Monday 13 May 2019

Book: Treatment of complicated mourning

Rando, T. A. (1995). Treatment of complicated mourning. Champaign, Ill: Research Press. 0878223290 9780878223299 https://www.worldcat.org/title/treatment-of-complicated-mourning/oclc/634487127 More to follow

Friday 10 May 2019

Book: Using Moodle (Cole & Foster 2e 2008)

Using Moodle: [teaching with the popular open source course management system](2e)(2008).
Cole, J. R., & Foster, H. (2008). Using Moodle: [teaching with the popular open source course management system](Second edition). Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Community Press.
ISBN 9780596518516 059651851X 9780596554989 0596554982

In late August 2011 I had a meeting with two academic gentlemen who would go on to offer me an unusual, yet fulfilling job. I was to act as an assistant project manager for the UNSW School of Business at ADFA to transfer their 23 postgraduate courses from a legacy Learning Management System (LMS) to an innovative, new, open source Content Management System (CMS). The old LMS was called Olive; the new CMS is called Moodle.
The UNSW is the University of New South Wales and ADFA is the elite Australian Armed Forces Training College: the Australian Defence Force Academy. I was there for nearly six months and it was an extraordinary experience. There was such a sense of respect and camaraderie from the defence forces staff and defence forces students that I have never experienced in any other work environment. Centrally placed in all this was a university where workplace politics was being played out amongst the academics, administration, and support staff; much like government bureaucracies I've worked in. Then there was also the mix of cultures from the mainly overseas students who were higher academic candidates, such as the brilliant Egyptian PhD candidate who was given a part-time role to assist me with content creation and the mundane task of transferring content files from the old system to the new one (...but hey, he was young and he needed the money!).
At the conclusion of the job interview I was handed a downloaded and printed PDF file of Using Moodle: teaching with the popular open source course management system (2nd ed.). I was given a week to learn it as the project manager was almost ready to travel down from Sydney to Canberra to begin the five month change program: moving the 23 courses that made up the Master of Business program from the old system and training the 29 academic staff how to use Moodle as technical staff would no longer be in control of content, as they were with the old Olive LMS. Except for a change of circumstances: at my next meeting with the UNSW staff members who would go on to become good friends and mentors, I was informed that the project manager had fallen off a ladder while gardening and broken her leg so badly that she would not return to work for at least six months: could I take over and deliver the change management project?
Moodle is not hard to get your head around if you have been using personal computers for as long as I have: at that stage I had more than 25 years' experience with PCs and trying to fix broken software and bad programming. If you can use content management systems like Wordpress or Blogger, or if you use MS Office software and have now transferred most of your files to Onedrive or back your files up to Dropbox, then using Moodle is not that difficult.
Although Moodle is based around four software components working together, known as LAMP for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP, you can download a working copy for Windows or Mac environments and try it out there. I have recently downloaded and set up a copy of one of the latest stable versions of Moodle to run on a Windows 10 laptop (though my attempts to set it up on a Windows 7 laptop have not worked, even though I had a copy running in 2011 on a Windows 7 lite Netbook) just to remind me what Moodle does. And although the copy of Using Moodle: teaching with the popular open source course management system (2nd ed.) is over 10 years old, it is still relevant enough to assist with setting up the software, then adding courses, before having to turn to online sources for help.
Other reading of related texts
Reference List / In-Text Citation Styles in APA 6th
Please Note: I do not strictly follow APA style in these citations as I would like various technology and media to be able to access these pages.

Download: Cole, J. R., & Foster, H. (2008). Using Moodle: teaching with the popular open source course management system (2nd ed.). Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Community Press.


20190510
Using Moodle (Cole & Foster 2e 2008)


Unless otherwise noted all books listed were in my personal library at the time of the first blog posting about the book. Some titles were borrowed from RMIT University libraries during the period 2006-2016, or from Hobsons Bay City Council library.

About this website and privacy
European Union (EU) laws require me, as author of this blog, to give EU visitors information about cookies used on this blog. In many cases, these laws may also require me, as author, or Google, as blog host, to obtain consent.

As a courtesy, I note that Google have added the following notice on this blog to help meet these regulations:

"This site uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and analyze traffic. Your IP address and user-agent are shared with Google along with performance and security metrics to ensure quality of service, generate usage statistics, and to detect and address abuse."

. LinkedIn
Fender 93 Super Amp PR244 201905
.

Thursday 9 May 2019

Book: Keeping archives (Ellis 2e 1993)

Keeping archives (2e 1993)
Ellis, J.(Ed.) (1993). Keeping archives (Second ed.). Port Melbourne, Vic: D W Thorpe.
ISBN 9781875589159

When I worked at ABC Radio Melbourne (1983-1994) some kind souls used to leave books that were no longer required for programme reviews at strategic points on the landings of the old Waverley Court building that housed 3LO and 3AR staff. This must have been one of the last books I was able to acquire, given its date of publication.
At the time I got it I equated archiving with the work of book and record librarians. As time has moved on it has come to mean so much more to me: with the research work I did for my Master of Arts; for archiving personal and computer files; and for Electronic Document and Records Management Systems that are now mandatory for all Australian government departments.
As a species we keep a lot of records; but we don't archive them well because most of us don't know or care to learn a few basic rules of archiving. This book is a useful reference for anyone working in (or whose hobby is) archive administration.
Other reading of related texts
Reference List / In-Text Citation Styles in APA 6th
Please Note: I do not strictly follow APA style in these citations as I would like various technology and media to be able to access these pages.




