Using the WWW to teach undergraduate nurses clinical communication

On-line learning is increasingly being used in nursing education. Nevertheless, there is still insufficient evidence to demonstrate: whether students respond positively when this form of learning is used to teach relatively practical or clinical subjects; whether it is effective; and whether it is fair to students with less access to, or familiarity with, computers and the internet. In 2003, an on-line Unit on clinical communication was developed for Australian undergraduate nurses in partnership between an Australian School of Nursing and the a Department of Clinical Psychology. Students were overwhelmingly positive in their evaluation of the Unit although some regretted the lack of face-to-face contact with tutors and peers. The best aspects of the Unit included the content and structure being perceived as interesting, fun and informative, the relevance of the material for them as nurses, flexibility to work independently, promotion of critical thinking and gaining an understanding of client issues. Neither their evaluation nor their final grades were related to students’ age or whether they preferred on-line or traditional learning. Students who had readily available computer access, however, had better final grades. Also, students’ grades were correlated with how often they accessed the Unit.

Evaluation of channel congestion in dedicated short-range communication networks

This thesis presents a novel idea for an adaptive prioritized cross-layer design (APCLD) control algorithm to achieve comprehensive channel congestion control for vehicular safety communication based on DSRC technology. An appropriate evaluation metric and two control parameters have been established. Simulation studies have evaluated the DSRC network performance in different traffic scenario and under different channel conditions. The APCLD algorithm is derived from the results of the simulation analysis.

Changing the company name : a model for identity change through communication

In an ever evolving business landscape, change is an ever present part of any organisation’s lifecycle. This thesis presents communication as a fundamental element of effective change management. Drawing from the existing change communication literature and two case studies, this thesis examines how organisations utilise strategic change communication to manage identity change. As a result this study presents a conceptual model that outlines a process of change communication strategy and implementation. This model is offered as a step toward connecting important scholarship into a more comprehensive portrait of change communication during identity change than so far has been available.

Self and other in communication and cognition : the role of auto-communication and intersubjectivity in autopoiesis of psychic systems

By referring to Niklas Luhmann's theory of self-referential systems, Aldo Mascareño (2008, submitted for publication) gives an account of system-environment interrelatedness, explaining how social and individual constitute each other through the process of communication and co-creation of meanings. Two possible extensions to his account are discussed. Firstly, auto-communication within the system that happens without any external reference needs to be taken into account while describing the existence and constant re-creation of psychic systems. Secondly, in order for the system and environment or two systems to communicate, an imagined and temporary intersubjectivity between the two needs to be assumed.

Decentralised Communication in Autonomous Agent Swarms

Communication and information diffusion are typically difficult in situations where centralised structures may become unavailable. In this context, decentralised communication based on epidemic broadcast becomes essential. It can be seen as an opportunity-based flooding for message broadcasting within a swarm of autonomous agents, where each entity tries to share the information it possesses with its neighbours. As an example of applications for such a system, we present simulation results where agents have to coordinate to map an unknown area.

Communication and essentialism: Grounding the shared reality of a social category

Essentialism is an ontological belief that there exists an underlying essence to a category. This article advances and tests in three studies the hypothesis that communication about a social category, and expected or actual mutual validation, promotes essentialism about a social category. In Study 1, people who wrote communications about a social category to their ingroup audiences essentialized it more strongly than those who simply memorized about it. In Study 2, communicators whose messages about a novel social category were more elaborately discussed with a confederate showed a stronger tendency to essentialize it. In Study 3, communicators who elaborately talked about a social category with a naive conversant also essentialized the social category. A meta-analysis of the results supported the hypothesis that communication promotes essentialism. Although essentialism has been discussed primarily in perceptual and cognitive domains, the role of social processes as its antecedent deserves greater attention.

