Jay Cross II

Not long ago, coaching in the workplace was used as a short-term solution to fix a problem or change employee behavior. Not anymore....

A new American Management Association study, conducted by the Institute for Corporate Productivity, shows that more than 60 percent of coaching assignments involve high potential employees and 42 percent of respondents said that coaching assignments involved executives.

Only 37 percent admitted that coaches were assigned to problem employees.

Times are changing. Executive development is becoming a very critical strategic goal in organizations. Instead of hiring executives to fill positions, companies are holding on to their employees to develop them to move up the corporate ladder.

Does your company use coaches for employee development or to fix employee behavior?

Just FYI people - According to a report released in May 2008 by the Energy Information Administration - an office within the Dept. of Energy...if the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) were opened to drilling this year, 2008 - the first oil would be seen in 2018 (10 years) and peak production would not occur until 2027. As it relates to changing the price of a barrel of oil...the best case scenario would occur in 2027 when that cost would come down by $1.44. The Wall Street Journal cites an estimate that it would take at least seven years to get the first barrel out of new Gulf of Mexico drilling.  Now if you want to look at real short-term relief, appreciate the fact that today, when China indicated that it would raise the prices of gasoline, the price of a barrel of oil dropped almost $5.00.

I was shocked to read in a 1800mattress.com survey that 38 percent of Americans fall asleep at work. A New York Times article finds that sleep deprivation costs U.S. businesses nearly $150 billion annually in absenteeism and lost productivity.

Do you take a cat nap at work? If so, how often?

Does a nap rejuvenate you for your afternoon work or just make you more groggy? How does sleep deprivation affect learning or mastering of new skills?

Honest to goodness, someone please respond to me so we can have an open conversation about this. Here is what I see. There is a journal, Field Methods, with an editor -  H. Russell Bernard, and then you have this publisher. Now someone from the journal PLEASE explain to me, what benefits you and/or your customers derives from you having this relationship with this publisher?! Understand this - I am not against the publisher, I understand their business model and I understand their motivations - they are not evil, they're just capitalists and NO the two are not the same. (previous rants on this topic)

Until I get some explanations though, I'm pretty well amazed at the academics involved in this scheme. I've posted about it before, but to date have not received any kind of explanation as to what benefit derives to the side of this equation that supplies all the intellectual horsepower.

• Do the writers/authors get paid?
• Does the journal get a slice of the money that the publisher charges consumers without which the journal could not operate?
• Could the journal not operate a peer-reviewed, refereed publication without the enormous support it gets from the publisher?
• Have you researched Open Access Journals and found that model to be wanting?
• Have you explored using a Creative Commons license but found fatal flaws in that plan?
• have you looked at the model of the Public Library of Science journals and found insurmountable issues there?
• Why?
• Why?
• Why?

Faculty are paid by their schools. Usually research is part of their job description - so they aren't out of pocket in terms of the cost of the research. Usually the "peers" who review articles, aren't paid or they're paid very little. So then we take this paid for research, add some peer review and then add some editorial work and then what? Lock it up behind TWO walls  - one of price and one of copyright.

I'm feeling stupid here because I just don't freaking get it! Want to know where EduPunk can make a dent that'll matter in terms of budgets, openness of research and so on? Tell your institutions to start contacting the academics on the other end of these journals and asking why the hell they continue to participate in an outmoded channel of production that strangles library budgets and restricts already paid for research to those who can afford it and then refuses to allow that content to be freely shared. I swear, I 'm just sitting here shaking my head...I understand this behavior from the recording and movie industries but from institutions and individuals that purport in some way to be supportive of openess and academic freedom. Well I guess its true...freedom isn't free.

<insert shameless plug here>

Just wanted to let everyone know, so you can all run out and sign up now! now! now! - that Brent Schlenker and I are doing an eLearning Guild Summer Seminar Series that is focused on all things "2.0" and how they can be used to create powerful ,collaborative, learning environments. An outline for our session is available here - but I should also point out that Clark Quinn and Jeff Johannigman are doing their session on serious games aka Immersive Learning Simulations, immediately following ours - so stay for both!

