June 1 2006
Next Newsletter published 15 June
Message from the Rector
The launch of 'the lounge' at the Academy Library occurred
on Tuesday 23rd May. The ground floor of the Library was reconfigured
and refurbished to enhance student communication and interaction
and to provide electronic information and multimedia to staff
and students alike. This wonderful area I'm sure will be used
with much enthusiasm.
Professor John Baird
Rector
Staff Bulletin
The Newsletter will now be published on a fortnightly basis.
If you have something you would like to contribute, please download
and complete the submission
form and email the information to newsletter@adfa.edu.au
by 12 noon on the Wednesday prior. The website will be changed
to reflect Fortnightly news rather than weekly as show above.
NEXT PUBLISHED CAMPUS NEWSLETTER THURS 15 JUNE 2006.
2006 WARMAN DESIGN AND BUILD COMPETITION
UNSW@ADFA CAMPUS COMPETITION
MAIN LABORATORY, BUILDING 18
SCHOOL OF AEROSPACE, CIVIL AND MECHANICAL ENGINEERING
Wednesday 7 June, 2006
1st Round – 2.00pm START
2nd Round – 2.45pm START
ALL INVITED
Project “ABC”–Autonomously Beautify Countryside:
The Gondwanan people are quite proud of their planet and its beauty
and while hosting the intergalactic millennium conference wish
to make a good impression on visiting dignitaries. It is proposed
that an autonomous device be designed and trialed to accurately
and rapidly distribute wild flower seeds along the planet’s
highways and byways. In the “ACME Pinnacle Laboratory”,
the Gondwanan Horticultural Society is struggling to arrive at
a design that might be feasible. Fortunately, teams of engineering
students from Earth are about to visit Gondwana as part of their
work experience programs. On previous visits engineering students
have rendered invaluable assistance, and the Gondwanans again
seek help from these budding engineers.
Objective: The objective is to design, build and prove a prototype
device in a laboratory environment that serves to accurately and
rapidly distribute seeds along the planet’s highways. Can
you assist in Project ABC – Autonomously Beautify Countryside?
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WebCT Skills Training in June/July 2006
Note: This training offering assumes a familiarity with
at least the basics of WebCT. If interested in coming along,
please note the short lead-time on booking-in for any, or all, of
the first 3 elements in this program.
Thanks to an arrangement just made with experienced colleagues
in TEDS (Technology and Educational Design Services) at the University
of Canberra , ETS are happy to be able to offer UNSW@ADFA staff
a veritable ‘smorgasbord' of professional training in the use
of WebCT here on campus over the next couple of months.
What's on the menu and when?
Friday 2nd June -> Book by Tuesday 23rd May
10.00 – 11.00 Dropbox
11.15 – 13.00 Online Markbook
14.00 – 17.00 Quiz
Tuesday 11th July -> Book by Friday 30th June
10.00 – 12.00 WebCT Housekeeping
Wednesday 19th July -> Book by Friday 7th July
10.00 – 13.00 Discussion Tool (Bulletin Board)
Your chefs?
Sue Demoor and Doreen Brooks of the University of Canberra.
How do I get involved?
Bookings are REQUIRED on all of the above to ensure they run.
Place yours via an email to Anne Green in Staff Development before
specified closing date/s: a.green@adfa.edu.au
Please be SPECIFIC about which of the above 5 events you wish
to attend and book in now, as numbers are limited. A wait list
will be kept, if necessary.
Want more information?
Read the ‘dish' descriptions for each of the individual training
sessions below. If you need more than that, please talk to James
Meek, Flexible Learning Developer in ETS: Bld 13, room 1.130,
ph 62688213, j.meek@adfa.edu.au
Bonus Event
Thursday 22nd June
12.15 – 13.00 Putting a different skin on WebCT
Matt Bacon, Sue Bebbington, Peter Delgado and Deborah Veness
of UC will also be visiting to show us a flagship WebCT site they
have recently made for a creative writing course. An ODLAA Award
winner, this site has several interesting features, including
a virtual reality style interface that makes it hard to even recognise
at first as a WebCT site.
(Booking is not required for this Bonus item ONLY --> just
turn up: Library Seminar Room.)
More detail on the individual training sessions
Dropbox
This workshop covers the use of the dropbox for collecting, marking,
and returning assignments to students. It is usually followed
by the Online Markbook workshop.
