Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Month: October 2010

  • Smart Groups

    We started in a conversation about an interesting grant seeking to help students from low-income families through OpenCourseWare and providing them better information. An Open Source LMS != open coureseware. OSLMS is running students through online classes. OCW is providing the content so anyone can download and use it. The better information section sounded to…

  • Failure to Improve Online Retention

    A former coworker, Cat Finnegan, worked on retention of online students. Recent articles about online students having higher drop out rates than face-to-face caught my eye. Especially the rationales. The recent articles all are about the work done at KSU (whose online class system we host, well one of them: Blackboard) which will be published…

  • How To Tell When Your Boss Is Lying

    I found this article in The Economist reporting on a study regarding lies on conference calls interesting. David Larcker and Anastasia Zakolyukina of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business analysed the transcripts of nearly 30,000 conference calls by American chief executives and chief financial officers between 2003 and 2007. They noted each boss’s choice of words,…

  • Missing Shutdowns

    A Weblogic managed node for a development cluster failed to shutdown when our shutdown script requested. The last managed node to shutdown becomes the JMS node and triggers a rewrite of the config.xml. We have scripts in place to check for the config.xml changing and alert us. Since I am the on call this week,…

  • Empathic Civilization

    It talks about mirror neurons as the key to why we feel empathy. This empathy is the foundation for why we do things for others. Nice thoughts.

  • Where Good Ideas Come From

    Found this interesting as it means the social interactions we make with others, talking about our ideas, is the mechanism by which we develop ideas. We have to spend time around others working in tangential areas to drive good ideas. “Chance favors the connected mind.”

  • TED Talk: Mike Rowe celebrates dirty jobs

    Michael Kopp posted about “If someone is trying to make you stay in your job – leave“. There are lots of other quotes the site to where he pulled the quote with the theme of a job must provide value is the sense of being a motivator through the challenges it provides and the growth…