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From LA Weekly: the Los Angeles Unified School District attempted to roll all of its employees to a single payroll calendar. The conversion has been a disaster, as LAUSD managers failed to follow a basic tenet of information systems migration – parallel conversion. Keep running the old system running until the new system works!

It was January when the district’s new, $95 million payroll system started spewing out erroneous checks, underpaying some people, overpaying others, and creating such chaos that administrators now pay special counselors to deal with the psychological trauma.

The blunders persist despite $37.5 million in fix-it cash, and teachers are ratcheting up the pressure by boycotting faculty meetings and holding rallies. They marched on September 25 outside the LAUSD offices — “We won’t take it no more!” hundreds chanted…

Wikipedia’s article on parallel adoption is actually helpful, with a decent reference list of supporting articles. This concept is discussed in the IS 6100 textbook in chapter 12 on page 476. Both terms have similar meanings.

At the end of the day, employees expect an accurate paycheck

Parallel testing is all but required when a company moves large amounts of data processing to a new system. Developers rarely anticipate every possible exception that might affect a new information system.

Vendors have been selling inexpensive personal computers for years. Dell has offered models that are more-or-less disposable – the case is sealed, and the repair costs may exceed the computer’s actual value.

Business Week reported on 9 October that sales of ultra-low cost PCs are growing, especially in Asia and Latin America. One popular market for these computers is in schools, where students need durable computers. Some models lack hard drives, relying on flash memory and network storage instead. This 16 June 2006 ZDNet article describes an Intel project to design similar computers. The article also points out some of the distribution challenges in these markets. Weekly payments, microloans, content filtering and asset control systems are important features.

The One Laptop Per Child initiative provides similar computers that run the Linux operating system instead of Microsoft Windows. This 4 October article in the New York Times provides a brief overview of the XO project, and Laptop Magazine has an extensive hands-on review. Wikipedia has an article, of course, and it notes that Intel has redirected its ultra low-cost PC program to support the XO project.

As this spec sheet shows, the XO computer is not a fast device. Its power usage is only 2 watts, which is less than some PDAs and smartphones. The XO’s battery can be recharged in several clever ways, as described in this list from OLPC News.

Ultra-low cost PCs aren’t supposed to compete with standard consumer and corporate models, so the key success factors in this industry may become quite different than those found in mainstream PC markets. The XO is inexpensive, easy to manufacture, and easy to deploy in local schools.

I’ve had a few students ask about their grades. I use the TurnItIn.com gradebook, which is linked to the assignment scores that I’ve entered in GradeMark. I don’t post grades on this web site. Students have individual accounts on TurnItIn.com, and that web site provides a nice set of encryption and security options.

Students in my courses can log in to TurnItIn.com, click on the link for their course, and click the “My Grade” link as shown below. The data is just an example.

The total score includes the assignments that I’ve posted in TurnItIn.com. It may not cover the entire course. Keep in mind the final assignments and the final exam in my courses comprise a large part of the course grade.

Starting this afternoon, I will be offline until Monday, 15 October. Students who have questions about the current assignments should email me, but I might not respond until Tuesday, 16 October.

I’m disabling the comment features on this web site, as I won’t be able to moderate and respond to these comments over the weekend. In general, comments aren’t the best way for students to contact me. Email is always a good option.

I’ll post another reminder next week, but I will be off-island from 18 to 23 October. I will have limited Internet access during that time, and my email responses will take longer than usual.

Students, please plan ahead and send me your emails well before the next IS 6100 and IS 7010 assignments are due.

This web site and our TurnItIn.com sections will be available, of course.

When I graded the Paper 2 assignments for my courses, I tried a feature in TurnItIn.com’s GradeMark system. It’s a scoring matrix that helps me calculate assignment grades.

I usually have a scoring matrix in my assignments. It’s printed at the end of the assignment document, after the questions and requirements. This is an example from the IS 6100 Paper 2 assignment for the Fall 2007 term.

In previous courses, I would append a completed matrix to the graded assignment.

When I started using GradeMark last year, I just typed scores into the TurnItIn.com general comments box. There’s no way for me to append a page to an existing document in a TurnItIn.com assignment.

The matrix lets me allocate points to each row or item in my grading scheme. The columns represent a grading scale. After I type in my remarks and fill in the general comments screen, I can check the approriate cells in the matrix to calculate a grade.

I’m a visual person, and I’ve used a similar format in printed scoring tables.

I didn’t connect the vertical scale to the letter grades.

Also, the draft and peer review items are scored in those assignments, so I did not include them in the scoring matrix shown below.

This screenshot of a TurnItIn.com scoring matrix is from my instructor account, so it might be different from the student view.

This matrix is available in the printable version of the GradeMark report, and the total grade will appear in the TurnItIn.com gradebook. See my article from 5 February 2007 for more information on viewing GradeMark reports.

During the term, the point value of each assignment increases. I’ll add more rows to the scoring matrix to distribute the points in reasonable amounts.

One issue I’ve run into is the scoring matrix editor. It tends to crash for no reason. I had to close the editing window, but at least the crash didn’t take down my web browser or the operating system. It took me 3 attempts to create the matrix shown above.