbia/PowerPoint).

 

DonÕt worry that you havenÕt got time to copy everything from my OHP foils word for word.  Of course you havenÕt.  If you havenÕt learned already, learn in this course to take notes the adult way – attend to what I say, glance at the OHP display and jot key phrases on paper as props to help you absorb the outline of the lectures.  The detail is in the book.

 

If you miss a lecture and you are worried because you canÕt see notes online, do what students have done down the ages:  ask a friend to lend you his or her notes.  (Or just go directly to the textbook chapter and explore it without the benefit of my signposts.)

 

 

Textbook

 

The textbook for the course is one I have written myself.  The first edition was published as:

 

e.biz: The Anatomy of Electronic Business, Elsevier, 2004

 

and copies of this are available in the university library and bookshop.  However, e-business is a field which is changing virtually month by month, so that edition is now showing its age.  In 2007 I wrote a new edition (the two books overlap heavily, but the new one is obviously far more up to date).  This will be published soon, under the title Electronic Business, by the British Computer Society (the body which governs our profession under Royal Charter).  Since the BCS have not got it out in time for this course, I have put the new edition online at:

 

            www.grsampson.net/Zebiz.html

 

NB that when the book is published, I shall have to take the online version down to protect the SocietyÕs copyright and sales.

 

I pick my own book not because I am self-centred but because there is little other choice.  The publisher was keen to take the book on because there was previously no textbook on e-business written for computing students, rather than managers.  I wrote the original edition in response to the experience of teaching this course a few years ago and finding no textbook available.  There are one or two alternatives now, but I am not convinced that they are equally suitable.

 

 

Lecture Topics

 

My lectures will relate to particular chapters in the textbook.  For teaching, though, it works best to change the sequence a little.  The topics will be covered in the following order.  (Chapter numbers here refer to the new/online version of the textbook.)

 

1               Introduction to the course

2               Introduction to e-business (ch. 1)

3               A case study: Amazon (ch. 3)

4               IT and the structure of the economy (ch. 2)

5               Enterprise resource planning (ch. 8)

6               E-business and social institutions (ch. 4)

7               Jurisdiction, regulation, taxation (ch. 5)

8               Does IT matter? (ch. 6)

9               Shifting to an intangible economy (ch. 7)

10            Marketing and customer relationships (ch. 9)

11            Advertising and Web 2.0 (ch. 10)

12            Diverse enterprise applications (ch. 11)

13            Web services and Òservice-oriented architectureÓ (ch. 12)

14            Economics of open-source (ch. 13)

 

At the time of writing we are hoping to welcome the following visiting speakers:

 

Anthony Bliss (AntBliss.com):  Technology as an enabler in the Event Photography business

 

Lee Braine (Project Manager, Finance):  Business transformation within banking

 

Sue Hyden (Streamnet Ltd):  E-supply chain management in the Government sector

 

Timetable

 

Week 1

Tue 8 Jan

lecture 1 (monitored attendance)

 

Thu 10 Jan

lecture 2

Week 2

Tue 15 Jan

lecture 3

 

Thu 17 Jan

Q&A session (monitored attendance)

Week 3

Tue 22 Jan

lecture 4

 

Thu 24 Jan

lecture 5

Week 4

Tue 29 Jan

lecture 6

 

Thu 31 Jan

visiting speaker:  Anthony Bliss (monitored attendance)

Week 5

Tue 5 Feb

lecture 7

 

Thu 7 Feb

visiting speaker:  Lee Braine (monitored attendance)

Week 6

Tue 12 Feb

lecture 8

 

Thu 14 Feb

lecture 9

Week 7

Tue 19 Feb

lecture 10

 

Thu 21 Feb

visiting speaker:  Sue Hyden (monitored attendance)

Week 8

Tue 26 Feb

lecture 11

 

Thu 28 Feb

lecture 12

Week 9

Tue 4 Mar

lecture 13

 

Thu 6 Mar

lecture 14

Week 10

Tue 11 Mar

Q&A session (monitored attendance)

 

Thu 13 Mar

RESERVED IN CASE OF OVERFLOW

 

The above is my best guess at the time of writing, but it can always happen that a visiting speaker has to change date or drop out at the last minute – donÕt be surprised if you come along to some class expecting to hear me and find yourself listening to an outside speaker instead, or vice versa!