By the end of this session, participants will be able to:
- Add an assignment to the Dropbox tool
- Establish the assignment settings
- Retrieve assignments
- Mark and upload assignments
- Release marks to students
- Understand how the assignment tool looks from the student's
perspective
Online Markbook
Use of the Markbook function in WebCT can save lots of time as
there are automatic ways to include marks from quizzes, and assignments,
grades based on marks, and formulas for adding columns. This is
much easier than in Excel, and as well, it is easy to release
marks and/or grades to students if desired.
By the end of this session, participants will be able to:
- Add columns in the Manage Students section
- Set up the best type of column for the purpose
- Add grade columns to automatically look up grade, based on
numeric column
- Change look-up grades for columns to a different percentage
- Set up a calculated column
- Upload from Excel to Manage Students
- Download to Excel from Manage Students
- Release particular columns to students
- Download student number and grade for Heads of Schools
Quiz
This tool is used to set up and run quizzes, surveys and self-tests
in WebCT. The Quiz tool allows selective release to students,
and permits question sets to be randomly generated. Once set up
quizzes can automatically generate marks.
By the end of this session, participants will be able to:
- Add a quiz to the WebCT site
- Add to and remove questions from the quiz
- Set question order
- Establish quiz/survey settings for the release of the quiz
- Mark quizzes
- Work with quiz results
WebCT Housekeeping
This workshop will run for approximately one hour. The second
hour has been set aside to allow staff to drop in for help with
their housekeeping problems. It is important that everyone re-sets
their old WebCT sites before using them. During this workshop
participants will learn how to clean up the WebCT site for a course
in order to be able to re-use the site with new students or to
use it as a template for another WebCT course.
By the end of this session, participants will be able to:
- Backup the WebCT course before starting the cleanup
- Re-set the course
- Remove co-designers and teaching assistants
- Backup the cleaned course for later use
- Manage and use backups
Discussion Tool (Bulletin Board)
This workshop gives you the experience and knowledge to use and
manage the Discussion Tool. This very powerful tool for online
teaching can be used to facilitate deep learning.
By the end of this session, participants will be able to:
- Manage the topics: add topics, make private, delete
- Access a topic and its messages
- Compose messages with attachments
- Understand unthreaded and threaded options
- Understand some of the pedagogical issues in using this tool
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Farewell Reception for Outgoing Vice-Chancellor Professor Mark
Wainwright - 13 June 2006
TO: All UNSW Staff
You are cordially invited to a Farewell Reception for the outgoing
Vice-Chancellor, Professor Mark S Wainwright. Professor Wainwright
is retiring after thirty-two years of service to UNSW and he would
be delighted if you would join him as he farewells his many friends
and colleagues at the University.
The Reception will be held on Tuesday 13 June 2006 from 4.00pm
till 6.00pm in Leighton Hall, the John Niland Scientia Building.
Please RSVP (acceptances only) to Ms Alyson Wills by Tuesday
6 June 2006, via email vcreception@unsw.edu.au
or telephone: 02 9385 2884.
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EXHIBITION - Passchendaele Beyond Imagination
An Exhibition of Drawings by Murray Kirkland
The Library, ADFA - 20 April to 18 June
Library hours: Mon-Turs: 9am - 9pm Friday: 9am to 5pm Sat-Sun:
1pm - 4pm
For information email: jeff.doyle@adfa.edu.au
or phone the Library on 6268 8111.
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Workshop "Preparation
for Retirement" - 13 July
On Thursday 13th July the Staff Development Unit has organised
a one day workshop Preparation for Retirement and if you wish
to attend please forward your expression of interest to the Staff
Development Unit to secure a place. The cost will be $185/person
and will commence at 9.00am finishing at 5.00pm with lunch and
light refreshments included.
A copy of the workshop content is below.
"SUCCESSFUL RETIREMENT –
LIFESTYLE PLANNING WORKSHOP -
Judy Cole Coaching
WORKSHOP / COURSE OVERVIEW
Helping Pre-retirees plan their
Retirement Lifestyle
The things that most happily retired people
have in common is a healthy positive attitude and a clear image
or plan of how they want the retirement phase of their lives to
be.
While many approaching retirement age have taken financial
planning advice, few invest time and energy planning the nonfinancial
aspects of retiring. Many underestimate the impact this significant
change will have on them, and with hindsight, wish they'd planned
it better.
The goal of this workshop is to encourage attendees
to take responsibility for creating a retirement they'll love.
