"Doing” social justice in early childhood: The potential of leadership

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) has long been connected with objectives related to social justice. ECEC in Australia has its roots in philanthropic and educational reform movements, and more recently with the National Early Childhood Reform Agenda, ECEC has once more been linked to the redressing inequality and disadvantage. Drawing on extant literature, including data from two previously reported Australian studies in which leadership emerged as having a transformational impact on service delivery, this paper examines the potential of early childhood leadership to generate ‘socially just’ educational communities. With reference to critical theory, we argue that critically informed, intentional and strategic organisational leadership can play a pivotal role in creating changed circumstances and opportunities for children and families.

Developing knowledge and leadership in pre-service teacher education systems

Pre-service teacher education institutions are large and complex organizations, which are notoriously difficult to change. One factor is that many change efforts focus largely on individual pre-service teacher educators altering their practice. We report here on our experience using a model for effecting change, which views pre-service teacher education institutions and educators as a part of a much broader system. We identified numerous possibilities for, and constraints on, embedding change, but focus only on two in this paper: participants’ knowledge of change strategies and their leadership capacities. As a result of our study findings and researcher reflections, we argue that being a leader in an academic area within pre-service teacher education does not equate to leadership knowledge or skills to initiate and enact systems-wide change. Furthermore, such leadership capacities must be explicitly developed if education for sustainability is to become embedded in pre-service teacher education.

Learning to lead: The development and testing of a model of leadership learning

Drawing upon an action learning perspective, we hypothesized that a leader’s learning of project leadership skills would be related to facilitative leadership, team reflexivity, and team performance. Secondly, we proposed that new and experienced leaders would differ in the amount they learn from their current and recent experience as project managers, and in the strength of the relationship between their self-reported learning, facilitative leadership, and team reflexivity. We conducted a 1-year longitudinal study of 50 R&D teams, led by 25 new and 25 experienced leaders, with 313 team members and 22 project customers, collecting both quantitative and qualitative data. We found evidence of a significant impact of the leader’s learning on subsequent facilitative leadership and team performance 8 and 12 months later, suggesting a lag between learning leadership skills and translating these skills into leadership behavior. The findings contribute to an understanding of how leaders consolidate their learned experience into facilitative leadership behavior.

Improving wound management for residents in Residential Aged Care Facilities: National dissemination and implementation of the evidence based Champions for Skin Integrity Program

