UNSW Sitewide

A collection of posts from across the UNSW Blogosphere!

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Microfinance Schemes

Posted by on November 17th, 2010 · Uncategorized

Leave any comments about Microfinance Schemes (NILS, SaverPlus, AddsUp, StepUp, Progress Loans) here. We welcome views on how microfinance schemes might be developed and improved, as well as examples of best practice in service delivery. Please use professional courtesy in framing your comments: posts will be monitored and any defamatory or derogatory comments will be removed.

Money Management Services

Posted by on November 17th, 2010 · Uncategorized

Leave any comments about Money Management Services here. We welcome views on how FaHCSIA’s program for money management services might be developed and improved, as well as examples of best practice in service delivery. Please use professional courtesy in framing your comments: posts will be monitored and any defamatory or derogatory comments will be removed.

Commonwealth Financial Counselling

Posted by on November 17th, 2010 · Uncategorized

Leave any comments about Commonwealth Financial Counselling here. We welcome views on how FaHCSIA’s program for financial counselling services might be developed and improved, as well as examples of best practice in service delivery. Please use professional courtesy in framing your comments: posts will be monitored and any defamatory or derogatory comments will be removed.

Emergency Relief

Posted by on November 17th, 2010 · Uncategorized

Leave any comments about Emergency Relief here. We welcome views on how Emergency Relief  might be improved and any examples of best practice in ER services. Please use professional courtesy in framing your comments: posts will be monitored and any defamatory or derogatory comments will be removed.

AGSM MBA Programs Newsletter – Week 10

Posted by on November 17th, 2010 · Newsletter

The video newsletter is back!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_FNs2UrFJY[/youtube]

Our Executive Projects Officer Jane Parker presents the news

Online Enrolment, Session 1, 2011

Online enrolment for Session 1, 2011 opened this Monday at 9:30am, via myUNSW.

Enrolments close at 5pm on Monday 29th November. Any enrolments or withdrawals after Monday 29th November may incur a $300 late enrolment/late withdrawal fee.

The Session 1, 2011 GDM / GCCM Course Calendars and the GDM Program Planning guide are available on the AGSM MBA Programs website.

Delivery of Course Materials

Please ensure your contact details and courier address are up to date on myUNSW to ensure correct delivery of your course materials.

MS Intensive Weekend 2 – ASB Building

This weekends Managerial Skills Intensive Weekend 2, will be held on Level 2 of the Australian School of Business (ASB) building, The University of New South Wales, Kensington.

The ASB building is located on the lower campus closer to Anzac Pde. Enter through Gate 2 on High Street, then access the West or East Lobby (E12) via College Road.

Paid parking is available on campus and the closest parking station is on Barker Street.  Free parking is available on campus after 7pm Friday night.  All day Saturday and Sunday parking is free.  It may be possible to find street parking but this is limited.

Timetable:

Friday 19 November:             6pm – 9pm

Geoff Mortimore’s class will be held in room 216, and Karen Rodrigues’ class in room 220.

Saturday 20 November:            9am – 5pm

Geoff Mortimore’s class will be held in room 215, and Karen Rodrigues’ class in room 219.

Sunday 21 November:             9am – 4pm

Geoff Mortimore’s class will be held in room 215, and Karen Rodrigues’ class in room 219.

Managing Change – Workshop 2 Reminder

Managing Change Workshop 2 (excluding Adelaide & Canberra) is this Saturday 20 November.

Planned Blackboard outage 18th November

Please note that Blackboard will not be available on Thursday, 18th November 2010 for an upgrade process. The UNSW Blackboard Learn server will be upgraded to Release 9.1, Service Pack 2.

End of Session Exams – Saturday 11 December

All NSW students (CBD, Kensington, Parramatta, North Sydney, North Ryde, as per your courier address on myUNSW) will be sitting their exams at one central venue in the Wentworth Building, University of Sydney.  All other students will sit their exam at their usual class venue. Intensive students will be sitting in their home state (as per courier address).

If you need to change your exam venue, you need to let us know by 3rd December 2010.