(link)   Cautionary Note: I'd like to read this article but don't really want to drop $32 for the privilege. Maybe it'd be really cool if the authors, Marta C. González, César A. Hidalgo and Albert-László Barabási could explain why they want to publish such great research behind such a walled garden. Maybe it'd be cool if nature could explain why it needs $32 freaking dollars from me for an electronic version of an article that must have already been paid for by their subscribers and for which the marginal cost is ZERO. So that $32 is pure profit. Honestly, this is just disgusting behavior for people and organizations that PURPORT to be engaged in academic endeavors.

Excerpt: "Despite their importance for urban planning, traffic forecasting and the spread of biological and mobile viruses, our understanding of the basic laws governing human motion remains limited owing to the lack of tools to monitor the time-resolved location of individuals. Here we study the trajectory of 100,000 anonymized mobile phone users whose position is tracked for a six-month period. We find that, in contrast with the random trajectories predicted by the prevailing Lévy flight and random walk models7, human trajectories show a high degree of temporal and spatial regularity, each individual being characterized by a time-independent characteristic travel distance and a significant probability to return to a few highly frequented locations. After correcting for differences in travel distances and the inherent anisotropy of each trajectory, the individual travel patterns collapse into a single spatial probability distribution, indicating that, despite the diversity of their travel history, humans follow simple reproducible patterns. This inherent similarity in travel patterns could impact all phenomena driven by human mobility, from epidemic prevention to emergency response, urban planning and agent-based modelling."

So Firefox 3 Download day was a pretty big success. That is if you count something on the order of 8 million downloads and quadrupling your market share in a single 24-hour period successful (1). I do want to point out though, that as much as I like FF3, Opera 9.5 is also out and is a fine, seriously fast browser in its own right.   

This article was one of the many that came out in the wake of Download Day; "Firefox 3.0 Doesn't Focus On Business IT." There are a couple of interesting points in this piece. The first thing is the sub-headline right under the main headline; "However, a lack of enterprise support won't stop employees from downloading and using the browser on their own, with or without the backing of IT." No doubt. This really is an extension of the already significant "consumerization" of the enterprise. I also like this quote "Give people the things they want and then they'll take it into the enterprise," Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla's VP of engineering, said in an interview. "Our approach for a long time now has been pull rather than push." Give people what they want...wow what a paradigm shift for thinking RE enterprise software...

Finally, I am REALLY interested in this line "Boeing and Fidelity Investments are among the companies that support or encourage Firefox use." Hmmm, I need to find some points of contact at Boeing and Fidelity who'll talk about that.

Second Life is a virtual world with tens of millions of square meters of virtual lands, more than 13 million "residents," and a thriving economy. The ease in which users can build and modify virtual spaces has made it an attractive choice for experiments in learning space design and educational experiences such as virtual field trips or the creation of galleries to display student-created media. The 7 Things You Should Know About Second Life, EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative’s (ELI) latest brief in the monthly series, examines how Second Life lets educators easily build and modify learning spaces to test how different strategies for a physical space affect learning and how a similar approach can be taken toward educational activities in those spaces.

Browse the complete 7 Things You Should Know About… monthly series.

John Curran, chairman of ARIN, will present the current IP address usage situation, give a brief history of the problem, and discuss issues regarding the migration to IPv6.

I have just returned from my business trip to Kiev Polytechnic Institute. It has been my first visit to Ukraine so I was a bit afraid of visiting a wild slovanic country. So I decided to address to a Kiev trip agency. They met me in Boryspil airport and conveyed me and my luggage to my appartments that they rented for me in advance. I have lived for 2 months in Ukraine and I have only good impressions about this country.