It will stimulate their self-awareness, discuss their belief systems
around retirement, give advice on making a smooth transition,
and examine eight important areas to consider when putting in
place a Retirement Plan for the next 20 plus years of their life.
Attendees must bring a pen and an open mind.
TIMING AND DURATION
This workshop/course is designed
as 4 sessions allowing for lively discussion.
It should run:
9.00-10.30 (20min tea/coffee break)
10.50-12.30 (1hr lunch break)
1.30 - 3.00 (20min tea/coffee break)
3 .20 - 5.00 (close)
RESOURCES AND TRAINING AIDS
The workshop is intended to be highly
interactive, with maximum participation through brainstorming,
awareness questionnaires and exercises.
W orkbooks including presentation material with
space for personal notes, questionnaires, exercises, motivational
pieces, inspiring case studies, summary of suggested further reading
and websites with useful information will be provided."
Anne Green, Staff Development and Equity Units
PH: 02 6268 6189 Fax: 02 6268 8405
Email: a.green@adfa.edu.au
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RESEARCH & RESEARCH TRAINING OFFICE
REPORT
A Heavenly Hovering Helo...
On Monday 21 May 2006, UNSW@ADFA researchers achieved the first
autonomous hover of their RMAX Unmanned Helicopter. The helicopter
hovered for about 4 minutes without human intervention using onboard
sensors including a GPS positioning system. During the test, the
helicopter remained within a few cm of its initial position, despite
wind gusts.
The milestone is the first step towards developing new sensors
and control algorithms to allow a small unmanned helicopter to
automatically launch and recover from ships at sea. This is an
area of intense development at the moment, but generally involves
larger vehicles that are more costly to build and operate. The
RMAX helicopter has been provided to UNSW@ADFA through an ARC
Linkage project industry partner contribution.
Whilst not the first autonomous hover in an RMAX, this achievement
has necessitated a complete flight control system to be developed
from scratch at UNSW@ADFA. The type of RMAX helicopter used in
this trial normally requires a skilled human pilot to operate
the controls in real-time. The autonomy systems constructed at
UNSW@ADFA remove the need for a pilot in the loop.
The RMAX helicopter is manufactured by Yamaha and is primarily
used for agricultural work in Japan including crop dusting. The
helicopter has a payload of 30kg and a maximum take of weight
of 100kg. Over one thousand RMAX helicopters have been sold domestically
in Japan. A number have been exported to the US and Europe and
are used as flight control research platforms at leading research
institutions including Berkeley, Georgia Tech and NASA.
The RMAX ship landing project is led by Matt Garratt, an ex RAN
marine and aviation engineer with the School of ACME. A/Prof Himanshu
Pota from the School of ITEE is coordinating the designing of
the control system for the UAV. Mr Jeremy Gleeson, SBLT Eckersly-Maslin
and Mr Bilal Ahmed are postgraduate students working on the project.
Faculty Seminar 13 June: Professor Peter Dennis
Military Prosopography: The AIF Project
The Research and Research Training Office is very pleased indeed
to advise that the June Faculty Seminar will be presented by Professor
Peter Dennis from the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.
(Our well-thumbed dictionary had also been a tad neglected lately:
no longer!) We understand ‘prosopography’ to mean
‘the study of an individual by means of such records as
may exist in official records, newspapers etc., of his or her
offices, honours, relations and achievements; the assembling of
a biography’. (Just goes to show that it’s not only
the chemists who have us diving for the OED....)
Abstract: The AIF Project centres around the
construction of a database on the 335,000 men and women who embarked
from Australia for service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1914-1918.
A wide range of published and archival records have been used
to create the most comprehensive database of its kind in the world.
Quite apart from its interest to individuals enquiring about family
members who may (or in some cases, family history notwithstanding,
may not) have served, the database can be used to analyse, for
example, recruitment patterns across a range of criteria (area,
age, religious affiliation etc), and the incidence of postwar
death. Making this information available on the web has presented
its own challenges. In this seminar I will discuss the construction
of the database, outline some of the preliminary findings, and
comment on the role of the web in historical research.
The Faculty Seminars are held in SL1 (Bld 21). Refreshments
are available from 3:15 in the ACME/P'G student lounge and the
seminars commence at 3:40pm. After the presentation, time will
be available for questions and feedback. All staff and research
students are encouraged to attend as Faculty Seminars provide
a great opportunity for networking across all Schools at UNSW@ADFA.