 

Our visiting speakers are contributing time from their busy lives purely out of the kindness of their hearts – do please help to make them feel glad they took the trouble to come.

 

 

Further Reading

 

Most of my lectures will relate to material in my textbook, but I shall not limit myself to its contents.  Students who want to do well on the course will read other material too, in print and on websites.  The textbook contains abundant references to other important articles, books, and websites, and I urge everyone to follow some of these up at least for topics that particularly interest them.  When you come to take the exam, the questions will obviously relate to the same general areas as my lectures, but they will give you opportunities to show that you have gone into the material and can discuss examples or considerations going beyond the few things I have time to say in lectures.  Answers which do that are likely to get much better marks than ones which merely play back to me what I have said to you.  (For the coursework, you will have to read up independently of my lectures.)

 

For readings on specific areas, I shall leave you to look at the references in the textbook (online or on paper).  But for more general background knowledge, let me draw the following to your attention:

 

on basic economics:  D. Begg et al., Economics, 8th edn, McGraw-Hill, 2006 (www.BeggEcon.com) – not many of you will want to read the whole book, but reading early pages would be a very good idea.

 

on business in general:  David Needle, Business in Context, 4th edn, Thomson Learning, 2004.

 

If youÕd like to understand the basics of the financial side of running a business, a nice accessible book addressed to computing students is Michael Blackstaff, Business and Finance for IT People, Springer, 2001.

 

 

Assessment

 

Students on this course will be assessed 50% by coursework and 50% by unseen exam.

 

 

Coursework

 

The coursework asks you to imagine that you are a business analyst whose job it is to formulate investment recommendations (perhaps for a merchant bank, or for readers of a business newspaper/magazine – for coursework purposes it is not important who the hypothetical audience for your writing is).  I am asking you to research some bit of the economy where e-business technique(s) of one kind or another are playing a role, and to formulate a case for believing either that the prospects are promising (so that investing, or increasing oneÕs investment, is recommended) or that the prospects are poor (so that the reader is recommended to reduce investment exposure).

 

Specifically, each student should produce two documents:

 

ÒBackground BriefingÓ (20% of course assessment)

handed in by 4 p.m. Thursday 31 Jan 2008

 

ÒInvestment RecommendationÓ (30% of course assessment)

handed in (with a copy of the Background Briefing, see below) after the Easter Vacation, by 4 p.m. Thursday 17 Apr 2008

 

The ÒBackground BriefingÓ will be a factual discussion of how e-business technique(s) are being deployed in whatever corner of the economy you have chosen to examine.  The ÒInvestment RecommendationÓ will take a view on whether you expect this development to be successful or otherwise, supporting your opinion by reference to the kinds of considerations discussed in some of the lectures and reading for the course.

 

Because the Investment Recommendation will need to refer back to points in the Background Briefing, it is vital that you keep a copy of the Background Briefing and hand it back along with the Investment Recommendation, so that I can understand what you are saying in the latter when it refers back to the former.  (I donÕt mind whether the copy you hand back is the one I marked or a fresh one.)

 

The formal University definition of the course specifies that the coursework in total should be about 4000 words.  I do not much care how you divide this between the two documents, but it might be sensible to divide it roughly in proportion to the assessment weighting, so a little less than 2000 words for the Background Briefing, a little more for the Investment Recommendation.

 

Please note:  now that I have given you the respective deadlines, I shanÕt make a point of repeatedly reminding you or chivvying you to do the work.  When you are earning a salary, I donÕt think your superiors would be impressed to hear ÒI forgot to do what you asked because you only asked me onceÓ!  Finding out what is expected and taking responsibility for getting it done are some of the employment-related behaviour patterns which this course aims to foster.

 

The Òcorner of the economyÓ which you examine could be anything from a single company, or a division within a company, up to a whole economic sector, such as food retailing (or even retailing in general), or the airline industry.  I hope different students will pick widely diverse topics (that will certainly make my marking task less tedious!)  But please donÕt pick Amazon, since I cover Amazon at length in the course and the textbook.  This obviously makes it difficult for a student working with that textbook to be original on the topic of this particular company.  And I would suggest avoiding companies whose products or services are themselves cutting-edge techie stuff (though, since this is a blurry category, I offer this only as a recommendation rather than a definite rule).  What you should be learning about on this course is how new technology is changing business in general, so I would rather you didnÕt get sidetracked into thinking and writing about new technology for its own sake.  I shanÕt mark anyone down for choosing a high-tech topic, but I predict that they will find it harder to produce the kind of report suitable for this course.

