Services from Tom March
e-Commerce Links & Ideas
The following are a handful of introductory links on the subjects of e & m-commerce. Ideas for how they might shape into curricular activities are provided in the conclusion.
Background Information
- Columbia Encyclopedia - Definition of e commerce.
- How Stuff Works - Find out how e commerce works.
- How to Create an E-Commerce Website - from VeriSign, a PayPal company
- e-Commerce Times
Shopping Guidance
- Monitoring Shoppers on the Web - news article describes how shops can trace customer purchases on the internet
- Shopping on the internet - Tips for shopping wisely on the internet.
Exemplary e-Commerce Businesses / Web sites
- 2005 National Winners from the UK
- First Annual E-Commerce Awards from MIT
- UK e-Commerce Winners from 1999 - 2003
Cautionary Tales
- Teenage Hacker Escapes Jail - News article about a teenage boy who published thousands of credit card numbers on the internet to warn people about the dangers of using some internet shopping sites.
- Hackers Steal 1 million credit card numbers - News from the BBC
M-Commerce
- M-commerce - from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission
- M-Commerce News - from e-Commerce Times
- Wireless News Updates - from Internetnews.com
- Mobile Commerce in the News - from 10 Meters.com
Conclusion - Ideas for Curriculum
The obvious starting point is to have students come to a personal understanding of what successful e-commerce looks like. They can use definitions and real examples. They can access "How-to" articles. The above links could be a jumping-off point with students adding the best sites they find to a common Hotlist / directory. Because this is a hot topic, many business & news sites + blogs will have new information daily. Thus subscribing to a few key RSS feeds is idea. This is starting to look like a good candidate for a ClassAct Portal.
Once students have an understanding of e-commerce, conducting market research and proposing a business plan is a natural. To make it more interesting, you could require using some new feature of m-commerce as a key ingredient, thus re-packaging Amazon.com or some other e-commerce success story isn't possible.
This also can fall into the WebQuest area and some pretty good business examples exist (see Franchise and Congratulation$, Now Win! - neither of which are germane to the current topic, but might provide ideas for brainstorming).
Possible Activities
Day 1
Directions: Surf, Sift & Sorting the links in the following list. By the end of the period, you should:
- generally know what e- & m-commerce are, and
- be able to share some REALLY interesting links on the subjects.
- Clusty simple search on e-commerce
- Clusty simple search on mobile-commerce
- Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" choice for e-commerce: Internationally and for Australia
- "m-commerce" by Daniel Cheung of iMobile.com.au
Use Gliffy or Jotspot to either Map-out or collect what you have learned.
Submit your best links via email to your teacher.
Day 2
Directions: Using a data projector and Internet connected computer, the class will be challenged to
- understand,
- make sense of,
- determine related issues / conflicts, and
- interpret
(it would be good if the sites used came from those found/suggested by students, but those earlier on this page may also be used. For example:
- Teenage Hacker Escapes Jail
- An "Unexpected Summer" with Coca Cola and high-tech cans
- Near-Field Communications Opens Vision Of E-Commerce and Cheat Sheet: NFC and contactless payments
- 2015 - (The World of Financial markets)
Concluding Activity: Students should brainstorm (individually and then as a class) how mobile e-commerce can be used (for good or ill). You might use Gliffy again to capture a Concept Map.
Days 3- 4
Ideas: Where to go now depends on a few things:
- student ability finding and interpreting Web resources
- student experience with open-ended, problem-solving tasks
- student ability to work independently and in teams
- how effectively class and home time are used
Three levels of project might follow (from simpler to more sophisticated)
- Students choose from one of life's pre-occupations (food, entertainment, music, communicating, education, addictions, transportation, etc.) and hypothesises an innovative way that something like NFC enabled transactions could be used. An assessment guide / rubric could be used to ensure that students meet certain criteria for a quality creation, not just science fiction. This might mean developing a brief business plan for the innovation.
- Slightly more advanced would be to take the above activity more into the realm of a WebQuest. This would entail a group of students working together to develop one product/process. Each team member would represent a role or perspective (such as technologist, investor, consumer, marketer, etc.). Each becomes expert on his or her role and then combine their perspectives to design a product or process that benefits from their shared expertise.
- If the topic catches students' imaginations and aligns well with the course syllabus, then a ClassAct Portal could be developed using simple Blog software. In some ways this is an extension of the above WebQuest where students throughout the year track new develops in the field. They will likely 1) blog what's new, 2) critique innovations, 3) maintain a directory of online resources that they have annotated, and 4) develop content themselves like reviews, podcasts, industrial design drawings, interviews with experts, etc.