Overview The incidence of skin tears, pressure injuries and chronic wounds increases with age [1-4] and therefore is a serious issue for staff and residents in Residential Aged Care Facilities (RACFs). A pilot project funded in Round 2 of the Encouraging Best Practice in Residential Aged Care (EBPRAC) program by the then Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing found that a substantial proportion of residents in aged care facilities experienced pressure injuries, skin tears or chronic wounds. It also found the implementation of the evidence based Champions for Skin Integrity (CSI) model of wound care was successful in significantly decreasing the prevalence and severity of wounds in residents, improving staff skills and knowledge of evidence based wound management, increasing staff confidence with wound management, increasing implementation of evidence based wound management and prevention strategies, and increasing staff awareness of their roles in evidence based wound care at all levels [5]. Importantly, during the project, the project team developed a resource kit on evidence based wound management. Two critical recommendations resulting from the project were that: - The CSI model or a similar strategic approach should be implemented in RACFs to facilitate the uptake of evidence based wound management and prevention - The resource kit on evidence based wound management should be made available to all Residential Aged Care Facilities and interested parties A proposal to disseminate or rollout the CSI model of wound care to all RACFs across Australia was submitted to the department in 2012. The department approved funding from the Aged Care Services Improvement Healthy Ageing Grant (ACSIHAG) at the same time as the Round 3 of the Encouraging Better Practice in Aged Care (EBPAC) program. The dissemination involved two crucial elements: 1. The updating, refining and distribution of a Champions for Skin Integrity Resource Kit, more commonly known as a CSI Resource Kit and 2. The presentation of intensive one day Promoting Healthy Skin “Train the Trainer” workshops in all capital cities and major regional towns across Australia Due to demand, the department agreed to fund a second round of workshops focussing on regional centres and the completion date was extended to accommodate the workshops. Later, the department also decided to host a departmental website for a number of clinical domains, including wound management, so that staff from the residential aged care sector had easy access to a central repository of helpful clinical resource material that could be used for improving the health and wellbeing of their older adults, consumers and carers. CSI Resource Kit Upgrade and Distribution: At the start of the project, a full evidence review was carried out on the material produced during the EBPRAC-CSI Stage 1 project and the relevant evidence based changes were made to the documentation. At the same time participants in the EBPRAC-CSI Stage 1 project were interviewed for advice on how to improve the resource material. Following this the documentation, included in the kit, was sent to independent experts for peer review. When this process was finalised, a learning designer and QUT’s Visual Communications Services were engaged to completely refine and update the design of the resources, and combined resource kit with the goal of keeping the overall size of the kit suitable for bookshelf mounting and the cost at reasonable levels. Both goals were achieved in that the kit is about the same size as a 25 mm A4 binder and costs between $19.00 and $28.00 per kit depending on the size of the print run. The dissemination of the updated CSI resource kit was an outstanding success. Demand for the kits was so great that a second print run of 2,000 kits was arranged on top of the initial print run of 4,000 kits. All RACFs across Australia were issued with a kit, some 2,740 in total. Since the initial distribution another 1,100 requests for kits has been fulfilled as well as 1,619 kits being distributed to participants at the Promoting Healthy Skin workshops. As the project was winding up a final request email was sent to all workshop participants asking if they required additional kits or resources to distribute the remaining kits and resources. This has resulted in requests for 200 additional kits and resources. Feedback from the residential aged care sector and other clinical providers who have interest in wound care has been very positive regarding the utility of the kit, (see Appendix 4). Promoting Healthy Skin Workshops The workshops also exceeded the project team’s initial objective. Our goal of providing workshop training for staff from one in four facilities and 450 participants was exceeded, with overwhelming demand for workshop places resulting in the need to provide a second round of workshops across Australia. At the completion of the second round, 37 workshops had been given, with 1286 participants, representing 835 facilities. A number of strategies were used to promote the workshops ranging from invitations included in the kit, to postcard mail-outs, broadcast emailing to all facilities and aged care networks and to articles and paid advertising in aged care journals. The most effective method, by far, was directly phoning the facilities. This enabled the caller to contact the relevant staff member and enlist their support for the workshop. As this is a labour intensive exercise, it was only used where numbers needed bolstering, with one venue rising from 3 registrants before the calls to 53 registrants after. The workshops were aimed at staff who had the interest and the capability of implementing evidence-based wound management within their facility or organisation. This targeting was successful in that a large proportion (68%) of participants were Registered Nurses, Nurse Managers, Educators or Consultants. Twenty percent were Endorsed Enrolled Nurses with the remaining 12% being made up of Personal Care Workers or Allied Health Professionals. To facilitate long term sustainability, the workshop employed train-the-trainer strategies. Feedback from the EBPRAC-CSI Stage 1 interviews was used in the development of workshop content. In addition, feedback from the workshop conducted at the end of the EBPRAC-CSI Stage 1 project suggested that change management and leadership training should be included in the workshops. The program was trialled in the first workshop conducted in Brisbane and then rolled out across Australia. Participants were asked to complete pre and post workshop surveys at the beginning and end of the workshop to determine how knowledge and confidence improved over the day. Results from the pre and post surveys showed significant improvements in the level of confidence in attendees’ ability to implement evidence based wound management. The results also indicated a significant increase in the level of confidence in ability to implement change within their facility or organisation. This is an important indication that the inclusion of change management/leadership training with clinical instruction can increase staff capacity and confidence in translating evidence into practice. To encourage the transfer of the evidence based content of the workshop into practice, participants were asked to prepare an Action Plan to be followed by a simple one page progress report three months after the workshop. These reports ranged from simple (e.g. skin moisturising to prevent skin tears), to complex implementation plans for introducing the CSI model across the whole organisation. Outcomes described in the project reports included decreased prevalence of skin tears, pressure injuries and chronic wounds, along with increased staff and resident knowledge and resident comfort. As stated above, some organisations prepared large, complex plans to roll out the CSI model across their organisation. These plans included a review of the organisation’s wound care system, policies and procedures, the creation of new processes, the education of staff and clients, uploading education and resource material onto internal electronic platforms and setting up formal review and evaluation processes. The CSI Resources have been enthusiastically sought and incorporated into multiple health care settings, including aged care, acute care, Medicare Local intranets (e.g. Map of Medicine e-pathways), primary health care, community and home care organisations, education providers and New Zealand aged and community health providers. Recommendations: Recommendations for RACFs, aged care and health service providers and government  Skin integrity and the evidence-practice gap in this area should be recognised as a major health issue for health service providers for older adults, with wounds experienced by up to 50% of residents in aged care settings (Edwards et al. 2010). Implementation of evidence based wound care through the Champions for Skin Integrity model in this and the pilot project has demonstrated the prevalence of wounds, wound healing times and wound infections can be halved.  A national program and Centre for Evidence Based Wound Management should be established to: - expand the reach of the model to other aged care facilities and health service providers for older adults - sustain the uptake of models such as the Champions for Skin Integrity (CSI) model - ensure current resources, expertise and training are available for consumers and health care professionals to promote skin integrity for all older adults  Evidence based resources for the CSI program and similar projects should be reviewed and updated every 3 – 4 years as per NH&MRC recommendations  Leadership and change management training is fundamental to increasing staff capacity, at all levels, to promote within-organisation dissemination of skills and knowledge gained from projects providing evidence based training Recommendations for future national dissemination projects  A formal program of opportunities for small groups of like projects to share information and resources, coordinate activities and synergise education programs interactively would benefit future national dissemination projects - Future workshop programs could explore an incentive program to optimise attendance and reduce ‘no shows’ - Future projects should build in the capacity and funding for increased follow-up with workshop attendees, to explore the reasons behind those who are unable to translate workshop learnings into the workplace and identify factors to address these barriers.