 

Obviously, if you choose a specific division within a company, that is not in itself something that anyone can buy shares in.  I can invest in NestlŽ S.A., but I cannot invest in Perrier Water, because it is a brand owned by NestlŽ.  For present purposes, though, this is not important.  If you think there is an interesting business story to tell about e-business in Perrier (I am not aware of one, but who knows!), then you are welcome to focus on Perrier and say that the positive or negative prospects for that initiative suggest (dis)investment in its parent company.  For that matter, it would not bother me if a student mistakenly supposed that Perrier was an independent quoted company and wrote accordingly.  The point of the exercise is not to become knowledgeable about who owns whom, but to develop ideas about how e-business techniques may impact on an enterprise.

 

IÕm looking for judicious, objective discussion – NOT HYPE!  Your role is to act as a business analyst, not an advertising copywriter!

 

The e-business technique(s) you discuss might be to do with company-internal processes – what in the textbook I call Business Process Re-engineering.  It would be just as valid to discuss how a retailer is deploying RFID tags to improve stock control, as to discuss how the same retailer is finding new customers via a website.  If one firm is doing both, you could choose to describe its whole spectrum of e-business initiatives, but an analysis focusing on just one of them could be equally valuable.  Set your explanation of the target e-business development in the context of some description of the environment in which it is occurring:  a little about the history and overall nature of the company, if you are writing about one company, a description of the general market situation facing your target economic sector, or whatever seems relevant for putting the reader in the picture.

 

I shall not evaluate your Investment Recommendation in terms of whether I believe your predictions are right or wrong.  I do not know, any more than you do, which stocks will in fact rise or fall over the next twelve months or five years.  (If I did, I surely would be too busy making gazillions to find time to drop in on the University!)  Rather, what I hope to see is that you make a reasonable case, demonstrating awareness both of some hard facts about your target economic topic and of some of the considerations which well-informed people have seen as potentially relevant to e-business success/failure.

 

There is no shortage of places to look for information these days.  Personally, I prefer to read printed hard copy, and I get most of my gen on company developments from magazines like The Economist and IT Week and business sections of newspapers like the Daily Telegraph.  But for those who prefer the Web, there are masses of online business-analysis magazines out there.  (Indeed some of the titles just quoted are available online, probably with a few daysÕ delay to encourage people to subscribe to the paper versions – but being up-to-the-minute is not important for this coursework exercise, since nobody is going to be investing real money in response to it.)  Quote your sources, whether hard copy or online, as with any other coursework; but use whatever sources you want.  CompaniesÕ own websites can often be interesting, but bear in mind that they are naturally not objective, neutral sources!

 

What you write may add up to only part of what a real-life business analyst would write in practice (indeed, given the word limit, that is almost sure to be so).  It is very likely that you will feel more confident about discussing some aspects of your chosen topic than others which would also normally be covered in a business-analysis report; in particular, many undergraduates will not be in a position to discuss what are called the ÒfinancialsÓ, for instance whether a technically attractive initiative might be risky because it requires too much borrowing and hence interest payments.  This is fine:  write about the aspects you can discuss knowledgeably, and not about ones you canÕt (you might even include a few words identifying areas that you know you are missing out).  I am much more interested in seeing that you can do some things, and giving credit for those, than detecting the existence of some gaps in your competence (which we all have).

 

Students sometimes ask:  after I write a Background Briefing on topic X, is it all right if in the light of further consideration I decide to do the second piece of coursework on some other topic Y?  Yes, that is all right:  it might well be that you encounter the makings of a much more interesting business story in between doing the two pieces of work, and I should be sorry to force you to stick to the earlier one in that case.  But bear in mind that if you do that, your Investment Recommendation will need to contain the background facts as well as the case for prospects being good or bad – and I shall still want the latter, I do not want just two factual background briefings.

 

 

Timing of Coursework Q&A

 

The session on Thu 17 Jan is reserved for students to ask questions about the first piece of coursework, which will be due in two weeks later.  So think ahead about what you are going to work on, and if you have any worries about exactly what is expected/allowed, bring them to the 17 Jan session!