Recently as many other post-soviet countries It has begun to develop. Now you feel in Kiev almost like in Europe, but services and products are considerably cheaper. People are kind and polite, though maybe only to foreigners :).

Geographically Ukraine is a state in Eastern Europe, bounded on the north by Belarus, on the north and east by the Russian Federation, on the west by Poland, Slovakia, on the southwest by Hungary, Rumania, and Moldova, and on the south by the Black Sea and the Azov Sea.

Ukraine includes the Crimean Autonomous Republic, which was elevated from an oblast to a constituent republic in 1991. Crimea deserves another topic. It is wonderful semi-island on Black Sea.  Taking a resting there is like being in paradise.

Ukraine is educated country. Almost half of people are graduated from higher school. There are a lot of great universities in Kiev - such as National Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv and National Technical University of Ukraine "Kyiv Polytechnic Institute" - NTUU "KPI". These two are largest ones. There is a huge amount of smaller institutes and collegues but I had not had a chance to visit them.

So if you receive an invitation to work with an Ukrainian university don't hesitate to accept it.

(DevLearn Link) ...c'mon, San Jose, great sessions, Tim O'Reilly is keynoting...that dude invented  "Web 2.0".. :-) ...what more do ya want?

Performance Testing PeopleSoft Campus Solutions v9.0: A Case Study, EDUCAUSE Enterprise Information and Technology Conference, Chicago, May 2009
Presenters: Jody Reeme, Associate Director, Student Enterprise Systems, and Jeffrey Wilson, Business Systems Analyst, Northwestern University

Presentation slides and handout available at http://net.educause.edu/ENT08/Program/14535?PRODUCT_CODE=ENT08/SESS18

NOTES

Reeme and Wilson began with an overview of the campus and their Oracle/PeopleSoft implementations and their hardware and then defined performance testing as:

• Performance Testing - transactional speed under specific workload
• Load testing - create incremental demand and measure
• Stress testing - system performance under controlled amounts of stress

They were doing performance testing for "peace of mind" in two areas:

• Upgrade to campus solutions v9 - Aggressive scheduling to minimize disruption for users - Started planning in 11/1/06 with the Upgrade to go-live 8/07. New load balancing hardware, etc, and
• Freshman registration - they wanted it to go smoothly. The "rock" at Northwestern - write on the rock the bad things - the IT group doesn't want to be listed on the "rock" 2000 freshmen register 2 days before the start of the fall quarter (each takes about 4 classes) The load on the system increases throughout the day as students get closed out of classes and search for alternatives. Everyone has a significant interest in things going smoothly since their initial implementation and last major upgrade did not.

Planning Process included

• Determine scope
• Develop timeline
• Get user input to determine which processes should be tested.
• Document processes to be scripted in advance
• Gather hardware specifications for proposed production environment
• Create system diagrams
• Allocate staff
• Engage consultants

Human Resources needed include

• Function subject matter experts
• Business analysts
• Developers
• Scripting experts
• Project managers
• DB administrators
• Sys administrators

They did not have a system set up in the beginning - they used the Oracle upgrade lab and it was an iterative process. Comp srvs testing moved into a new production environment

Test case requirements gathering

• Meeting with functional users - identify key business processes to be tested
• Prioritize processes for testing - automated vs manual
• Collect statistics on processes identified.

Processes tested:
Test case scripting was developed - they created excel spreadsheet of steps, expected results, etc - (templates are in the ppt) The scripts used load runner and each was done separately

Scripts they created included the items below - Note that each script worked differently

• Login
• Class search - simple vs detailed
• Enrollment - with search vs without
• Drop classes
• Degree what -if
• Enrollment verification
• Unofficial transcript
• Student account lookup
• Random self-serve navigation
• Logout

And then

Data - selection & manipulation, parameterization
Security - login ids for new freshman, current undergrads, and staff

They exposed some bad data in the system that could be dealt with appropriately and the scripts allowed them to use same data over and over again. They also had some manual scripts to make sure all staff members were security cleared.