Polysynaptic potentials within the lateral amygdala networks as indicators of reverberatory activity

Synaptic plasticity in the lateral amygdala (LA) may underlie auditory fear conditioning. Hebb postulated that sustained activity in reverberating cellular ensembles can facilitate temporal coincidence detection. Our anatomical data show that LA neurons have extensive local axon collaterals that are topographically organized and that could provide the anatomical basis for reverberatory activity...

Deriving word association networks from text corpora

This article presents and evaluates a model to automatically derive word association networks from text corpora. Two aspects were evaluated: To what degree can corpus-based word association networks (CANs) approximate human word association networks with respect to (1) their ability to quantitatively predict word associations and (2) their structural network characteristics. Word association networks are the basis of the human mental lexicon. However, extracting such networks from human subjects is laborious, time consuming and thus necessarily limited in relation to the breadth of human vocabulary. Automatic derivation of word associations from text corpora would address these limitations. In both evaluations corpus-based processing provided vector representations for words. These representations were then employed to derive CANs using two measures: (1) the well known cosine metric, which is a symmetric measure, and (2) a new asymmetric measure computed from orthogonal vector projections. For both evaluations, the full set of 4068 free association networks (FANs) from the University of South Florida word association norms were used as baseline human data. Two corpus based models were benchmarked for comparison: a latent topic model and latent semantic analysis (LSA). We observed that CANs constructed using the asymmetric measure were slightly less effective than the topic model in quantitatively predicting free associates, and slightly better than LSA. The structural networks analysis revealed that CANs do approximate the FANs to an encouraging degree.