GCCM NSW students will be sitting their exam in the AGSM Building.  Interstate students will sit the exam in the Cliftons venues alongside GDM students. Any overseas-based GCCM students will need to organise their own venue and invigilator.

Events

November 2010

Canberra: Canberra: Executive Intelligence, Fujitsu House, 7-9 Moore St, Canberra, 24 Nov

What it takes to move into the senior executive echelons of an organisation

Brisbane: End-of-year Celebration Drinks, Jade Buddha (in the Jade Lounge), 1 Eagle Street, Brisbane, 30 Nov. Bookings essential

PLEASE NOTE: The Melbourne: Monthly Networking Drinks will return in December.

December 2010

Melbourne: End-of-year Networking Drinks, Silk Road (Dynasty Room), 425 Collins Street, Melbourne, 1 Dec

The Melbourne alumni committee is offering 1 free drink to everyone that pre-registers for the event by Monday 29th November. So book now!

We encourage students to access the following page regularly to keep up to date with events organised by alumni branches for alumni, students and their guests:

http://www.asb.unsw.edu.au/newsevents/Pages/default.aspx

Drupal Commons report

Posted by on November 16th, 2010 · Uncategorized

I attended an Acquia webinar last week on Drupal Commons. There will be a recording of it here shortly (look for November 11 2010).

Drupal Commons is a pre packaged Drupal 6 (D6) distribution by Acquia. It includes an install profile, a patched D6 core, a set of community sourced modules, some Acquia modules and a Drupal Commons core (glue) module.

Drupal Commons goal is to provide an out of the box community building solution based on Drupal. It requires a lot of memory (128MB to PHP minimum) and runs heavy. A D7 release is on the cards but has no release date – too many modules require D7 ports at this stage.

Here are a list of modules broken down into feature sets:

Content / Collaboration

  • OG (organic groups)
  • Shoutbox
  • Tagadelic
  • Drupal Wiki
  • Freelinking
  • Profiles (core)
  • CCK (content types)
  • Discussions
  • + 10 more

Users

  • Profiles (core)
  • Relationships (friending)
  • Heartbeat
  • Userpoints (reputation) but not Badges (though that’s possible)

Personalisation

  • Flags (bookmarks)
  • Panels + Context (custom layout per path)
  • Apache SOLR (filters for search)
  • Acquia Search (from Acquia Network Subscription – a pay service – for faceted results and content recommendation)

Management

  • Quant + Charting
  • Featured

General

  • Admin menu
  • CTools
  • Calendar, Date and Time
  • Flags
  • Messaging + Notifications
  • Strongarm (configuration in code)
  • Token
  • Skinr (theming)
  • Rules
  • Vertical Tabs (theming)
  • jQuery UI (theming)

Features not in Commons but requested (contribute to http://commons.acquia.com/ to add your vote)

  • Projects
  • Subgroups
  • per group layout
  • per group content types
  • Homebox (user level dashboard)
  • community tagging
  • popular content block
  • private messaging
  • document management

Acquia offer Commons open and as a managed service, as an implementation service and with their network subscription.

the hard work of making things easy.

Posted by on November 15th, 2010 · Uncategorized

Huge meeting last Thursday with DAAO core team (Jo, Olivia and me) and the House of Laudanum team ( Zina, Snow and Lotte (who skyped in from Amsterdam).

Snow talking us through some of the ways we can automate data entry making the task less onerous and more accurate.

We talked a lot about the contributor- that is the person who will write accurate quality biographies and enter accurate relevant data in the metadata fields. When we extend the schema- we are also asking people to enter in more data- to make a greater commitment to the DAAO.  We have to make it worth their while. We can think of this extra value along two different paths: the satisfaction one gets at interacting with good design and seeing a change being made to a record in real-time; and the additional value one gets from being part of a community that is relevant and useful to you.  In the image above, Snow is talking us through how a semi- automated data entry system could help ease the burden of data entry on the contributor. For instance, imagine if you could just cut and paste an exhibitions list into one field, rather than entering every exhibition into a single field?  Too much data entry is placing a big obstacle to to contributing to the DAAO. However, each decision we make has consequences.

