Lifting the spirit - John Williams

There are artists that create something that some collectors are welling spend millians on that I sneer upon, "I can do that in my sleep".  Their art has not intrinic values, the piece worth a lot simply some rich guy can pay for it.   Those arts can hang on a poor family's wall and most people passing by will barely give it stare.

But there are some art, like the music by the giants, Beethovan, Prokoviev, Chovoskey, and lately, John Williams, a few seconds into their master pieces, I, and most everyone will be shocked, mesmerized, attracted and emersed in the music.  The talents were so extraordinary that the composer does not need introduction, the art speaks for itself.

On the way home today, 57F and gloomy.  I took the top of the Starbuck off, enjoy the refreshing sea brease, even though it is a bit chilly.  I turned on William's Indiana Jones theme, my spirit is instantly lifted, filled with joy, hope, courage and longing for the future and unknow.

That is art, that is masterpiece!  That you HAVE to admire.   

Things that I appreciate about myself

Start to improve my presentation skills and strategy.  This is one of the TED video that I reviewed
Thru the lens of "appreciation about myself", it is a powerful way of thinking, similar to "out of oneself" experience, can make one very clear on who we are and where should we go from here.

"Am I my best friend?"
"Am I helping myself to be successful?"
"Does Eric Tao doing his best to help me happy?"

I appreciate Eric because he is always learning, always trying to make his life and others better.  He try to cheer everyone up even in the direst situations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-xWh54HYS4

Always wanting more - after 3 hours tennis at PG

Played three hours of Tennis.  Moderately happy but not contented as before. Only a few weeks ago, I was estatic that I can play tennis again after shoulder and knee injury stopped me for over 18 months. Just hitting a few fast ball was enough to lift my spirit.  But after a few weeks of playing, I felt bored already.  People met in Meetup.com was nice and pleasent but they can hardly play.   It is obvious that few of them formally learn the game.  I have to tune down my game quite a bit so not to embarress anyone.   But it bored me, even I appreciate the exercise and social contact. 

I miss my grad student days and my days playing at Cupertino.  Over there, my winning was never assured so each game become more meaningful.  Sigh, can't have everything.

CALMAT MBA / CSIT degree student collaboration guidelines

Collaboration is one of the key learning in master degrees in CALMAT. So what do students in these programs think should be a guidelines for collaboration and team work? Read on:

Sophie, mirhuang, judy, Edmond Low, Belinda Lo

GUIDELINES FOR STUDENT PROFESSIONAL TEAM BEHAVIOR
IN THE CALIFORNIA UNIVERSITY OF MANAGEMENT AND TECHNOLOGY (CALMAT)

1. Introduction
2. Class Attendance
3. Communication
4. Contractive Behavior
5. Student Conflicts
6. Academic Dishonesty
7. Special Situations

The university and administration believe that for students to be prepared for career success and to demonstrate:

• professional,
• ethical,
• responsible business and social behavior.

In keeping with these expectations and to protect the welfare of all students, the university and administration of CALMAT have agreed on the following guidelines for appropriate behavior of students in our programs, attending classes and communication as teamwork.

Class Attendance

1. Each student is expected to attend class regularly
2. Arrive on time.
3. Remain until class is dismissed.
4. Leaving class early are disruptive for other students and are behaviors that are not acceptable in a classroom or business setting.

Communication

Provide teamwork and good communication by utilizing new technology communication such as:

• gmail account (email)
• skype account
• ulearn forum
• telephone – cell phone/ txt msg

Contractive Behavior

The classroom should be considered a place of business - academic business.

Contractive behavior such as:

• Positive communication among students,
• Motivation and ways of resolving conflicts
• responsibility to maintain a classroom free of such distractions.

Student Conflicts

Any student who believes that he or she has been treated unfairly under these guidelines should first address the matter with the faculty member responsible for the class. If the problem is not resolved, the student may meet with the Dean or file complains procedures outlined in the University catalog.

Academic Dishonesty

Unethical behavior of students is not acceptable and will not be tolerated in the class.

Academic dishonesty such as:

-cheating on exams,

-plagiarism of the work of others,

-unapproved collaboration on graded work

The student will be given immediately consequences. Depending on the problem, a student who is guilty of any such violation may be withdrawn from the course and given a grade of zero on the assignment, given a grade of F in the course.

Special Situations

Students with Disabilities

Students with disabilities are expected to meet the same standards of conduct as any student. It is important that an instructor establish the standards for the classroom and for all students of academic freedom

Referral to Counseling

Provide counseling and guild students to effectively and quickly correct student misbehavior and to educate the student appropriate manage in the college community.

Consultation
Please contact the Counseling & Consultation Services if you would like to consult with the Director or Associate Director.
If you have questions regarding appropriate responses in these or other situations, please contact the Dean of your College, the Dean of Student Services and/or the Director of Counseling & Consultation Services.

Group project members: Deepti, Susan, James

Student Guidelines for successful MBA program with motivation and behavior focus

Use communication tools including email (Google doc and Gmail), online chat (Skype), and telephone number;
U-learn access as initial studying tool;
Studying group formed within each class;
Initiate industrial training survey;
In class group discussion;
Group activities to build friendship among the team;
Small network such as Linked-in or Twitter to help each other for job searching;
Group members break down each subject into individual parts and share after each other’s hard work;
Everybody’s leadership quality should be explored (Everybody gets turn to be in charge);
Create the case studies and encourage the debate and discussion on different opinions;
Team or group concept will be dynamic, means each class group is formed by different people each time (or reshuffling for better outcome);
To resolve the conflict, the leader should resume the discussion first, then the group member vote for the decision. If there is tie, the leader will make the final decision;
Collaboration should be part of the grading to motivate a good team work.
If everybody follows this guideline, we will have very efficient and successful year in MBA program.

