Stay tuned for details!

Stay tuned for details!

Stay tuned for details!

Reason #1--Succession Planning is primarily not about what is happening at the current moment--it is about being prepared for the future. In the same way that organizations spend vast amounts of time planning and reviewing budgets to ensure the organization has financial resources in the future, talent assessment and review processes are designed to prepare talent resources in the future. Some organizations are delaying or lowering the priority of succession planning right now...are any organizations lowering the priority of their financial planning processes? Reason #2--As we all know, it takes years of development through job experiences, learning from both success and mistakes on the job, coaches, and formal learning opportunities to prepare an individual for a senior leadership position. So if we slow or stop our succession planning in this economy because the 401(k) accounts of our leaders are currently in the tank, will we be ready as the stock market continues to grow, and the executives are suddenly ready to depart? Reason #3: Talent Review processes prepare both the employees and the company for organizational changes. Let me be clear that Talent Assessment and Talent Review processes are not designed for Reduction in Force actions that sometimes must occur in a business. However, whenever these changes occur, including the organizational chart shuffle process that occurs after a layoff or as a merger takes place (or when a company grows!!!), the organization that regularly assesses, reviews and develops their talent will be prepared to make the best possible decisions for any type of organizational restructure strategy.

This is a guest post from James Heywood at Off2Class. Take it away James… Teaching phrasal verbs is an inevitable step as students gain proficiency and aim for a more natural speaking style. Native speakers use phrasal verbs frequently and it is likely that your students will have already ask ... The post How to Teach Phrasal Verbs by James Heywood appeared first on Teaching ESL Online.

Hello! I am Karen Widmer, the Program Design TIG co-chair and a doctoral student at Claremont Graduate University. In 2014 the PD-TIG was officially approved for business and we have a full docket of presenters lined up for the 2015 AEA conference. We continue to be surprised at the many roles evaluators take at the design stage of a program and we’d like to share some of the themes that will be featured in Chicago. Lesson Learned: In the design stage of the program… Evaluation questions can serve as a source of brainstorming. They trigger new ways to look at program aims. When measures are laid out from the beginning, data collection can be more easily integrated into the daily work of the program. More careful identification of participant characteristics at the outset can jumpstart your efforts to locate an appropriate comparison group. A logic model is often welcomed by program stakeholders. Graphic depiction of the logical relationships between program elements gets everyone on the same page and equips them to anticipate strengths, weaknesses, gaps, and unintended consequences of program activities. Being an evaluator at the design stage can be a mixed bag. Designers may reckon that the time for evaluation should be farther off and see your questions as push-back to their vision. Outside evaluators may then criticize your later participation in evaluating the program, claiming that you no longer have an unbiased perspective. These concerns are legitimate and we look forward to discussing them at the conference.  Hot Tip: A broad range of programs are suited for a priori Programs undergoing development will need ongoing formative evaluation. Programs that deliver a product will need summative criteria for judging their value. For programs joining a consortium (where several programs share common purpose and maybe funding), evaluative thinking can assist with the protocol for effective reporting across consortium members. Cool Trick: Evaluation can be developed as part of the program to ensure: Maximum utility—intended users can tell you in advance which information will be useful. Maximum feasibility—available resources can be budgeted in advance. Maximum propriety—the welfare of those affected can be given priority when decisions must be made about the program. Maximum accuracy—pre-planning evaluation methods increases their dependability, helping to narrow alternate explanations. By participating in program design activities, evaluators have the luxury of strengthening a program before it is launched. This is avant garde work, so our TIG has its work cut out to develop the skills and protocol for doing the job well. Rad Resource: Join us at the PD-TIG sessions at the 2015 AEA Conference! Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org . aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.  

