Group items tagged

very interesting article on IBM's decision to cut some workers' pay by 10% while they are engaged in a catch-up learning program 1 day a week for six months. Different speculation on why IBM chose to couple pay cut with +performance requirements. From Fall 2014.

Interesting article in the NYT by Taffy Brodesser-Akner from Dec. 28, 2013 about the life coach, Martha Beck, who has built a multimillion-dollar business on helping executives, and others, find their passion and what they want to do with their lives. Her biggest money maker is her certification process for her method of life coaching. She trains others and they pay for the courses, pay for the certification, pay to have her seal on their websites.

"in this digital age we have sacrificed our privacy in order to access all manner of free stuff on the web. It's a movement that most of us have come to accept. Or have we? I'll borrow a quote I read on MetaFilter recently: 'If you're not paying for it; you are the product'. I'm not sure how many people are fully aware of this sentiment yet or whether they even care. But the next time you're browsing the web or enjoying a video on YouTube, remember that Google is watching your every move; because that's the price you pay."

Article by Kerry Hannon, Forbes, 1.25.13 This author asserts that older workers will become more valued by employers even though they aren't making special efforts to hire or retain them now and do not want to pay for the cost of training/retraining them. These trends suggest that taking charge of one's own learning with a PLP, PLN, etc. and taking advantage of all the free opportunities will be valuable skills to have. This author only looks to community colleges for retraining and does not reference any of the online options that we know about from the work on the directory. Should we draft a comment back to Kerry Hannon on this website? "1. Who is going to pay for that training? Most labor market experts I have interviewed say the government and private employers need to ramp up more training programs for older workers and create workplaces that make it easier for them to do their jobs. Employers don't want to spend for it. They've already cut to the bone to stay competitive globally in recent years and this kind of spending is a tough sell. Conceivably, as I discussed as a panel member at a recent Federal Reserve Workforce Development conference, one way to provide the needed training is through the community college system. The coursework could be offered at an affordable cost for the worker. Depending on who foots the bill, employers or employeees could receive tax incentives to ease the tuition bill. (Please continue to next page.) "

Video by Clay Johnson on import of health information diet, big think website. April 24, 2013. Rescuetime.com--measures your intake of info on computer--makes you a more conscious consumer, how much time spending on email, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Loves samebox.com--for pay subscription service--advanced spam filter, only puts important messages before you, emails you a digest at the end of every day of everything else Trying to live an ad free lifestyle--just as expensive as paying for content. ex--Domino's pizza commercial convinces you to buy pizza instead of making dinner. Use ad block on firefox and chrome to reduce exposure to ads. Cut cable to stop exposure to TV advertisements--"makes for weird bar conversations sometimes"

Yammer site with features, mobile use, admin, and activation info. Trial is free, then you have to pay to use along with paying for office integration.

Great article on pay gaps between men and women in same positions but with slightly different levels of experience, college attainment--men except for one earned more, sometimes much more.

White paper by Shawn Callahan, Mark Schenk, and Nancy White, April 21, 2008 on Building a collaborative workplace "THE ROLE OF LEADERSHIP Leadership is a keystone for establishing supportive collaboration cultures, especially in teams and communities. This is based on how leaders mainly embed their beliefs, values and assumptions in the fabric of their organisation. There are six main behaviours that leaders display that mould the organisation's culture.[3] What leaders pay attention to, measure, and control on a regular basis-are they paying attention to collaborative strategies and behaviours from team, community and network perspectives? How leaders react to critical incidents and organisational crises-are they sacrificing long-term goals for short-term fixes which sabotage collaboration? Does fear of connecting to the larger network keep them from tapping into it? How leaders allocate resources-are they investing in the collaboration capability? Is it attentive to all three types of collaboration? How leaders express their identity through deliberate role modelling, teaching, and coaching-as our leaders collaborate, so do we! How leaders allocate rewards and status-are your leaders rewarding individual or collaborative behaviours? Or both? How leaders recruit, select, promote, and excommunicate-are collaborative talents sought and nurtured?"