 

In the past I have experimented with different lead-in times between this session and the coursework deadline.  In some past years, students at the Q&A session have looked at me blankly and none of them seemed to have begun work on the assignment.  So one year I made the Q&A session very close to the hand-in deadline; but then students complained that by the time the Q&A session arrived it was too late to be useful.  I sympathized with that complaint, so I have settled on a fortnight as a reasonable gap between them.

 

Ask whatever youÕd like to ask about the coursework at the Q&A session, where all students can hear your question and my answer – or for ever hold your peace!  Please donÕt ask me about the coursework task after the lecture, or by e-mail.  I shanÕt answer if you do, IÕm afraid.  Students these days are just too given to saying things like ÒItÕs not fair, so-and-so was told such-and-such, I wish I had known I could do thatÓ.  If the Q&A were done by e-mail, even if all students were copied into the e-mails IÕd get some saying ÒItÕs not fair, by the time I saw that such-and-such was allowed/required, I had already committed myself to something differentÓ.  Taking questions at a known time in open class, and not otherwise, is the only way to avoid this sort of complaint.  And remember:  if you want to do X and itÕs a reasonable thing to do in terms of what I have said above, then if I havenÕt expressly said that you shouldnÕt do it, IÕm hardly going to mark you down for doing it when you give the work in.  That really would be unfair.

 

Please donÕt say ÒI feel shy of asking questions in front of the classÓ.  You wonÕt be much use when you go to work unless you are prepared to question and if necessary point out publicly that the Emperor has no clothes.  Learn not to be shy!

 

None of the above applies to asking me questions about e-business in general – it only applies to questions about the assessed work.  I am very happy to talk to individual students about the subject itself, face to face or by e-mail, any time that is reasonably convenient.  I have given up listing a weekly Òoffice hourÓ on my door, because when I did no student ever seemed to show up at that particular time and hence I would forget when it was; but knock on my door any time, and if I am there and not tied up with something unusually urgent, we can talk.  Or send me an e-mail, and IÕll either discuss your topic by e-mail or suggest a time to talk face to face.  I like talking about e-business.  ItÕs only getting into issues of unfairness with respect to marked work that I donÕt like.

 

 

Presentation of Coursework

 

Bear in mind that what you are going to write is intended as a business document addressed to a sober, serious readership.  Students sometimes delight in using electronic WP facilities to jazz up coursework with a variety of fonts, snazzy diagrams or pictures, etc.  In business, most of that sort of thing is best reserved for the advertising or other publicity aimed at customers; it cuts no ice internally within a business and is best avoided.  (Of course, if some simple diagram genuinely makes the discussion easier to follow, that is a quite different matter.)

 

On the other hand, the prose needs to be carefully written.  A businessman or –woman is unlikely to be impressed by a document couched in rambling, grammatically misshapen sentences.  In real life, it would go straight in the bin.  I am not allowed just to throw your work in the bin without marking it, but I would certainly mark work like that down.

 

There is masses of advice available, on the Department website and elsewhere, about how to plan and write a good report – including the very basic points that (i) you do need to plan before you write a sentence of the real thing, for instance by jotting down topic headings and juggling them round into a logical and persuasive sequence; and (ii) having written a first draft of the document, you need to revise it – preferably more than once – before handing it in.  See, for instance, ÒWrite That Essay!Ó, at www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/doc/essays/essays.html.  (Documents written for university assessment used routinely to be called ÒessaysÓ.  The ones for this course might better be called ÒreportsÓ, but the principles of good writing are not affected.)

 

One particular point:  I personally am not too bothered about the occasional spelling mistake (so long as they are not too frequent), but your punctuation must follow normal English conventions.  Punctuation displays the logic of a discussion, so doing it sloppily destroys the clarity of your writing.  (See for instance what was for a while recently Amazon.co.ukÕs No. 1 top-selling title, Lynne TrussÕs Eats Shoots and Leaves: The zero tolerance approach to punctuation.)

