Abstract

During the last decade we have engaged in several heretofore separate and at least initially, somewhat independent research initiatives: 1) Virtual teams and collaborative technologies [Ballantine, Becker, et. al.; 1999], [Becker, Ballantine, et. al., 1999, 2001], [Becker; 2003], [Becker and Cline; 2005]; 2) building bridges between researches across the borders of the Americas [Becker and Sanchez; 2006, 2007, and 2008]; and 3) analyzing the dramatic and alarming declines in IS/IT majors [Becker, Hassan, and Naumann, 2006]. Within the last few years we have come to discover that these research streams appear to be converging in a welcome and pleasantly synergistic manner. When combined these research streams result in an action plan to utilize a combination of virtual collaborative technologies and face-to-face interactions with faculty and students throughout the Americas to increase the number of IS/IT majors at all educational levels: undergraduate, masters and doctoral degrees. This paper describes what brought us to this epiphany and my plan for the next year-long phase of this study, which will commence in summer 2009 for this author. A partial list of the planned activities, objectives and metrics are shown in Appendix 1

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