Proceedings of the 3rd International Subtropical Cities Conference 2011 Subtropical Cities: Subtropical Urbanism -Beyond Climate Change

Climate has been, throughout modern history, a primary attribute for attracting residents to the “Sunshine States” of Florida (USA) and Queensland (Australia). The first major group of settlers capitalized on the winter growing season to support a year-­‐round agricultural economy. As these economies developed, the climate attracted tourism and retirement industries. Yet as Florida and Queensland have blossomed under beneficial climates, the stresses acting on the natural environment are exacting a toll. Southeast Florida and eastern Queensland are among the most vulnerable coastal metropolitan areas in the world. In these places the certainty of sea level rise is measurable with impacts, empirically observable, that will continue to increase regardless of any climate change mitigation.1 The cities of the subtropics share a series of paradoxes relating to climate, resources, environment, and culture. As the subtropical climate entices new residents and visitors there are increasing costs associated with urban infrastructure and the ravages of violent weather. The carefree lifestyle of subtropical cities is increasingly dependent on scarce water and energy resources and the flow of tangible goods that support a trade economy. The natural environment is no longer exploitable as the survival of the human environment is contingent upon the ability of natural ecosystems to absorb the impact of human actions. The quality of subtropical living is challenged by the mounting pressures of population growth and rapid urbanization yet urban form and contemporary building design fail to take advantage of the subtropical zone’s natural attributes of abundant sunshine, cooling breezes and warm temperatures. Yet, by building a global network of local knowledge, subtropical cities like Brisbane, the City of Gold Coast and Fort Lauderdale, are confidently leading the way with innovative and inventive solutions for building resiliency and adaptation to climate change. The Centre for Subtropical Design at Queensland University of Technology organized the first international Subtropical Cities conference in Brisbane, Australia, where the “fault-­‐lines” of subtropical cities at breaking points were revealed. The second conference, held in 2008, shed a more optimistic light with the theme "From fault-­‐lines to sight-­‐lines -­‐ subtropical urbanism in 20-­‐20" highlighting the leadership exemplified in the vitality of small and large works from around the subtropical world. Yet beyond these isolated local actions the need for more cooperation and collaboration was identified as the key to moving beyond the problems of the present and foreseeable future. The spirit of leadership and collaboration has taken on new force, as two institutions from opposite sides of the globe joined together to host the 3rd international conference Subtropical Cities 2011 -­‐ Subtropical Urbanism: Beyond Climate Change. The collaboration between Florida Atlantic University and the Queensland University of Technology to host this conference, for the first time in the United States, forges a new direction in international cooperative research to address urban design solutions that support sustainable behaviours, resiliency and adaptation to sea level rise, green house gas (GHG) reduction, and climate change research in the areas of architecture and urban design, planning, and public policy. With southeast Queensland and southern Florida as contributors to this global effort among subtropical urban regions that share similar challenges, opportunities, and vulnerabilities our mutual aim is to advance the development and application of local knowledge to the global problems we share. The conference attracted over 150 participants from four continents. Presentations by authors were organized into three sub-­‐themes: Cultural/Place Identity, Environment and Ecology, and Social Economics. Each of the 22 papers presented underwent a double-­‐blind peer review by a panel of international experts among the disciplines and research areas represented. The Centre for Subtropical Design at the Queensland University of Technology is leading Australia in innovative environmental design with a multi-­‐disciplinary focus on creating places that are ‘at home’ in the warm humid subtropics. The Broward Community Design Collaborative at Florida Atlantic University's College for Design and Social Inquiry has built an interdisciplinary collaboration that is unique in the United States among the units of Architecture, Urban and Regional Planning, Social Work, Public Administration, together with the College of Engineering and Computer Science, the College of Science, and the Center for Environmental Studies, to engage in funded action research through design inquiry to solve the problems of development for urban resiliency and environmental sustainment. As we move beyond debates about climate change -­‐ now acting upon us -­‐ the subtropical urban regions of the world will continue to convene to demonstrate the power of local knowledge against global forces, thereby inspiring us as we work toward everyday engagement and action that can make our cities more livable, equitable, and green.