 

For some reason which I have never understood, many students have special difficulty with the apostrophe.  The rules for this are not difficult.  To mark the possessive, you put an apostrophe after the non-possessive form, followed by S unless there is a plural S before the apostrophe.  So the boys means more than one boy, the boyÕs means Òof the boyÓ, and the boysÕ means Òof the boysÓ.  There is one important exception:  its means Òof itÓ, because itÕs is reserved for the abbreviated form of Òit isÓ, and other contracted forms such as donÕt, weÕll also use the apostrophe to mark the place where letter(s) are omitted.

 

That is really all there is to it.  So, if you donÕt want to be marked down for illiteracy, please conform to the normal rules.

 

 

Quoting your Sources

 

As with most written work at University (including the research which we tutors publish), the coursework for this course is likely to involve getting hold of information by reading other documents, on paper and/or the Web.  But, as with other courses, what I am expecting you to do is to digest what you find and use your sources to give me your position on a particular topic – not just to parrot back to me other peopleÕs words.

 

This is not just about ÒplagiarismÓ.  It is mainly about learning.  Students sometimes think of coursework as something we set to force you to Òprove that youÕve done the readingÓ.  But what we are really trying to do in teaching is not to make you just go through the motions, but to get you actually thinking and making the material your own.  Only through digesting your reading to the point where you can cover a topic in your own words does working on a written assignment achieve that.

 

The point is about plagiarism too, though.  If you copy long passages from your sources, without making it clear via inverted commas or indentation precisely what wording you have copied and where from, thatÕs just cheating.  Only a minority of students do that – but if anyone on my course does it, I shall throw the book at him or her.

 

Note in particular that it is not enough to copy whole paragraphs, with no quotation marks, and somewhere include a website URL or book citation with no specific indication whether this is the source of a few words, a long passage, or is just mentioned as a general source of information that you have used.  If you take not just information but specific wording from someone else, we must be able to see what wording is borrowed.  Otherwise, we regard it as plagiarism, which leads to an appearance before the Misconduct Panel.

 

When you do quote sources, legitimately, or refer to sources of information without quoting them word for word, give the details – whether journal article, book, web page, or whatever – in a fashion that enables the reader to go and find the item for himself.  That is the purpose of listing references in academic writing.  I quite often spot some point in student coursework which interests me enough to want to follow the reference up.  It is very frustrating if the reference is given just as, say, an authorÕs name, or a magazine or journal title, with no further details.  There are various standard conventions for citing publications, examples of which you will often have encountered in your reading.  Pick a style that suits you, and follow it consistently.

 

 

A Note on Handing Coursework in

 

When giving in written coursework, please do not enclose the papers in a plastic pocket.  Students often use for this purpose the pockets that are marketed for holding single sheets of paper in ring binders, and for the muggins who has to mark the stuff these make life quite difficult:  getting the sheets out is often fiddly, and then the pocket has to be kept and the sheets reinserted to keep them together.  When dozens of items have to be marked, perhaps on a bus or train, this makes the process noticeably more demanding and is quite irritating – which will probably affect the mark awarded marginally, markers being only human.  All that is actually needed is a way to hold multiple sheets together securely, and the plastic pockets do not even do that – once the papers are taken out it is easy to mislay a sheet.  The two proper ways to link multiple sheets together are either with a single staple (not paperclip) in the top-left corner – a small stapler is a very cheap item and a basic necessity for university work; or by a Treasury tag through a hole punched in the same corner.

 

 

Unseen Exam

 

The coursework relates to relatively concrete facts about specific businesses.  The exam will balance this, by giving you an opportunity to show that you have been thinking about the higher-level, more general issues considered in the syllabus, and that you have read the subject up beyond the bullet-point remarks contained in my lectures.

 

Several past papers are available via the online Informatics courses directory.  This yearÕs exam paper will be broadly similar in style.  However, whereas the undergraduate paper (as in the past) will require candidates to show awareness of a range of relevant facts and will encourage them to go beyond that by thinking critically about the topics, the MSc paper will require that higher level of answer.

 

Revising for unseen exams, and then managing your time in the exam-room, are both techniques which students need to think about and plan in advance, particularly now that recent fashions in schooling mean that many students have less practice with unseen exams than used to be the case.  The Department course-directory site has a page of advice on these topics:

 

www.informatics.sussex.ac.uk/doc/unseen_exams.php

 

As the exam period approaches, you are warmly recommended to scan through the contents of this page and consider whether some of the advice might be worth adopting.  Good luck!