Issues in the process included:

• Ever-changing application and prioritization of scripts
• Browsers are different so they needed two sets of scripts - one for IE and one for Firefox.

Preparing the Testing Environment
They had a production testing environment where they refreshed data and the server setup was 8 web and 8 application servers.
They also tested out pieces of the student administration application - data manipulation, reset testing of users' passwords, the LDAP connection and Data conversion. The basically did a manual walk through of test cases and then some short automated tests.

During the tests they set up a "War Room" and then started small, ramping up with real-time monitoring. It was very time consuming.

The results of the test were analyzed and adjusted for a next round.

Lessons Learned

• You should begin tracking statistics as early as possible
• You should determine appropriate performance benchmarks
• You must be clear about who has responsibility for what.
• You must be clear about the resources needed
• You should integrate your testing needs into your implementation or upgrade plans
• Communication and planning are both critically important.

Benefits from performance testing included

• Identifying application and hardware needs
• Confidence that the system would work under loads
• Created shake out of the production environment itself
• And they had a successful freshman registration period and didn't get added to the "rock"

This is the counter for Firefox 3 downloads as of 1655 EST. According to this story on CNET, the download rate at one point 14,000 copies per minute or 233 per second.

This keynote presentation will discuss the current IT environment at NASA and the IT challenges that the agency faces as it moves into a new era of space exploration. The CIO from the Kennedy Space Center will discuss new strategic directions and supporting initiatives being implemented across the agency to enable future mission success.

The phone rings. The caller begins with the familiar, “I’ve been thinking...” and the rest of the conversation centers on how to pilot an emerging instructional technology. Faculty who are early adopters of technology are experimenters and risk-takers; they broaden the landscape of effective teaching and learning with technology. Yes, they push the envelope, but they also offer partnership for identifying what’s scalable and sustainable for broader use. Our panelists will share their campus perspectives on adopting emerging technologies from Web 2.0 to virtual worlds, their successes and challenges, and the partnerships they’ve formed.

This 56 minute podcast features the opening keynote address from the EDUCAUSE 2008 Southeast Regional Conference. The speech, "Information Technology Challenges at NASA," is by Michael J. Bolger, CIO at NASA.

This keynote presentation discusses the current IT environment at NASA and the IT challenges that the agency faces as it moves into a new era of space exploration. The CIO from the Kennedy Space Center talks about new strategic directions and supporting initiatives being implemented across the agency to enable future mission success.

This hour and thirteen minute podcast features a panel discussion from the EDUCAUSE 2008 Southeast Regional Conference. The participants of this general session, "Supporting Faculty Adoption of Emerging Technologies: Wanderlust or Creating a Campus Roadmap?," include:

• W. Gardner Campbell, Professor of English, University of Mary Washington
• Jean Ann Derco, Executive Director, Educational Technology, The University of Tennessee
• James Groom, Instructional Technology Specialist, University of Mary Washington
• Dolly J. Young, Full Professor of Spanish, The University of Tennessee
• Session moderator: Julie K. Little, Interim Director, ELI, EDUCAUSE

Faculty who are early adopters of technology are experimenters and risk-takers; they broaden the landscape of effective teaching and learning with technology. Yes, they push the envelope, but they also offer partnership for identifying what’s scalable and sustainable for broader use. Our panelist share their campus perspectives on adopting emerging technologies from Web 2.0 to virtual worlds, their successes and challenges, and the partnerships they’ve formed.

Dashboards help inform the end-user community of progress on major IT initiatives and also help the IT community keep focused on the status of less intensive projects. Dashboard interface uses can range from an individual campus-wide initiative dashboard to a one showing multiple projects occurring simultaneously. A dashboard not only can enhance a website's visual appeal, but it can also give project managers (and IT and other campus leaders) information at a glance that helps them understand the current status of the IT organization's priorities and its future direction.