AOM and the impact of technology on case writing

I finally broke my duck and made it to AOM for the first time this year http://meeting.aomonline.org/2011/ and it was great.  San Antonio, Texas, had just celebrated passing it's 100th day of temperatures over 100 F.  But I have to tell you that the discussion in the case round table that I moderated was just as intense.  It was great to be in the company of so many enthusiastic exponents of case writing.  I hope we can play a part in providing a similar workshop at next year's event in Boston.  Thanks to Marilyn Taylor (Bloch School of Management, University of Missouri), Josh Daspit (University North Texas) and Mark Jenkins (Cranfield) for making such a successful bid to the Academy.  We had a full house of over 40 participants and a quality discussion.

High on the agenda was how to make use of new technologies without either distorting the case or sinking under the additional costs of producing video and other features.  The solution, we thought, is to keep it simple and not try to compete with the high-end production values of the film, tv or games people.
Why?
Because good quality audio is more important that video.  Users can accept and accommodate lower grade moving images if the sound quality is good.  Skyped interviews can be arranged quickly and conveniently and cheaply without the cost (in time and money) of high-grade location recording.

And because text with short imbedded clips (audio or video) may be better pedagogically and preferable to expensively integrated multimedia. It's easy to do, technically, and can be done by one person working alone.  There is also a strong argument that students get most of the information through the text and that teh dynamics of working the case in the classroom deliver the engagement and real time experience that we look for in multimedia.  The hard bit is in working through the pedagogical differences between structuring a rich-text document and the traditional written case.