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Professor Ruth gives a 4 minute audio description of his new course for Spring 2012
Catalog Description PUBP 710-008 Social Networks and Public Policy Wednesdays at 7:20. This new offering examines the global role of blogs and social networking from a public policy perspective. Three major course elements are: blogs and the political process; opportunities, threats and challenges of social networks for governments and institutions; the role of social networks in effecting regime change, like Arab spring and other contemporary events. Discussion, individual student projects, guest speakers and case studies.
Listen to the course description presented by Professor Stephen Ruth
Welcome
Welcome to the ICASIT web site. Please take a quick look at the tabs above, which tell our story. We have been operating for over two decades and our primary focus for 2012 is what it has always been: studying policy issues that leverage Information Technology. Our projects and applied research aim at evaluating the implementation of IT (a strategic issue), not simply ownership (an operational concern). With cumulative grants and contracts in the several million dollar range and projects in nearly thirty countries, ICASIT has had partnerships with foundations, research centers, and universities around the world. We continue to be very proud of our contribution to the highly successful Nepal wireless project. After starting with only one site, there are now over 20 villages connected along with hospitals and schools in the region. The project leader, Mahibir Pun, won the coveted Ramon Magsaysay award, dubbed the "Asian Nobel Prize", for his work in community development on the project. There is an article describing Nangi and Mr Pun in more detail and a more recent update which chronicles the continuing growth of the Nepal project. The Northern Virginia Technology Council's journal, The Voice, also featured Pun and ICASIT. To get another look at the project in more detail you can view the slide show from a recent report to the Asia Pacific Telecommunity
If you have time, check out our popular IT research site. Many researchers find the site useful since it gives over a thousand links to almost a hundred hot topics like cloud computing, social networking, IT legislation, M banking, telematics, etc. Thanks to SPP grad students Najoua Benmlih and Iqbal Ahmed, who updated the site. There will be a revised version early in 2012 to accommodate our new area of study: tech-based social networking.
Our newest and highest priority project is telework-which has the unrealized potential to save vast amounts of office space, carbon emissions, and fossil fuel-possible, achieving annual savings in the hundreds of billions perhaps. A Ruth/Chaudhry article in IEEE Internet Computing described the differences between public and private sector success in deployment of telework projects and we have several new articles almost completed. At ICASIT we think telecommuting is a serious policy issue affecting transportation, homeland security and other high priority challenges for the new administration. Also we are investigating some of the challenges worldwide of Green IT. I have a new article on that subject which aims to sort out this topic for the general reader.
ICASIT continues its outreach to our business partners in the region. in Knowledge Management, Electronic Commerce, Distance Learning, and other areas. By more effectively using corporate knowledge and wisdom, many companies have been able to improve collaboration, operations, and mission performance. Also, during the past year I have given four seminars to visiting Chinese telecom executives and also a two day telecom seminar for senior tech managers at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).
Thanks to a generous foundation grant a while back, we added a unique new area of research -- developing methodologies to determine the true cost of distance learning processes in a university setting. We have produced a half dozen articles on this potentially trillion dollar issue—see them in Publications—click on the link below. My IEEE Internet Computing article summarizes some of the key issues. We continue to conduct practical, results-oriented studies of real-world applications of technology aimed at developing activity-based costing models of distance learning. I'm grateful to GMU for the award of a Faculty Study Leave for 2011. I used the sabbatical time to do more research on all these topics.
If you would like to know more about us, contact me at (703) 993-1789 or ruth@gmu.edu.
Stephen Ruth
Director
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