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Fairfax County School Board Adopts FY 2011 Approved Budget - The Fairfax County School Board has adopted the Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) FY 2011 approved budget of $2.2 billion, which establishes new fees for athletic participation and for Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) tests; eliminates more than 200 positions, nearly half of which are from central office support; freezes all employee salaries for the second consecutive year; and creates a three-year priority schools pilot program that designates 30 schools to receive special staff support and financial support to help improve student achievement. [FCPS News Releases]

This blog post is for week 5 of RIT’s Human Communication course.

I found this comic online a few days ago and thought I’d share it:

Being in a Human Communication class, this made perfect sense to put on my blog (even though I only found it through StumbleUpon). As you can probably tell, it plays off of the connectedness that many people feel must be present in order to rationally communicate with others. Through the use of social media sites and technology, we have become more “connected” with each other on a certain level that hasn’t been seen in the past. The depth of the interactions we have online, however, seems to be quite different. Many people on Facebook, Twitter, etc. share the type of information shown in the comic and may feel they have an intimate bond with others they talk to online. Does this really mean we’re great friends with those people though? Sharing these types of extraneous physical ideas is a much different beast than sharing actual personal feelings, which is viewed more as what people did in the past. Is there a paradigm shift happening here in the way and manners people communicate? It certainly is happening as far as platform – phone, email, letters, etc. – is concerned.

This blog post is for week 4 of RIT’s Human Communication course.

As I have found out even more extensively these past couple weeks, communication in workplace environments is just as important as with those you live with. I recently started working in a customer-service IT environment, where our team receives tickets about computer and network problems that clients are experiencing. Communication is one of the most important things to be able to do (after fixing computers), since the tickets that we receive have already gone through a third party. Once we receive them, an analysis and break-down of the contents must be done in order to procure any questions or comments which we may have about the user’s problem(s). After that, a prompt response to the client would be in order, to see if we would be able to help over the phone, which would require clear verbal communication in order for the person on the other end of the line to understand the technical support person.

Communication between co-workers and clients is very different in some of these respects. When talking to the user with the computer problems, the communication (most likely) has to be very formal and easy to follow, as one may be issuing directions over the phone for the other person. However, when communicating with co-workers you can be relaxed, say things on your mind, and in general be more laid-back than with the person you’re helping. It’s important to customer service representatives to be able to differentiate between these two times, and make the right decisions for the language to use in the situation. Delays and hiccups in this process can create strain and stress, and ultimately costs the organization money.

Reference:

This is a re-posting of an email a colleague of mine sent, expressing his dismay over the new licensing scheme Oracle seems to have adopted for the Sun Ray product line:

If this blog post is correct and I'm reading it correctly:

http://blogs.oracle.com/mapledesk/2010/04/how_do_i_license_thee.html