Interesting article on free courses vs paid courses, and how charging for specific skill courses and rebroadcasts makes money and is becoming more prevalent.

paid vs free courses: online training business is attracting users and investors

Explores value of Pinterest for business, Donston-Miller, March 6, 2012. Pinterest users are heavily women and younger (ages 25-44) Assessment: "Companies are finding themselves challenged to effectively marshal their externally facing social networking efforts, and most are likely focusing on Facebook and Twitter. So, with resources at a premium, should your company be paying attention to upstart social network Pinterest right now? The short answer is yes." Pinterest experiencing huge growth and now drives more traffic to Real Simple website than Facebook does. Caveat: Pinterest user boards overwhelmingly focus on food, fashion, home decor, and hobbies, things that are visual and usually visually appealing. "Pinterest is best used to inspire or remind... looking at capitalizing on Pinterest as a gift registry ...even if your company doesn't make or promote something highly visual ...it probably has something that can be visualized and put into context... data ...house infographics--things like data sets, visualization of data.... even with something like a technology company, there are always ways to visualize information in an engaging way."

Blog post by Jeff Cobb, February 2010, Tagoras site, on pricing elearning. Explains price, cost, margin, value relationship. Excerpt: "What then are typical price points for e-learning in the association market? I am tempted not to cite any because the only other price points that should matter to an organization are potentially those of competitors. (And as Apple, for example, has demonstrated so well, even competitor pricing should be given only so much weight.) Additionally, our research suggests that only 20 percent of associations have any sort of formal process for setting price - which makes me wonder how much thought is being put into value, margins, and volume. Still, it can be helpful to have some sort of benchmark, however, general, against which to gauge your organization's pricing. We go into much more detail about pricing in our Association E-learning: State of the Sector report, but the average price per e-learning content hour in the association sector - based on our survey of nearly 500 organizations - is $56.79. Per credit hour the average is $73.97. So, for example, based on these figures, the average fee for a 90-minute Webinar that offers CE credit would be around $110. Conclusion I began this discussion by focusing on value, and it seems important to note as I conclude it that the price point is not only dependent upon perceived value, it helps drive perceived value. Part of what gives a Mercedes or a Louis Vuitton handbag its sheen of value is the high price point associated with each. To a certain extent, of course, the price is driven by underlying cost. But it is also true that these companies simply have the audacity - the organizational self-esteem, you might argue - to set a premium price. And people gladly pay it. Few associations, I find, are willing to take such an approach with pricing their e-learning, and perhaps few would succeed if they did. But my suspicion is that most organizations are pricing at a lower l

interesting article in NYT on February 24, 2013 on how adults long out of high school in some cases cobbled together learning experiences--formal academic work, open courseware, and experiential--to receive college degrees from Thomas Edison in New Jersey without ever having arrived on campus or borrowed money to pay for their degrees

Post in WP discussion forum on how unhelpful so-called help discussion forums really are. Excerpt: "I signed up for WP AT Godaddy,com and have the same question, so I have to come here and do whatever I can understand of what i'm told. my universal experience with forums like this - here at WP and at the forums which serve as the ONLY assistance for non-paying users of third party design businesses -is that genuinely inexperienced people are not-so-subtly encourage to self-select out. people who need help make it very clear that they are really inexperienced, beg for step-by-step directions and get responses they cannot decipher or use. And if they have the temerity to say so, well, here's the first forum i clicked under this topic: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/email-set-up-on-wordpress-site?replies=3 the forum was simply shut down. lol? I don't understand why experienced users who know how to do things bother to make such replies. Is there some club somewhere where such things are on display for the amusement of our betters? Because unintentionally or not, it seems gratuitously mean. "

Rachel Sklar is holding networking events for women who work in the tech industry. She is about to make it a business, where women pay to be connected with other women like them. Interesting business design.

Women to women networking in a specific industry: tech

video (18 minutes) by Clay Johnson, February 2012, hyping his book The Information Diet. Goes to food analogies again and again--pizza tastes better than broccoli--and abundance of entertainment, affirmation, and fear is secret pact between customer and media producers online. What is it that people want? What we tell them through our clicks and searches is that we want to be right acc: to Johnson. AP story--poll economic worries pose new snag for Obama. On Fox news, it says that Obama has big problem with white women. They changed headline and reduced story by 600 words, taking out everything positive about his work. They know that readers will read something negative about president. "Opinion tastes better than news." How AOL should make its editorial decisions--they want to spend no more than $84 on a piece of content. How they decide: traffic potential (using SEO to find out what people are searching for--no one is searching for Pentagon Papers or broccoli); bottom of list is editorial integrity because it is market inefficiency. Believes that we are living in land of info abundance where we want to be affirmed, not told the truth. SEOs complete the inquiry to present tabloid types of info that attract us and distract us and misinform us. Our clicks lead to poor information diets, a disease. Make a whole news movement, a slow news movement, demand that media change. We as readers need to upgrade. information over-consumption, not overload enable infoveganism--eat food, not too much, real food at bottom of food chain. 2. Use source material--show your work. 3. Let me pay you for ad free experience. 4. Content is not a commodity (for news producers)