Enterprise-related crisis communication on Twitter

The rise of social media as communication channels has enabled customers to provide feedback or to ask for assistance quickly and easily. In the context of brand crises, the microblogging platform Twitter is highly relevant because of its ability to support information sharing. By investigating communication on Twitter, the authors examine Twitter activity patterns based on a dataset of some 240,000 tweets during two major brand crises affecting the Australian airline Qantas – the volcanic ash cloud caused by the eruption of Chilean volcano Puyehue in June 2011, and the global grounding of Qantas flights by management in the course of an industrial dispute in October/November 2011. Through this case study we find that characteristics of communication change significantly during different stages of the crisis. Further, we demonstrate that different kinds of crisis result in different communication patterns on Twitter.

Exploring factors influencing adherence to lifestyle modifications in Chinese people with hypertension: The role of concordance during health communication

This study investigated the factors influencing the conduct of modifying unhealthy lifestyles in Chinese people with high blood pressure, and examined the effect of health communication between health professionals and patients on their health behaviours. The thesis proposes a new theoretical framework to explain and predict individuals' behaviours which can be used to design interventions to improve their health behaviours.

Reliable, cloud-based communication for multi-robot systems

In contrast to single robotic agent, multi-robot systems are highly dependent on reliable communication. Robots have to synchronize tasks or to share poses and sensor readings with other agents, especially for co-operative mapping task where local sensor readings are incorporated into a global map. The drawback of existing communication frameworks is that most are based on a central component which has to be constantly within reach. Additionally, they do not prevent data loss between robots if a failure occurs in the communication link. During a distributed mapping task, loss of data is critical because it will corrupt the global map. In this work, we propose a cloud-based publish/subscribe mechanism which enables reliable communication between agents during a cooperative mission using the Data Distribution Service (DDS) as a transport layer. The usability of our approach is verified by several experiments taking into account complete temporary communication loss.

Effective communication during disasters: What effects community decision making & action?

Study/Objective This paper describes a program of research examining emergency messaging during the response and early recovery phases of natural disasters. The objective of this suite of studies is to develop message construction frameworks and channels that maximise community compliance with instructional messaging. The research has adopted a multi-hazard approach and considers the impact of formal emergency messages, as well as informal messages (e.g., social media posts), on community compliance. Background In recent years, media reports have consistently demonstrated highly variable community compliance to instructional messaging during natural disasters. Footage of individuals watching a tsunami approaching from the beach or being over-run by floodwaters are disturbing and indicate the need for a clearer understanding of decision making under stress. This project’s multi-hazard approach considers the time lag between knowledge of the event and desired action, as well as how factors such as message fatigue, message ambiguity, and the interplay of messaging from multiple media sources are likely to play a role in an individual’s compliance with an emergency instruction. Methods To examine effective messaging strategy, we conduct a critical analysis of the literature to develop a framework for community consultation and design experiments to test the potential for compliance improvement. Results Preliminary results indicate that there is, as yet, little published evidence on which to base decisions about emergency instructional messages to threatened communities. Conclusion The research described here will contribute improvements in emergency instructional message compliance by generating an evidence-based framework that takes into account behavioural compliance theory, the psychology of decision making under stress, and multiple channels of communication including social media.

Effective communication during disasters

This paper describes a program of research examining emergency messaging during the response and early recovery phases of natural disasters. The objective of this suite of studies is to develop message construction frameworks and channels that maximise community compliance with instructional messaging. The research has adopted a multi-hazard approach and considers the impact of formal emergency messages, as well as informal messages (e.g., social media posts), on community compliance. In recent years, media reports have consistently demonstrated highly variable community compliance to instructional messaging during natural disasters. Footage of individuals watching a tsunami approaching from the beach or being over-run by floodwaters are disturbing and indicate the need for a clearer understanding of decision making under stress. This project’s multi-hazard approach considers the time lag between knowledge of the event and desired action, as well as how factors such as message fatigue, message ambiguity, and the interplay of messaging from multiple media sources are likely to play a role in an individual’s compliance with an emergency instruction. To examine effective messaging strategy, we conduct a critical analysis of the literature to develop a framework for community consultation and design experiments to test the potential for compliance improvement. Preliminary results indicate that there is, as yet, little published evidence on which to base decisions about emergency instructional messages to threatened communities. The research described here will contribute improvements in emergency instructional message compliance by generating an evidence-based framework that takes into account behavioural compliance theory, the psychology of decision making under stress, and multiple channels of communication including social media.