If we allow cutting and pasting exhibitions into one field-how will that affect exhibition search results? Could we find a system that structures the data automatically?  For instance, we are thinking about using Open Calais to help use semantically structure the biography text fields so that much of the metadata fields can be automatically populated from the biography text.  Using semantic web technologies (which is important in terms of future proofing our site)  also has implications for the structure of our database.

Only one week back and Olivia is as focused as ever. Lotte on the lap top is holding up well, given that it is 10pm Amsterdam time.

There are always compromises made in the design process- who we do focus on- the contributor ( the person who produces, checks and updates the content) or the user? Of course,  ideally they would overlap considerably (think social media)- but our research shows that they are pretty disparate groups at the moment- which is why ‘community building’ is so pivotal in projects like this.  At this stage, we need to think a lot about the experience of getting content onto the site as we need more content- and it needs to be authorative, up-to date and comprehensive. There is no user without a contributor.

There is lots to do, but the DAAO is in many ways still in its infancy- we can plan for the future, by making priority lists. This process is sometimes called MoSCoW- Must-Should-Could-Want. Because we are developing the project in a modular fashion, we can assign some things as CANs and WANTS and develop them later and write new grants to develop them with different partners. For instance, it would be brilliant to have a ‘save search and annotate’ feature in this iteration of the DAAO, but can we afford it? Is it the most important thing now? or would we rather try and get images into the site? (User research says Images gets Must, Save search and annotate gets a Could).  All of these features that we want go into the technical specification which we hand over to the Developer and we work with them to get as far down our priority list as we can without compromising the quality and functionality of the site.

More soon!

Six month International Business Program

Posted by on November 14th, 2010 · Uncategorized

Manhattan Institute of Management

Students who complete this program will have a better understanding of the successful management practices needed to compete in the global economy.  Through its integration of the study of culture, economics, and world business, this program will provide the student with an active, hands-on approach to understanding the global environment. Course work combines theory and practice with an Internship at a New York City Company.

Why Study at MIM?

  1. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere!
  2. International Exposure: work elbow-to-elbow with students from all over the world.
  3. Internship Location: In the heart of Wall Street in NYC. At companies including:
  • Credit Suisse
  • AXA Financial
  • New York Capital Enterprises
  • MTV
  • Bloc Group

Cost of Program: $5,000 (Internship included)

Duration: 6 months

Application Requirements:

All you need to apply are:

  • Copy of transcripts and degrees
  • Resume
  • Insurance Coverage
  • Driver’s License
  • Vaccinations for measles, mumps, and rubella

Further details:

 

Assignment 3 mark is ready to collect.

Posted by on November 14th, 2010 · Uncategorized

Assignment 3 marking is finished and the mark and feedbacks are ready to collect by using the below link:

https://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~give/Student/give.php

Please report any error in collecting the result (with the exact error message) to cs1400@cse.unsw.edu.au.

Maple TA 6.0 goes live

Posted by on November 11th, 2010 · Learning & teaching, Maple TA

Maple TA logo

After the resolution of a number of interesting teething problems (thanks Darryl!), we now have enough confidence in the service to release Maple TA into production. I’m hopeful that the new features and improvements in version 6 will see a continued uptake of this service.

The vendor describes the software as:

Maple T.A. is an easy-to-use web-based system for creating tests and assignments, and automatically assessing student responses and performance. It supports complex, free-form entry of mathematical equations and intelligent evaluation of responses, making it ideal for mathematics, science, or any course that requires mathematics.

http://www.maplesoft.com/products/mapleta/

Currently the School of Mathematics and Statistic is the primary user of Maple TA but it is also used by some areas of the Faculty of Engineering and it could be used by other areas within the University with mathematical testing and assessment needs.

If you are interested in learning more about the Maple TA service, or if you would like to use it, please contact the IT Service Centre on x51333 or email servicedesk@unsw.edu.au.

Maple TA version 6 went into production in late October 2010.