Working Up

Working Up in Project Management, Systems Engineering, Technology, and Writing

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College Professors Beware—MOOCs are not College

October 13th, 2016 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips If you are a successful college professor, and someone asks you to turn your course into a MOOC, proceed with great care. These things are not the same. I am currently taking a series of online courses or MOOCs (Massive Open Online Course or is it Massive Online Open Course or is […]

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Tags: Education · Learning · MOOC

Expanding the AI Problem Set

September 5th, 2016 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips First you work on a small problem set. Once you learn from that, you expand the problem set. Google recently started hiring speakers with accents to help train its speech recognition software systems. Why didn’t they do this sooner? Why did they only use middle-America, white-bread Americans, or some other Johnny Carson, […]

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Tags: Adapting · General Systems Thinking · Learning · Problems · Process

MOOCs and Bad Presentations

August 15th, 2016 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Why do online educators put bad presentations in their courses? I am taking yet another online course. My wish is to show potential employers that despite my advanced age I am not brain dead yet and still actively learning. My current online course—no names mentioned to protect the guilty—brings with it something […]

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Tags: Education · Learning · MOOC

YAC – Yet Another Certification

July 7th, 2016 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips I receive yet another certification. I just passed yet another exam and received yet another certification. Contrary to advertisements, the exam was full of trick questions and didn’t test knowledge of the subject matter. Nevertheless, that is the certification industry, and it is a big $$$ indu$try. I find it a shame […]

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Tags: Certification · Competence · Education · Learning

They are My Customer, but not My Teacher

June 2nd, 2016 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips My customer pays me for a product or a service. I provide it. I do not, however, have to allow my customer to be my teacher. My customer is my customer. They pay me for a product or a service, and I provide that. However, I don’t have to: act like they […]

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Tags: Choose · Customer · Learning

Deep Learning: Today’s Hot New Programming Language

May 12th, 2016 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips New deep learning tools have turned a technology field into a general-purpose programming language. I worked with neural networks 25 years ago (yes, I am that old). Recently, big, big neural networks have returned to favor as deep learning. Clever techniques have reduced this to a programming language instead of an area […]

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Tags: Knowledge · Learning · Technology

How do You do Your Job?

February 8th, 2016 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips It can be most helpful to many if you would write what you do to accomplish your job. How do you do your job? Can you answer that question? Most people I have met cannot. I find that quite frustrating. Part of my job is to describe to possible customers how my […]

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Tags: Communication · Knowledge · Learning

CompTIA Security+

December 7th, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Over the weekend, I passed the test for CompTIA Security+ certification. It was probably the worst test I have taken since my junior year of college (back when we scratched answers on cave walls with colored rocks). Anyways, I memorized a bunch of stuff and passed a test. Perhaps this will come […]

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Tags: Computing · Education · Learning · Security

Discovery of the Century

November 12th, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips I find a long-lost cartoon. It is wonderful. Shown below is a cartoon that I saw pinned to the wall in the mid-1980s while I was in grad school (yes, I am that old). The thought of the cartoon has stayed with since. We don’t know what will happen with an idea […]

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Tags: Learning

ITIL Foundation Certification

October 29th, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips I earn a ITIL Foundation-level certification. For the past six or eight years I have heard of ITIL  certification. I didn’t pay much attention to it as I wasn’t an Enterprise IT person and did see a way that I could qualify for it. A recent look at it changed my mind. […]

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Tags: Change · Computing · Education · Employment · Knowledge · Learning