Collaboration between infection control and occupational health in three continents: a success story with international impact

Globalization has been accompanied by the rapid spread of infectious diseases, and further strain on working conditions for health workers globally. Post-SARS, Canadian occupational health and infection control researchers got together to study how to better protect health workers, and found that training was indeed perceived as key to a positive safety culture. This led to developing information and communication technology (ICT) tools. The research conducted also showed the need for better workplace inspections, so a workplace audit tool was also developed to supplement worker questionnaires and the ICT. When invited to join Ecuadorean colleagues to promote occupational health and infection control, these tools were collectively adapted and improved, including face-to-face as well as on-line problem-based learning scenarios. The South African government then invited the team to work with local colleagues to improve occupational health and infection control, resulting in an improved web-based health information system to track incidents, exposures, and occupational injury and diseases. As the H1N1 pandemic struck, the online infection control course was adapted and translated into Spanish, as was a novel skill-building learning tool that permits health workers to practice selecting personal protective equipment. This tool was originally developed in collaboration with the countries from the Caribbean region and the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). Research from these experiences led to strengthened focus on building capacity of health and safety committees, and new modules are thus being created, informed by that work. The products developed have been widely heralded as innovative and interactive, leading to their inclusion into “toolkits” used internationally. The tools used in Canada were substantially improved from the collaborative adaptation process for South and Central America and South Africa. This international collaboration between occupational health and infection control researchers led to the improvement of the research framework and development of tools, guidelines and information systems. Furthermore, the research and knowledge-transfer experience highlighted the value of partnership amongst Northern and Southern researchers in terms of sharing resources, experiences and knowledge.

The use of computer-based learning tools for teaching and clinical purposes: Interactive computing strategy for Iraq

Medical universities and teaching hospitals in Iraq are facing a lack of professional staff due to the ongoing violence that forces them to flee the country. The professionals are now distributed outside the country which reduces the chances for the staff and students to be physically in one place to continue the teaching and limits the efficiency of the consultations in hospitals. A survey was done among students and professional staff in Iraq to find the problems in the learning and clinical systems and how Information and Communication Technology could improve it. The survey has shown that 86% of the participants use the Internet as a learning resource and 25% for clinical purposes while less than 11% of them uses it for collaboration between different institutions. A web-based collaborative tool is proposed to improve the teaching and clinical system. The tool helps the users to collaborate remotely to increase the quality of the learning system as well as it can be used for remote medical consultation in hospitals.

Textual communication in Virtual Environments for real world interaction

Ever since man invented writing he has used text to store and distribute his thoughts. With the advent of computers and the Internet the delivery of these messages has become almost instant. Textual conversations can now be had regardless of location or distance. Advances in computational power for 3D graphics are enabling Virtual Environments(VE) within which users can become increasingly more immersed. By opening these environments to other users such as initially through sharing these text conversations channels, we aim to extend the immersed experience into an online virtual community. This paper examines work that brings textual communications into the VE, enabling interaction between the real and virtual worlds.

Taking the brand promise online: challenges and opportunities

Starting from the fact that a 'brand' is a universal concept regardless of environment, but its enactment changes according to environment, this paper provides pointers about brand building on the internet. It presents a three-level model of a brand to help organisations characterise their brands' promises. By expanding this model it then considers how a brand's promise can be enacted on the internet in order to assess the coherence of the brand. Through considering how some organisations have taken advantage of the internet, it highlights three factors critical for success. Ten key action points for marketers are presented.

Continuous prewarping of time for multiuser interactive virtual environments

Dynamic multi-user interactions in a single networked virtual environment suffer from abrupt state transition problems due to communication delays arising from network latency--an action by one user only becoming apparent to another user after the communication delay. This results in a temporal suspension of the environment for the duration of the delay--the virtual world `hangs'--followed by an abrupt jump to make up for the time lost due to the delay so that the current state of the virtual world is displayed. These discontinuities appear unnatural and disconcerting to the users. This paper proposes a novel method of warping times associated with users to ensure that each user views a continuous version of the virtual world, such that no hangs or jumps occur despite other user interactions. Objects passed between users within the environment are parameterized, not by real time, but by a virtual local time, generated by continuously warping real time. This virtual time periodically realigns itself with real time as the virtual environment evolves. The concept of a local user dynamically warping the local time is also introduced. As a result, the users are shielded from viewing discontinuities within their virtual worlds, consequently enhancing the realism of the virtual environment.