Projecting the new world city: The city as spectacle in an urban light festival

As a precursor to the 2014 G20 Leaders’ Summit held in Brisbane, Australia, the Queensland Government sponsored a program of G20 Cultural Celebrations, designed to showcase the Summit’s host city. The cultural program’s signature event was the Colour Me Brisbane festival, a two-week ‘citywide interactive light and projection installations’ festival that was originally slated to run from 24 October to 9 November, but which was extended due to popular demand to conclude with the G20 Summit itself on 16 November. The Colour Me Brisbane festival comprised a series projection displays that promoted visions of the city’s past, present, and future at landmark sites and iconic buildings throughout the city’s central business district and thus transformed key buildings into forms of media architecture. In some instances the media architecture installations were interactive, allowing the public to control aspects of the projections through a computer interface situated in front of the building; however, the majority of the installations were not interactive in this sense. The festival was supported by a website that included information regarding the different visual and interactive displays and links to social media to support public discussion regarding the festival (Queensland Government 2014). Festival-goers were also encouraged to follow a walking-tour map of the projection sites that would take them on a 2.5 kilometre walk from Brisbane’s cultural precinct, through the city centre, concluding at parliament house. In this paper, we investigate the Colour Me Brisbane festival and the broader G20 Cultural Celebrations as a form of strategic placemaking—designed, on the one hand, to promote Brisbane as a safe, open, and accessible city in line with the City Council’s plan to position Brisbane as a ‘New World City’ (Brisbane City Council 2014). On the other hand, it was deployed to counteract growing local concerns and tensions over the disruptive and politicised nature of the G20 Summit by engaging the public with the city prior to the heightened security and mobility restrictions of the Summit weekend. Harnessing perspectives from media architecture (Brynskov et al. 2013), urban imaginaries (Cinar & Bender 2007), and social media analysis, we take a critical approach to analysing the government-sponsored projections, which literally projected the city onto itself, and public responses to them via the official, and heavily promoted, social media hashtags (#colourmebrisbane and #g20cultural). Our critical framework extends the concepts of urban phantasmagoria and urban imaginaries into the emerging field of media architecture to scrutinise its potential for increased political and civic engagement. Walter Benjamin’s concept of phantasmagoria (Cohen 1989; Duarte, Firmino, & Crestani 2014) provides an understanding of urban space as spectacular projection, implicated in commodity and techno-culture. The concept of urban imaginaries (Cinar & Bender 2007; Kelley 2013)—that is, the ways in which citizens’ experiences of urban environments are transformed into symbolic representations through the use of imagination—similarly provides a useful framing device in thinking about the Colour Me Brisbane projections and their relation to the construction of place. Employing these critical frames enables us to examine the ways in which the installations open up the potential for multiple urban imaginaries—in the sense that they encourage civic engagement via a tangible and imaginative experience of urban space—while, at the same time, supporting a particular vision and way of experiencing the city, promoting a commodified, sanctioned form of urban imaginary. This paper aims to dissect the urban imaginaries intrinsic to the Colour Me Brisbane projections and to examine how those imaginaries were strategically deployed as place-making schemes that choreograph reflections about and engagement with the city.

Women's perceptions of communication in pregnancy and childbirth: Influences on participation and satisfaction with care

In this study, 3531 Queensland women, who had recently given birth, completed a questionnaire that included questions about their participation in decision making during pregnancy, their ratings of client centred care and perceived quality of care. These data tested a version of Street’s (2001) linguistic model of patient participation in care (LMOPPC), adapted to the maternity context. We investigated how age and education influenced women’s perceptions of their participation and quality of care. Hierarchical multiple regressions revealed that women’s perceived ability to make decisions, and the extent of client-centred communication with maternity care providers were the most influential predictors of participation and perceived quality of care. Participation in care predicted perceived quality of care, but the influence of client-centred communication by a care provider and a woman’s confidence in decision making were stronger predictors of perceived quality of care. Age and education level were not important predictors. These findings extend and support the use of LMOPPC in the maternity context.