Peijung, navdeep, jzheng, cap, song, Chia_hui

show details 3:15 PM (8 hours ago)

Guide line of team work

1. Team members should communicate through email, msn, or face-to-face when the deadline arises. Given everyone’s scheduling differences, real time meeting is not truly necessary.

2. Team leader should be decided depending on the project. Whoever fits the description for the given project will take the lead.

3. Team fund will be established. By the end of each project, gift certificates will be given to the best performer. Meetings will be held to discuss problems areas and to determine why that the person least performed. Team members will show respect to one another. Blaming is not allowed.

4. We will not evaluate other individual’s work, but will held meetings to discuss what worked and what didn’t.

5. Conflicts will be resolved by thorough discussions with every team member. When needed, the team leader will make the final decision; take the conflict out of their hands.

6. Ideas are shared between team members. No one will need to copy off another member’s work.

7. Msn and GoogleDoc are standard communication tools.

8. The team work as one, stand as one, fail as a whole.

9. Conflicts and problems should never separate the team members. Instead, they unite them

Team Member: FRED, JODDY, JIMMY, GERALD, HONG

GUILDELINE

1. Objective

Learn how to build up a team, lead a team and corporate with each other. The goal of this team is to bring the essential value to the members to be successful in CALMAT MBA program by focusing on group interaction and case studies.

2. Formation

1. Consist of 5 members;
2. Divide your responsibilities, need one team leader, one for accounting, one for market, one for product.
3. Decide your team leader in every project and should rotate.

3. Communicate

1. How

Each member should provide their inputs and feedback to all the team members. The team will assign a coordinator to record the summary of the topic. The meeting will be formed thorough thru internet, phone conference or time schedule with 2/3 of members are available.

4. Behavior

1. Team work and collaboration is encouraged. Any behavior hurt the team should be punished.
2. How does team resolve conflicts?

Ensure everyone on the team understand and agree up the common goal of the team, encourage each team member to be open up and bring up conflict, if any, to the team for discussion. In case of different opinions that cannot be compromised to each other, majority win-based voting mechanism can be used to achieve consensus across the team.

Important: Copy homework is forbidden!!!

5. Results

• Every team should turn up a 5 pages report to the professor timely and present your results to the whole class with PowerPoint for every project.

Guideline for teamwork / to build an effective team

Jenny, Kevin, Stephanie, Dennis, Henry

1. Respect your Peers-Support everyone’s background
2. Shared goal for success
3. Promote Open expression of ideas – Healthy competition and open discussion
4. Responsible and communal ownership of outcome
5. An extent of Leadership is encouraged

The above attributes apply to the short- term definition of a team whose long term objective involves the recognition of individual career aspirations as a means to maintain and grow Calmat University.

CSUMB tribe wiseman

Partificating the chairs meeting. All other chairs are rather new and I have been doing this for a lot of years. I've become the tribe's wisesman. There is a certain comfort in this since almost all issues discussed, I have some anecdots, success or horror stories to tell. But I also felt old, it maybe time to move on.

The educational effectiveness is become so much of an emphasis on many campuses, including CSUMB, there is a clear and present danger that we take faculty's time off their primary focus: study, evaluate, generate, document and deseminate knowledge and compel them to spend too much effort on education and assessment. We might have a lot of professors that are very good at measuring student leanring, but not as good as their core function. That would be sad for higher-ed.

The missing items in many of the discussions are "excellent" and "motivation". Which are crucial in any educational process and prominantly missing in public K-12, and now in some colleges and universities, also.

Priority, choices and consequences

When I was a bit younger, like all other naive beginning professors, I believed I am do everything: getting million dollar grants, teach five courses, public 6 papers, supervise 20 students on their capstones or thesises, play tennis three times a week, swim two hours a week, practice my cello everyday, run a department, design new degrees, mentor new faculties, participate 10 committees and still can put my feet on the coffee table every night watching Sinfield re-runs.

Then the reality hits me hard. Covering everything made my involvement superficial, quality of work is out of the window, little time to spend on individual students, and hundred of emails left unanswered every week.  I have to return my phone calls during commute, writing proposals till 2-3 AM. 

Selecting what are important is challenging yet has to be done, I replaced swimming with more time efficient running, two papers a year only, ask other faculty to step in for advising.  Over the summer, I need to review what I been doing over the last few years and have to make the difficult decisions: what valuable activites I will NOT do.

Unfortunate incidents and actions

Hopefully some lessens are learned from this.

MIST faculty has met and reviewed the Feb 4th incident of one student’s proposal (Proposal C) copied “structure, design and format” of a proposal (Proposal O) by another students without permission in XYZ. MIST faculty has decided the following actions and comment:

1. Ethics and integrity are essential in education, especially in School of ITCD. Any plagiarism is not tolerated and will result in failing the assignment at the minimum, expelling from the program AND the university likely.

2. The faculty concluded the offense of coping “structure, design and format” without permission is unprofessional and should be discouraged. However, the faculty does not categorize the offense as plagiarism since most of the content of the proposals are distinct.

3. The student who copied the structure, design and format should complete the following actions within a week from today. Otherwise more severe measures will be taken by the MIST program.

a. Send an email to the original author, apologize for the action, and ask for permission to use the “structure, design and format” or Proposal O.

b. If the permission is granted in three days, acknowledgment should be included in the new version of Proposal C. If the permission is denied or not received within three days, Proposal C should be reformatted and revised so no components of Proposal O are used.

Please email me if you have any questions.

Eric Tao, on behalf of MIST Faculty