Service Interface Synthesis in Business Networks

Mismatches between services needing to interoperate have been addressed through the adaptation of structural and behavioural interfaces of services, which in practice incur long lead time through manual, coding effort. We propose a framework, complementary to con- ventional service adaptation, to synthesise service interfaces in the open setting of business networks, allowing consumers to introspect service interfaces and formulate service invocations. The framework also allows evolved service requests, as new features of service capabilities are discov- ered, through interactions with other, similar services. Finally the frame- work fosters reuse of adaptation efforts through normalisation of struc- tural and behavioural interfaces of similar services. This paper provides a first exposition of the service interface synthesis framework, describing patterns containing novel requirements for unilateral service adaptation and detailing the interface synthesis technique. Complex examples of ser- vices drawn from commercial logistic systems are then used to validate the synthesis technique and identify open challenges and future research directions.

Cultural policy and Australia's national cultural heritage: Issues and challenges in the GLAM landscape

In 2012 the Australian Commonwealth government was scheduled to release the first dedicated policy for culture and the arts since the Keating government's Creative Nation (1994). Investing in a Creative Australia was to appear after a lengthy period of consultation between the Commonwealth government and all interested cultural sectors and organisations. When it eventuates, the policy will be of particular interest to those information professionals working in the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) environment. GLAM is a cross-institutional field which seeks to find points of commonality among various cultural-heritage institutions, while still recognising their points of difference. Digitisation, collaboration and convergence are key themes and characteristics of the GLAM sector and its associated theoretical discipline. The GLAM movement has seen many institutions seeking to work together to create networks of practice that are beneficial to the cultural-heritage industry and sector. With a new Australian cultural policy imminent, it is timely to reflect on the issues and challenges that GLAM principles present to national cultural-heritage institutions by discussing their current practices. In doing so, it is possible to suggest productive ways forward for these institutions which could then be supported at a policy level by the Commonwealth government. Specifically, this paper examines four institutions: the National Gallery of Australia, the National Library of Australia, the National Archives of Australia and the National Museum of Australia. The paper reflects on their responses to the Commonwealth's 2011 Cultural Policy Discussion Paper. It argues that by encouraging and supporting collecting institutions to participate more fully in GLAM practices the Commonwealth government's cultural policy would enable far greater public access to, and participation in, Australia's cultural heritage. Furthermore, by considering these four institutions, the paper presents a discussion of the challenges and the opportunities that GLAM theoretical and disciplinary principles present to the cultural-heritage sector. Implications for Best Practice * GLAM is a developing field of theory and practice that encompasses many issues and challenges for practitioners in this area. * GLAM principles and practices are increasingly influencing the cultural-heritage sector. * Cultural policy is a key element in shaping the future of Australia's cultural-heritage sector and needs to incorporate GLAM principles.

Unlearning leadership in the conceptual age

"We live in times in which unlearning has become as important as learning. Dan Pink has called these times the Conceptual Age,i to distinguish them from the Knowledge/Information Age in which many of us were born and educated. Before the current Conceptual Age, the core business of learning was the routine accessing of information to solve routine problems, so there was real value in retaining and reusing the templates taught to us at schools and universities. What is different about the Conceptual Age is that it is characterised by new cultural forms and modes of consumption that require us to unlearn our Knowledge/Information Age habits to live well in our less predictable social world. The ‘correct’ way to write, for example, is no longer ‘correct’ if communicating by hypertext rather than by essay or letter. And who would bother with an essay or a letter or indeed a pen these days? Whether or not we agree that the Conceptual Age, amounts to the first real generation gap since rock and roll, as Ken Robinson claims,ii it certainly makes unique demands of educators, just as it makes unique demands of the systems, strategies and sustainability of organisations. Foremost among these demands, according to innovation analyst Charlie Leadbeater,iii is to unlearn the idea that we are becoming a more knowledgeable society with each new generation. If knowing means being intimately familiar with the knowledge embedded in the technologies we use in our daily lives, then, Leadbeater says, we have never been more ignorant.iv He reminds us that our great grandparents had an intimate knowledge of the technologies around them, and had no problem with getting the butter churn to work or preventing the lamp from smoking. Few of us would know what to do if our mobile phones stopped functioning, just as few of us know what is ‘underneath’ or ‘behind’ the keys of our laptops. Nor, indeed, do many of us want to know. But this means that we are all very quickly reduced to the quill and the lamp if we lose our power sources or if our machines cease to function. This makes us much more vulnerable – as well as much more ignorant in relative terms – than our predecessors."