20190509
Keeping archives (Ellis 2nd ed. 1993)


Unless otherwise noted all books listed were in my personal library at the time of the first blog posting about the book. Some titles were borrowed from RMIT University libraries during the period 2006-2016, or from Hobsons Bay City Council library.

About this website and privacy
European Union (EU) laws require me, as author of this blog, to give EU visitors information about cookies used on this blog. In many cases, these laws may also require me, as author, or Google, as blog host, to obtain consent.

As a courtesy, I note that Google have added the following notice on this blog to help meet these regulations:

"This site uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and analyze traffic. Your IP address and user-agent are shared with Google along with performance and security metrics to ensure quality of service, generate usage statistics, and to detect and address abuse."

. LinkedIn Fender 93 Super Amp PR244 201905
.

Book: Managing enterprise content: a unified content strategy. (Rockley, Kostur, & Manning 1e 2005).

Managing enterprise content: a unified content strategy. (first edition)(2005)
Rockley, A., Kostur, P., & Manning, S. (2005). Managing enterprise content: a unified content strategy. Indianapolis, Ind: New Riders.
ISBN 9780735713062

A fascinating book when I first read it; and one that follows on as an adjunct from my previous entry Internal Controls and Corporate Governance (3e 2009).
Its thesis, or perhaps its premise, is that (large) corporate (and government) entities would do well to adopt Content Management Systems (CMS), Workflow Management Systems (WMS), XML authoring and metadata when creating and managing content. Why should your sales department tell your clients one thing, when the manufacturing branch says another? Shouldn't the organisation speak with one voice?
The tools the authors wrote about were just becoming widely available; no more hand-coding HTML like I once did; or waiting 45 minutes for a two-page MS Word document to have tags parsed by a proprietary programme. But content management, blogging and web publishing was just in its infancy, and social media needed simple tools for simple people to publish online. XML fell by the wayside and a patched-up form of HTML was embraced by the masses. Who bothers to add metadata when Google finds your website, anyway?
Other reading of related texts
Reference List / In-Text Citation Styles in APA 6th
Please Note: I do not strictly follow APA style in these citations as I would like various technology and media to be able to access these pages.




20180509
Managing enterprise content: a unified content strategy. (Rockley, Kostur, & Manning 1e 2005).


Unless otherwise noted all books listed were in my personal library at the time of the first blog posting about the book. Some titles were borrowed from RMIT University libraries during the period 2006-2016, or from Hobsons Bay City Council library.

About this website and privacy
European Union (EU) laws require me, as author of this blog, to give EU visitors information about cookies used on this blog. In many cases, these laws may also require me, as author, or Google, as blog host, to obtain consent.

As a courtesy, I note that Google have added the following notice on this blog to help meet these regulations:

"This site uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and analyze traffic. Your IP address and user-agent are shared with Google along with performance and security metrics to ensure quality of service, generate usage statistics, and to detect and address abuse."

. LinkedIn Fender 93 Super Amp PR244 201905
.

Wednesday 8 May 2019

Book: Internal controls and corporate governance (Leeson, Di Sisto, Flanders 3e 2009)

Internal controls and corporate governance (3e 2009)
Leeson, D., Di Sisto, S., & Flanders, D. (2009). Internal controls and corporate governance (Third ed.). Frenchs Forest, N.S.W: Pearson Australia.
ISBN 9781442504660

Review
Not exactly a title that would be on most people's reading lists: but I am learning a lot from this book even if it is nearly ten years old. Data is gold and it is being traded in dark places. The more we rely on access to information, the more n'er-do-goods can make money from trading in other peoples' data. This book gives some insight into how and why protecting data is imperative in this era.
Other reading of related texts
Reference List / In-Text Citation Styles in APA 6th
Please Note: I do not strictly follow APA style in these citations as I would like various technology and media to be able to access these pages.
Johnson, G., & Scholes, K. (2002). Exploring corporate strategy: [text and cases](sixth ed.). Harlow: Prentice Hall/Financial Times.
Christopher, W. F., & Thor, C. G. (1993). Handbook for productivity measurement and improvement. Portland: Productivity Press.


20190508
Internal controls and corporate governance (3e 2009)


Unless otherwise noted all books listed were in my personal library at the time of the first blog posting about the book. Some titles were borrowed from RMIT University libraries during the period 2006-2016, or from Hobsons Bay City Council library.

About this website and privacy
European Union (EU) laws require me, as author of this blog, to give EU visitors information about cookies used on this blog. In many cases, these laws may also require me, as author, or Google, as blog host, to obtain consent.

As a courtesy, I note that Google have added the following notice on this blog to help meet these regulations:

"This site uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and analyze traffic. Your IP address and user-agent are shared with Google along with performance and security metrics to ensure quality of service, generate usage statistics, and to detect and address abuse."

. LinkedIn Fender 93 Super Amp PR244 201905
.
RELATED BOOKS NOT PURCHASED 20190515 [RICHMOND] 9780470810910 04708109123E 2007/2011 [6e 2015]

9780070277687

9780070277694

9781907643101 1907643109 p93 Can OR Do effect business?