Working Up

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

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The Parchment vs the Portfolio

January 19th, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Online education may one day make it, but for now, we have excellent online learning. You must, however, prove you learned something. Enter the portfolio. A parchment is another name for a diploma. We get a diploma from some education organization that says we spent time and money at that organization. Everyone […]

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Tags: Competence · Education · Learning · Portfolio

They Can Read It at Home

January 15th, 2015 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips One thing teachers today have to realize is that the learners can read it all at home at their leisure. The title of this post will haunt educators of all types. It has haunted college professors for decades. They can read it at home So why “lecture?” I remember the TV show […]

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Tags: Communication · Education · Knowledge · Learning

Kids do the Strangest Things—So Watch

December 29th, 2014 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips People with no experience in a situation do the unthinkable. Often, the unthinkable leads to the impossible, and we want to know about the impossible. Kids do things that are just, well, I struggle to describe them as they are out of the ordinary. Here are a few examples: My oldest son […]

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Tags: General Systems Thinking · Ideas · Knowledge · Learning

The Zero-th Step of Any Process

December 8th, 2014 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Before doing anything else—think. Yes, this is old advice, but it still works. Process, process, process. The world uses Agile processes now. (At least those people whose job it is to tell everyone else what their organization does tells the world that they are Agile. I tend to doubt that they actually […]

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Tags: Choose · General Systems Thinking · Learning · Management · Process

Finding the Question

October 13th, 2014 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Perhaps we should stop teaching kids to find the answers and switch to teaching them how to find the questions. I read much these days from older people complaining about how younger people just look up the answers on Google. These younger people don’t know anything; they don’t learn anything. Well, the […]

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Tags: Education · Internet · Knowledge · Learning

Tuition and Learning

September 29th, 2014 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips We often pay the tuition for learning, but neglect to learn anything. I have blogged about this before. (From January 2010) I suppose I will stop blogging about this when the practice stops. Sorry, I guess that means that every few years I will blog about it again. Is there any least […]

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Tags: Adapting · Learning

Udacity.com: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

July 24th, 2014 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips I take a Udacity.com online course and find good, bad, and ugly. I recently took an online course from udacity.com. As the post title suggests, I found… The Good: I was excited about the nanodegree program that udacity—one of the big players in MOOC—was about to offer. Companies were creating courses to […]

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Tags: Education · Learning · MOOC

The em dash and Learning

July 10th, 2014 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips I still learn new things. I still want to learn new things. I recently learned how to make the em dash and en dash characters in OS X with keyboard shortcuts. I no longer have to go to the “insert symbols” function to insert these special characters. One of the disappointing results […]

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Tags: Education · Learning · Writing

But I Had a Great Time

May 29th, 2014 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips Once again I delve into the question, but what was the objective? I find myself planning events more than previously. At least I find myself involved in planning events. And, as I have written before, I tend to ask some variation of, “What is the objective?” I have been involved with many […]

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Tags: Learning · Planning

Writing Doesn’t Scale

May 15th, 2014 · No Comments

by Dwayne Phillips There is something about attempting to write a longer piece that makes writing a sentence much more difficult. I’ll start with something that is probably obvious to everyone else in the world: Writing doesn’t scale. Explanation: People who can write a two-page piece, flop when they attempt to write a 20-page piece. […]

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Tags: Education · Learning · Writing