And despite our remarkable lack of success in eliciting compliance
with the request for an RSVP, we are still not yet giving up!!
We would like to emphasise that RSVPs are greatly appreciated
– the danger of running out of wine doesn’t bear thinking
about. Please RSVP to Elvira Berra at e.berra@adfa.edu.au or on
88112 by cob on 8 June. (In actual fact, we’ve had the largest
number of responses ever for this Seminar because of the incorrect
date initially advertised! Unkind persons would say the RRTO made
a mistake with the initial date: on the other hand, the RRTO claims
that the strategy worked.......Says something about our client
group, really!)
Annual Function for ARC Applicants
On Tuesday 30 May the Rector, Associate Dean (Research) and
members of the Faculty Research Grants Committee hosted the annual
function to acknowledge the efforts of those researchers who submitted
applications for funding to the Australian Research Council (ARC).
As anyone who has submitted an ARC proposal knows only too well,
the application process itself deserves a reward for perseverance,
dedication and sheer tenacity. This year the application process
was exacerbated by the behaviour of the Grants Administration
Management System (GAMS), which at times would only allow researchers
to log on between midnight and six am!!
PS: (While a number of researchers were heard to refer to this
annual function as the ‘pat-on-the-head’ function,
staff in the Research and Research Training Office (RRTO) wish
it to be known that by the time the application round was over,
they felt as if they had been ‘patted on the head’
with a pile driver!)
A highlight of the function this year was the presentation of
an award to Professor Joseph Lai for his exceptional dedication
towards the promotion of research at UNSW@ADFA. Professor John
Baird (Rector) congratulated Prof Lai on the implementation of
a range of innovative schemes which have significantly enhanced
the profile of research on this campus and have greatly contributed
to research endeavours across all schools.
(And the RRTO would especially like to than Ms Jan Gordon, Manager,
Academy Library and Mr David Paterson, Senior Photographer, for
their collusion in preparing the award to Prof Lai)
US State Department “Country Reports on Terrorism”
Tuesday 6 June 2006
Where: Military Theatre, ADFA
When: 1.30 pm– 4.30 pm
To be delivered by: Mr John Crowley, Deputy Political Counsellor,
US Embassy with a commentary by Dr Clinton Fernandes, Snr Lecturer,
UNSW@ADFA Defence Studies Forum
The report covers developments in countries in which acts of terrorism
occurred, countries that are state sponsors of terrorism, and
countries determined by the Secretary of State to be of particular
interest in the global war on terror. The report also provides
information on terrorist groups responsible for the death, kidnapping,
or injury of Americans, any umbrella groups to which they might
belong, groups financed by state sponsors of terrorism, reports
on all terrorist organizations on the Foreign Terrorist Organization
(FTO) list, and other terrorist groups determined by the Secretary
to be relevant to the report.
Beginning with the report for 2005, Country Reports on Terrorism
will also address terrorist sanctuaries and terrorist attempts
to acquire weapons of mass destruction. It will also include statistical
information provided by the National Counterterrorism Center http://www.nctc.gov/
on the number of individuals killed, injured, or kidnapped by
terrorist groups. The text of the report can be accessed at: http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/crt/c17689.htm
RSVP by 5 June 2006 to k.eden@adfa.edu.au
or 6268 8845.
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Petro Fedorczenko Memorial Lecture - 5 June
Date: Monday 5 June 2006
Time: 1730 (staff are requested be seated by 1715)
Venue: Adams Hall
Dress: Lounge Suit or equivalent for Ladies
Guest speaker: Generation Y Expert, Mr Peter Sheahan.
All staff and partners are welcome
POC: Kerry Neal SOCOORD Ph: 6268 8606
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Unisuper Seminar - 27 June
Tuesday 27 June 2006
Lecture Theatre 3
12.30 – 1.30pm
Topic: Contribution Flexibility (where members
will be able to vary contribution levels, from 1 July 2006, within
certain limits)
Registering for a Seminar
To register for a seminar, please go to the
website below, click on the nominated topic, select the ACT in
the drop down menu, click on register. Registration of your attendance
will ensure an accurate number of handouts are available. http://www.unisuper.com.au/resources/seminars.cfm
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Got a Story?
If you have something you would like to contribute, please download
and complete the submission
form and email the information to: Email: newsletter@adfa.edu.au
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Contact Us
Office of the Rector
Phone: 02 6268 8701
Email: newsletter@adfa.edu.au
Do you have a story you would like to contribute?