I’m a senior developer in the Secure Communications team in DWP. Phil Mawson, Senior Developer, DWP When I started my career back in the 1980s, developers were often stuck in a room coding all day long, only interacting with other IT managers and developers. Communication skills were definitely not a requirement of the job! But that’s all changed. Developers are now an important part of a wider project team. We see and hear users’ stories, we work with business analysts, we know the big picture, we voice our opinions and importantly, we collaborate. Giving developers a voice We didn’t have to revolt for this change to happen - it’s all to do with the emergence of agile. This gave developers a true voice and a place within a project team. People realised that developers have good ideas and if you ask them their opinion on requirements and give them context then they can not only contribute, but they can do their job a lot better. Since 2006 I’ve only ever worked in agile environments, mostly in the private sector. I joined the DWP Secure Communications team in 2014 and, as well as relishing the chance to work in Leeds instead of London, the opportunity of using my experience to build a development environment and the capability to develop new digital services was too good to miss. As soon as I started I was given every opportunity to share my experiences, and to help find like-minded people who shared my passion for agile development to persuade them to join the team. What I didn’t expect was the foundations that had already been put in place by the business. The Digital Academy was in full swing, helping the business community to adopt an agile way of working, and from what I have seen so far achieving this with flying colours. Fast forward to now. The Leeds hub is buzzing: story cards adorn every inch of free wall space and an array of noises from cuddly and plastic toys announce stand-ups every morning. Developers are right in the thick of the action, projects are progressing and services are being built to meet users' needs. Working with story cards Developing the Secure Communications service All this leads me nicely onto the day job. In Secure Communications, we’re developing a service that lets verified third parties securely send DWP information, or receive information from us. From a developer’s point of view it’s a brilliant project to work on as it involves building a system that hides all its complexities from the user and seamlessly does its thing in the background. The prototype we’re building allows GPs to securely submit patient medical report forms online, instead of by post. This is more efficient for GPs and also means terminally-ill patients get their Personal Independence Payment (PIP) faster. Our main challenge is communicating with NHS systems to make sure we can authenticate the GPs who are sending us the forms. In future we want to adapt and roll the solution out to other departments or sectors, so our development work is rooted in making sure what we’re doing is reusable and scalable. We also need to make sure we can deploy software quickly and efficiently. To meet all these technical challenges, we’re using the very latest development tools. Secure Communications digital service Amongst all this, the days - and the sprints - go by so quickly. Processes are always iterating, new people are coming into the team and we’re making progress. Our project is on track, we’re engaging with our sponsors and users and with their help we’re heading in the right direction. We’re about to go into beta. Building an end-to-end prototype, testing it with GPs and preparing to run it will provide yet more technical challenges. But it’s a really exciting place to be, and as a developer, it’s all a far cry from the days of being distant and separate from everything going on in a project.

Print vs. digital textbooks and the challenge of meeting student needsAll schools of higher education struggle to keep their costs of attendance as competitive and reasonable as possible. One of the longest, most debated arguments on campus amongst learners and educators is the cost of required textbooks. The Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA), a U.S. federal law, contains a textbook provision that requires publishers and…