Blog by Annie Murphy Paul, June 20, 2013, PBS Next Avenue on 8 things that can make you smarter. "4. Attention You've probably heard about the "marshmallow test," a famous experiment conducted by psychologist Walter Mischel in the late 1960s. He found that children who could resist eating a marshmallow in return for the promise of two marshmallows later on did better in school and in their careers. Well, there's a new marshmallow test that we face every day: the ability to resist the urge to check email, respond to a text or see what's happening on Facebook or Twitter. We've all heard that because "digital natives" grew up multitasking they excel at it, but in fact, we now know there are information-processing bottlenecks in everybody's brain that prevent us from paying attention to two things at the same time. Focused attention is an important internal situation that we must cultivate in order to fully express our intelligence." Another excerpt: "A common example: The ready availability of technology has convinced many people that they don't need to learn facts anymore, because they can always "just Google it." In fact, research from cognitive science shows that the so-called "21st-century skills" that we're always hearing about - critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration, creativity - can't emerge in a vacuum. They must develop in the context of a rich base of knowledge that is stored on the original hard drive, one's own brain. For tech to make us smarter, we need to know when to put it away.

Blog by Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner with the letter Jennifer Lawrence wrote about "not being nice anymore about gender pay inequality in Hollywood"

Description of a course offered by the Hague University of Applied Sciences, Fall 2012. Nancy White is one of the faculty. "The intersection of technology and social processes has changed what it means to "be together." No longer confined to an engineering team, a company, a market segment or country, we have the opportunity to tap into different groups of people using online tools and processes. While we initially recognized this as "online communities," the ubiquity and diversity of technology and access has widened our possibilities. When we want to "organize our passion" into something, we have interesting choices. It is time to think about a more diverse ecosystem of interaction possibilities which embrace things such as different group configurations, online + offline, short and long term interactions, etc. In this course we will consider the range of options that can be utilized in the design, testing, marketing and use of engineering products. In this course, we'll also begin to pay attention to "The Four i's of Innovation." You'll be learning a lot about these in the coming courses, but consider this a preview. The first i is the itch; "a hunch" that there is something going on. This inclination can indicate the sublime starting point for change or an innovation The second i is insight; the research framework to base the fundamentals of the innovation on The i for idea; the experimenting towards potential solutions ("what if"- approach) The final i is for impact; the realization of the changes and innovations."

Heidi Hartmann writes about pay gap that is compounded when a woman is hired at a lower salary based on her previous salary that was most certainly lower than her male counterpart.

Article on Leaning into Discomfort: Social Sector Leadership inthe 21st Century, NPQ (Nonprofit Quarterly), May 7, 2012 Excerpt from interview with Nancy Northup, Center for Reproductive Rights: ""In fact, leaning into discomfort, I think, is critical, to make sure that what we are doing-both externally, as we work to establish reproductive rights around the world, and internally, at the organization level-is bold enough. The organization had better be feeling discomfort if it's leaning into new strategies and ways of working. "You have always to ask, Am I pushing for the change that's really needed? On all of those levels, you have to continually refresh and check and make sure that you're getting the most power for the mission by being as uncomfortable as possible. Because change is hard, and the reason why you have to look at all those different levels-yourself, your organization, and then the world-is that if you're not willing to hold the tension of change as an organization, how can you begin to understand what you have to risk and what others have to risk to make change happen in the world?"" Excerpt from interview with Ai-jen Poo, National Domestic Workers Alliance: As Poo observed, "Domestic workers work in isolated workplaces. They don't have any job security whatsoever, and there are no labor standards or protections, except-for now-in New York, because of us. But really, there's nothing mediating the relationship between a worker and an employer-your workplace is somebody else's so-called castle. It already takes a lot of courage to assert your rights and dignity, and to make sure that you get paid on time, and to make sure that you can get home on time to your own children. And all of these challenges that are just day-to-day challenges of living in that environment already demonstrate a tremendous amount of day-to-day courage." Excerpt from interview with George Goehl, National People's Action �