Prior and posterior linear pooling for combining expert opinions: Uses and impact on Bayesian Networks

The use of expert knowledge to quantify a Bayesian Network (BN) is necessary when data is not available. This however raises questions regarding how opinions from multiple experts can be used in a BN. Linear pooling is a popular method for combining probability assessments from multiple experts. In particular, Prior Linear Pooling (PrLP), which pools opinions then places them into the BN is a common method. This paper firstly proposes an alternative pooling method, Posterior Linear Pooling (PoLP). This method constructs a BN for each expert, then pools the resulting probabilities at the nodes of interest. Secondly, it investigates the advantages and disadvantages of using these pooling methods to combine the opinions of multiple experts. Finally, the methods are applied to an existing BN, the Wayfinding Bayesian Network Model, to investigate the behaviour of different groups of people and how these different methods may be able to capture such differences. The paper focusses on 6 nodes Human Factors, Environmental Factors, Wayfinding, Communication, Visual Elements of Communication and Navigation Pathway, and three subgroups Gender (female, male),Travel Experience (experienced, inexperienced), and Travel Purpose (business, personal) and finds that different behaviors can indeed be captured by the different methods.

Strenthening information literacy through collaboration: Implications for AIM

Because of its size, its excellent VET history, and its emerging higher education provision, AIM is in a special position to be an exemplar of good practice in the VET-HE transition. Many dual sector providers, by virtue of their size, tend to focus on higher education, on the assumption that VET ‘competence’ implies that their VET entrants to HE are confident and capable in information literacy skills. While this is only one of the many challenges that such students face in their undergraduate programs, it is the most critical for most of them in their quest for academic success. All students (school leavers, gap-year participants, articulating, mature age) entering HE will face specific challenges. For articulating students, the nature of credit transfer arrangements will often mean they commence studies in units that are not designated first year units. In this case, the embedded support structures are not as prominent. The existing literature is not consistent in reports on the rates of completion, retention and attrition of articulating students. There is some evidence that VET-qualified students have higher retention rates than school leavers [1], but limited information literacy skills can lead to attrition [2].

Voltage balance improvement in urban low voltage distribution networks

This project is a step forward in developing effective methods to mitigate voltage unbalance in urban residential networks. The method is proposed to reduce energy losses and improve quality of service in strongly unbalanced low-voltage networks. The method is based on phase swapping as well as optimal placement and sizing of Distribution Static Synchronous Compensator (D-STATCOM) using a Particle Swarm Optimisation method.

Being here: Designing for distributed hands-on collaboration in blended interaction spaces

This paper describes a concept for supporting distributed hands-on collaboration through interaction design for the physical and the digital workspace. The Blended Interaction Spaces concept creates distributed work environments in which collaborating parties all feel that they are present “here” rather than “there”. We describe thinking and inspirations behind the Blended Interaction Spaces concept, and summarize findings from fieldwork activities informing our design. We then exemplify the Blended Interaction Spaces concept through a prototype implementation of one of four concepts.

The Library beyond (just) the book: Collaboration and co-working spaces for new technology and new technological practices

Libraries have often been first adopters of many new technological innovations, such as, punch cards, computers, barcodes, and e-book readers. It is thus not surprising that many libraries have embraced the advent of the internet as an opportunity to move away from just being repositories of books, towards becoming ideas stores and local network hubs for entrepreneurial thinking and new creative practices. This presentation will look at the case of “The Edge” – an initiative of the State Library of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, to establish a digital culture centre and learning environment deliberately designed for the co-creation and co-construction of knowledge. This initiative illustrates the potential role of libraries as testing grounds for new technologies and technological practices, which is particularly relevant in the context of the NBN rollout across Australia. It also provides an example of new engagement strategies for innovative co-working spaces that are a vital element in a trend that sees professionals, creatives and designers leave their traditional places of work and embrace the city as their office.