With my ALA Editions "Rethinking Digital Literacy" co-conspirators (AKA learners) currently exploring the broad question of "who owns the learning" in digital environments, I saw at least one obvious answer while co-hosting and participating in a tweet chat about hyperlinked learning last night: anyone willing to be a collaborator/co-conspirator in the learning process owns the learning. The question about ownership of learning—engagingly examined by Alan November in a book and a TEDx talk we’re exploring in Rethinking —is important and double-edged for any trainer-teacher-learner working within a digital environment. It makes us think about who retains (or should retain) access to all our discussions, learning objects, and other tangible aspects of the online-learning process that are usually lost to us once a course formally concludes and the course learning management system is closed to learners. The question also makes us think about who has responsibility for nurturing and sustaining the (lifelong) learning process that is an essential component to fostering digital literacy. With my tweet-chat colleagues in the Educational Technology & Media massive open online course (#etmooc) community, the answer to both facets of the question is obvious and openly accessible. All of us involved in that particular community of learning retain (and openly share) access to the artifacts produced through our learning—e.g., through blog postings that occasionally connect to and interact with blog posts from other members of the community; through archived recordings of our interactions during  the course and those that continue to take place in Google Hangouts and any other accessible online tool we can find and explore as part of our continuing learning efforts on the topic of educational technology and media; and through tweets and the Storify learning objects we produce. More importantly, we shape those discussions and artifacts collaboratively and through our own initiative—this is learner-centric, learner-driven learning at a very high and productive level. We have learned to take the responsibility for asking what we can do rather than relying solely on others to facilitate our learning process. For the tweet chat last night, a couple of us prepared the script with questions to be used during the tweet chat. We facilitated the session. I then edited and posted the Storify transcript of the event so other members of the community could be part of the effort to use and disseminate that resource. The result is that while learning, we also made—and are continuing to make—it possible for others who want to learn more about hyperlinked learning to do so while also seeing how a self-directed community of learning operates. Owning the learning at this level always seems to produce results far beyond anything we anticipate. The hyperlinked-learning tweet chat, for example, produced numerous examples of hyperlinked learning in action. There was the magnificent "Tutor/Mentor Learning Map," with more than 2,000 hyperlinks to other resources, prepared and shared by #etmooc community member Daniel Bassill. There were exchanges about tech tools some community members had not yet tried. There were informal attempts to define hyperlinked learning, including Daniel’s suggestion that it "is like island-hopping in a huge ocean of knowledge. You can go from place to place in any direction"; Shuana Niessen’s suggestion that it’s "non linear responsive learning"; and my own observation (based on our source material from Michael Stephens) that it’s "what we did/do in #etmooc: connecting, exploring, playing, collaborating, learning experientially" and what I’m fostering among my Rethinking Digital Literacy co-conspirators. What made the session particularly interesting was how often the discussion about hyperlinked learning actually became an example of hyperlinked learning. There was the moment, for example, when we had a unexpected appearance from Alec Couros, who with his own original group of co-conspirators designed and facilitated that MOOC that inspired us to assume shared ownership (without in any way excluding Alec) of the #etmooc learning community. And there were plenty of other moments when learning by hyperlink drew in new colleagues as well as a few we hadn’t seen in quite a while. Nothing could speak more viscerally and meaningfully to the topic of hyperlinked learning than a community so completely hyperlinked that interactions continue to grow rhizomatically—a theme we explored during the formal course and continue to explore and nurture with every new action we take. Rereading the Storify transcript a few times led to additional reflection—and learning—for me throughout the day today as I continued to produce this article. I repeatedly was struck by how the act of collaboratively shaping our learning experiences means that we hone other digital-literacy skills at the same time: being able to work within ever-changing online environments; being willing to contribute to our own learning and to the growth of our learning communities; and being able to capture discussions, learning objects, and other aspects of the learning process so they remain accessible rather than locked away in something akin to the storage crate housing the Lost Ark of the Covenant at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. As I return to my Rethinking Digital Literacy co-conspirators—those learners who are so creatively and effectively crafting their own learning experiences—I look with admiration at the ways they are, in Week 3 of our four-week course, continuing to expand the ways they interact across as many digital platforms as possible. They—we—will leave distinct traces, if not much larger artifacts, of our time and collaborative learning efforts. It’s what was done in #etmooc; it’s what some of us have done in the Open and Connected Learning MOOC (#oclmooc) and the Connected Courses MOOC (#ccourses); and it’s what is creating the possibility that what we create during our four formal weeks of shared learning will remain accessible to current learning community members as well as to others who might want to learn from what we are accomplishing together. In these dynamic, digitally-literate learning communities driven by hyperlinked learning, connected learning, connectivist-learning precepts, we are all co-conspirators. And we all own the learning, in every possible sense.  N.B.: This is the fourth in a series of reflections inspired by our ALA Editions "Rethinking Digital Literacy" course.

How to navigate the world of citation metricsSince 2009, the number of journal research papers has increased at an average of 4% per year.1 Within this growing (and rapidly changing) research environment, citation metrics continue (rightly or wrongly) to be used to benchmark the performance of journals, institutions, and even individual academics. The core principle of citation metrics is the assumption that…

Improving the reader experience with EPUB 3We’re pleased to announce that EPUB 3 is Wiley’s standard for e-books in reflowable format as of February 1, 2014. Wiley delivers e-books in the EPUB 3 format to all of its distribution partners and retail accounts, including Amazon and Apple iBooks, and is among the first publishers to distribute all of its professional and…

