Dr. Grandon Gill holds an AB (cum laude) from Harvard College and an MBA (high distinction) and DBA from Harvard Business School. He teaches introductory and intermediate courses in programming for undergraduates and also teaches case method capstone courses in the MIS undergraduate, MS-MIS and Executive MBA programs. He has also taught a variety of IT courses during his tenure at USF, from computer systems concepts to doctoral case methods. He received USF’s Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching Award in 2007 and 2013.
Dr. Gill has published or edited more than 40 case studies, most recently for the Journal of IT Education: Discussion Cases. His recent book, Informing with the Case Method, has been the basis of workshops in the U.S. and around the globe. Thus far in 2013, venues have included the NSF TUES PI Conference in Washington D.C., RMIT: Vietnam in Ho Chi Minh City, the United Nations Staff College in Turin, Italy, and at the 3rd International Symposium on Integrating Research, Education, and Problem Solving (Special Track on Case Methodologies), Orlando Florida.
Dr. Gill is passionate about using technology as a teaching tool and has studied distance learning, strategy, and practice, alternative course designs, and tools for course development and delivery, all under the general heading of informing science. His research in this area has been published in many journals, including Informing Science, Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education, the Journal of Information Systems Education, eLearn, and the Journal of IT Education. He has also published multiple times in MIS Quarterly, the MIS discipline’s leading journal—his most recent article considering the MIS fields from an informing science perspective. His academic service includes stints on the editorial boards of six journals. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of Informing Science: the International Journal of the Emerging Transdiscipline and the Journal of IT Education: Discussion Cases. He serves as a Governor and Fellow of the Informing Science Institute.
If you survey employers about what skills they are looking for in our students, you will nearly always hear about the soft skills of communications, problem solving, collaboration and willingness to learn. More recently, creativity and resiliency have made frequent appearances on such lists. Unfortunately, while such lists are interesting, they provide us with little guidance with respect to what specific skills within each area needs to be the focus of our educational efforts at each level or what pedagogical approaches are likely to be effective in helping our students to develop the appropriate skills.
The workshop will begin by looking at the nature of task complexity, which is characterized as existing in three forms:
- Experienced complexity, which manifests itself in our mental and physical reactions to a task.
- Intrinsic complexity, which can be assessed through the study of the problem space used to perform the task, and
- Extrinsic complexity, which is driven by the relative fitness of task states and outcomes.
Based on an analysis of how these different types of complexity are evolving in today’s world, it proposes a variety of sub-skills that will be valued within the broad categories of skills that employers appear to desire.
The second part of the workshop will involve active participation by attendees. Through discussion, we hope identify both well established and novel educational approaches that would be particularly relevant to identify the skills needed to cope with today and tomorrow’s expected levels of complexity. No particular level of education is pre-supposed; suggestions applicable to primary and secondary school are as welcome as those for undergraduate, graduate and post- graduate education.
The participatory workshop’s goal is to help the facilitator develop a list of approaches that can be incorporated into the plenary session that he will be giving at the conference later in the week.