Guiding e-learning: introducing online informal learning to a global voluntary organisation

The World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts (WAGGGS) is the umbrella organisation for Member Organisations from 145 countries around the world, with a total membership of ten million. While Member Organisations offer training and development within their own countries, WAGGGS offers international opportunities. This project seeks to explore how technology can be used to offer similar opportunities to those provided by the face-to-face courses to a much wider audience, while retaining the community and interactive learning aspects of the existing programmes.

"Where am I?" Impact of display and content variables on spatial presence and comprehension in virtual environments

Forgetting immediate physical reality and having awareness of one�s location in the simulated world is critical to enjoyment and performance in virtual environments be it an interactive 3D game such as Quake or an online virtual 3d community space such as Second Life. Answer to the question "where am I?" at two levels, whether the locus is in the immediate real world as opposed to the virtual world and whether one is aware of the spatial co-ordinates of that locus, hold the key to any virtual 3D experience. While 3D environments, especially virtual environments and their impact on spatial comprehension has been studied in disciplines such as architecture, it is difficult to determine the relative contributions of specific attributes such as screen size or stereoscopy towards spatial comprehension since most of them treat the technology as monolith (box-centered). Using a variable-centered approach put forth by Nass and Mason (1990) which breaks down the technology into its component variables and their corresponding values as its theoretical basis, this paper looks at the contributions of five variables (Stereoscopy, screen size, field of view, level of realism and level of detail) common to most virtual environments on spatial comprehension and presence. The variable centered approach can be daunting as the increase in the number of variables can exponentially increase the number of conditions and resources required. We overcome this drawback posed by adoption of such a theoretical approach by the use of a fractional factorial design for the experiment. This study has completed the first wave of data collection and starting the next phase in January 2007 and expected to complete by February 2007. Theoretical and practical implications of the study are discussed.

Digital code-switching between Cypriot and Standard Greek: performance and identity play online

Studies of code-switching in writing are very limited in comparison with the numerous investigations of this phenomenon in oral communication. Recent research has revealed that in text-based computer-mediated communication internet users bring into play the various languages available in their linguistic repertoire and, consequently, switch between them. In this case study, I investigate digital code-switching between Cypriot and Standard Greek, the two varieties of Greek spoken on the island of Cyprus. Following Auer’s conversation analytic approach and Gafaranga’s view that conversational structure coexists with social structure, I investigate code-switching in online interactions. The data to be analysed here, unlike those considered in most studies of code-switching, are written data, obtained from channel #Cyprus of Internet Relay Chat. The results suggest that code-switching in writing is influenced not only by macro-sociolinguistic factors, but they are also shaped by the medium- and social-specific characteristics of Internet Relay Chat. This, in turn, allows internet users to gain access to different roles and perform various identities within this online context.

Writing in a non-standard Greek variety: Romanized Cypriot Greek in online chat

Cypriot Greek, a variety of Greek spoken in the island of Cyprus, is relatively distinct from Standard Greek in all linguistic domains. The regional variety does not have a standard, official orthography and it is rarely used for everyday written purposes. Following technological development and the emergence of Computer-mediated Communication, a Romanized version of written CG is now widely used in online text-based communication, among teenagers and young adults (Themistocleous, C. (2008), The use of Cypriot-Greek in synchronous computer-mediated communication (PhD thesis), University of Manchester). In this study, I present the innovative ways that Greek-Cypriots use Roman characters in an effort to represent features of their spoken language in their online writings. By analysing data obtained from channel #Cyprus of Internet Relay Chat, I demonstrate how the choice of writing in CG affects the ways that Roman characters are used. I argue that this practice is not just a response to technological constrains but it actually has a wider social significance.

How culture and government shape entrepreneurial innovation: the case of Korean and UK online gaming firms

This paper examines institutional sources of product innovation with reference to the online gaming sector of Korea and the UK. It examines the combined impact of formal and informal institutions and their interaction with multiple case studies. Despite the growing importance of innovative products in contemporary entertainment (including interactive games), the ‘informal’ source of innovation has attracted limited attention. By closely looking at the idea exploration, generation and selection process (where creativity plays a major role), we intend to find out how values and public policy affect product innovation. This study shows that the value of Korean and UK online gaming firms (regardless of their different socio-economic contexts) plays an important role in generating product innovation. An additional point is that Korean firms are likely to take advantage of government policy support to overcome inadequate institutional settings in conjunction with the initial conditions of online game development.