Scientific integrityAre scholarly publications any more reliable or trustworthy than the general press? Does the publishing process build in sufficient checks and balances or is it remarkably flawed? Reports of fraudulent or retracted articles from the body of scholarly literature might suggest a crisis in scholarly publishing. There have been a number of sting operations to…

Alltrials: sign up to make clinical trials countIt’s International Clinical Trials day and it’s time all clinical trial results are reported. Results from around half of clinical trials have never been published. Information on what was done and what was found in these trials could be lost forever to doctors and researchers, leading to bad treatment decisions, missed opportunities for good medicine,…

Using video abstracts to promote readershipBefore Google, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, there was the printed word.  Most of us learned new information, shared our ideas, promoted our research, and generally connected though a learning community by reading, writing, and publishing papers through established journals.  A colleague recently told me that when she was writing what became a well-known article in…

How to judge the news value of your paperJournalists at all levels of the media, from the local weekly newspaper to 24 hour rolling television news, share the common traits of being perennially understaffed and under pressure to find stories under tight deadlines. So how do you grab their attention? Here are ten things to consider when evaluating your paper for publicity: Relevance…

Is crowdfunding making science sexy? An interview with Experiment's Denny LuanWe recently spoke to Denny Luan, co-founder of Experiment about crowdfunding for research and the future.  Curiosity has led Denny down some very different paths, involving race cars, anthrax research, and microfinance. He has degrees from the University of Washington in biochemistry and economics, where he spent time making circuits out of bacteria. Q. When, how and…

A Day in the Life of LIS graduate student Brandon Thomas LockeOur "Day in the life" series featuring early career researchers continues with Brandon Locke, an MLIS student at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He holds an MA in History from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and is interested in Digital Humanities, scholarly communication, and data curation. Q.…

Visual capabilities, information visualization concepts, and data repositoriesI recently attended a talk by Anselm Spoerri where he outlined some basic principles of information visualization. Spoerri is a professor in the School of Communication at Rutgers University. His research and teaching focus is on Information Visualization, Information Retrieval & Knowledge Management, Multimedia Interfaces & Retrieval, and Computer Vision.  The goal of Spoerri’s work…

Seven things to consider when preparing your book proposalLike many things, a good book starts with a great idea, but how do you develop that idea so that a publisher might be interested in working with you? Start by creating an initial proposal outlining your idea and why you think it would make a good publishing project. When submitting a proposal to a…

#PeerReview-now trending on a newsfeed near youIt’s hard to match the buzzworthiness of peer review. Over the past several months alone, a number of conferences and workshops have tackled the topic, spawning lively debates in the Twittersphere and on blogs well after the events themselves concluded (overviews of Peer Review Watch’s Is Peer Review Broken? and BioMed Central’s Editors’ Conference are…

His life is Open Access and Open Data: meet Mark Thorley of RCUKQ: First of all Mark, thanks for taking the time to talk to us.  Can you tell us what your role at RCUK involves? A: I’m part of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), one of the 7 Research Councils that make up Research Councils UK (RCUK). My remit includes scholarly communications - of which the…

Meet @informationista: a Q&A with librarian Elaine AlligoodElaine Alligood is the Chief, Library Service for the Boston VA Healthcare System’s three campuses and is the 2013 recipient of the Vagainas Librarian of the year award.  Q. Can you please explain your current role and how it came about? A. It’s an ironic tale for sure! In March of 2011 I worked at VA Boston…

How to promote your work using ‘off-page’ SEO (Search Engine Optimization)An earlier post on this topic ‘Search Engine Optimization and your journal article: do you want the bad news first?’ focused on tips to make your journal article optimized for search engines. Today’s post looks beyond the journal article structure and takes a closer look at ‘off-page’ SEO strategies. SEO, SEO, SEO. It seems like all…

From Entomologist to Agricultural Librarian-Onan MulumbaBelow is the first in a regular series of stories we plan to feature from the new Research4Life publication "Unsung Heroes, Stories from the Library".  As an entomologist training Ugandan beekeepers how to better produce, process and market honey on the domestic and international markets, Onan Mulumba faced many challenges posed by the lack of up-to-date, evidence-based scientific…