Bricks vs clicks: entrepreneurial online banking behaviour and relationship banking

Purpose – Little research has been conducted on the effects of information technology on financing entrepreneurial businesses or small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs). The purpose of this paper is to examine the impacts of entrepreneurial online banking and relationship banking on the severity of financial problems perceived by entrepreneurs and their interactive effect. It also investigates how characteristics of individual businesses and entrepreneurial demographics influence SMEs’ financial situation. Design/methodology/approach – An ordered logistic model is used on a UK dataset to empirically test the hypotheses derived in this paper. The empirical evidence is drawn from the 2004 UK survey of SME finances, which contains a sample of 2,500 firms. Findings – This paper finds that both entrepreneurial online banking behaviour and relationship banking alleviates the severity of financial problems perceived by entrepreneurs. The relationship affect is less evident for entrepreneurs who most frequently use an online approach to communicate with their banks than for those using traditional methods. Business and entrepreneur characteristics also have a strong impact on the severity of the financial problems suffered by SMEs. Originality/value – This paper provides evidence supporting the favourable impacts of the application of information technology on entrepreneurial finance from the perspective of entrepreneur/business. It also identifies a substitute relationship between entrepreneurial online banking behaviour and relationship banking, a relationship which contradicts existing evidence.

Online orthographies

The representation in online environments of non-Roman-based script languages has proved problematic. During the initial years of Computer-mediated Communication, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange character set only supported Roman-alphabeted languages. The solution for speakers of languages written in non-Roman scripts was to employ unconventional writing systems, in an effort to represent their native language in online discourse. The first aim of this chapter is to present the different ways that internet users choose to transliterate or even transcribe their native languages online, using Roman characters. With technological development, and consequently the availability of various writing scripts online, internet users now have the option to either use Roman characters or their native script. If the latter is chosen, internet users still seem to deviate from conventional ways of writing, in this case, however, with regards to spelling. The second aim, therefore, is to bring into light recent developments, by looking at the ways that internet users manipulate orthography, to achieve their communicative purposes.

Written Cypriot Greek in online chat: Usage and attitudes

This paper investigates the attitudes of Greek-Cypriot internet users towards written Cypriot Greek (CG) in online chat. CG does not have a standard official orthography and it is only used in informal oral communication. With the emergence of computer-mediated communication (CMC), a novel Romanized form of CG is used instead of Standard Greek (SG) in online environments (Themistocleous 2005). To investigate language attitudes, an online questionnaire was distributed electronically to Greek-Cypriot internet users. The results show that the majority of the informants have positive attitudes towards written CG, a practice that goes against the results of previous attitudinal surveys. In this paper, I demonstrate how the internet can influence and change the attitudes of Greek-Cypriots towards their regional variety. It is argued that the unconventional and norm-free character of CMC allows internet users to use their non-standard variety in a domain where the standard would be expected to be used.

Elderly learners and Massive Open Online Courses: a review

Background: Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have become commonplace in the e-learning landscape. Thousands of elderly learners are participating in courses offered by various institutions on a multitude of platforms in many different languages. However, there is very little research into understanding elderly learners in MOOCs. Objective: We aim to show that a considerable proportion of elderly learners are participating in MOOCs and that there is a lack of research in this area. We hope this assertion of the wide gap in research on elderly learners in MOOCs will pave the way for more research in this area. Methods: Pre-course survey data for 10 University of Reading courses on the FutureLearn platform were analyzed to show the level of participation of elderly learners in MOOCs. Two MOOC aggregator sites (Class Central and MOOC List) were consulted to gather data on MOOC offerings that include topics relating to aging. In parallel, a selected set of MOOC platform catalogues, along with a recently published review on health and medicine-related MOOCs, were searched to find courses relating to aging. A systematic literature search was then employed to identify research articles on elderly learners in MOOCs. Results: The 10 courses reviewed had a considerable proportion of elderly learners participating in them. For the over-66 age group, this varied from 0.5% (on the course “Managing people”) to 16.3% (on the course “Our changing climate”), while for the over-56 age group it ranged from 3.0% (on “A beginners guide to writing in English”) to 39.5% (on “Heart health”). Only six MOOCs were found to include topics related to aging: three were on the Coursera platform, two on the FutureLearn platform, and one on the Open2Study platform. Just three scholarly articles relating to MOOCs and elderly learners were retrieved from the literature search. Conclusions: This review presents evidence to suggest that elderly learners are already participating in MOOCs. Despite this, there has been very little research into their engagement with MOOCs. Similarly, there has been little research into exploiting the scope of MOOCs for delivering topics that would be of interest to elderly learners. We believe there is potential to use MOOCs as a way of tackling the issue of loneliness among older adults by engaging them as either resource personnel or learners.