Computational science for undergraduate biologists via QUT.Bio.Excel

Molecular biology is a scientific discipline which has changed fundamentally in character over the past decade to rely on large scale datasets – public and locally generated - and their computational analysis and annotation. Undergraduate education of biologists must increasingly couple this domain context with a data-driven computational scientific method. Yet modern programming and scripting languages and rich computational environments such as R and MATLAB present significant barriers to those with limited exposure to computer science, and may require substantial tutorial assistance over an extended period if progress is to be made. In this paper we report our experience of undergraduate bioinformatics education using the familiar, ubiquitous spreadsheet environment of Microsoft Excel. We describe a configurable extension called QUT.Bio.Excel, a custom ribbon, supporting a rich set of data sources, external tools and interactive processing within the spreadsheet, and a range of problems to demonstrate its utility and success in addressing the needs of students over their studies.

Experience has no shadow

This research is situated in the field of practice-led research investigating embodied perspectives on the performance of dance making. In the stock of choreographic literature, the celebrated ‘creativity’ label is associated predominantly with the choreographer and is discussed in terms of product rather than process (Lussier-Ley and Durand-Bush 2009; Hennessey 2003). A reliance on the mystery of inspiration or choreographic genius (Penty 1998) for the production of ‘great’ dance works does not acknowledge the complex and timely process common in the creation of dance (Mace and Ward 2002) nor provide a true representation of the creative contributors (Farrer 2014). The failure to attribute creative impulses and skills to dancers is reminiscent of a time when they were thought of only as instruments in the creative process not active participants and collaborators (Jowitt 2001a; H’Doubler 1957). This project asked the question, to what end do dancers contribute to choreography and how is this contribution valued and recognised? Dancers are integral to the creative process. The research found that the scope of a dancers’ creative involvement in the development of a new work is dependent on: the individual choreographers approach to creating movement; the relationship between dancer and choreographer, and dancer and fellow company members; and the dancers collaborative skills and interpretive skills, versatility, and initiative. Recognition and attribution of dancers’ creative input is dependent on a choreographer’s viewpoint, generosity, and prior creative experiences. The work was created as a part of the Ausdance Queensland 2010 Bell Tower III Choreographic Residency program. Applicants were peer reviewed and vetted by a panel of local and national dance producers. The creative work was presented at the Judith Wright Centre for Live Arts. The project was funded by Ausdance Queensland and Arts Queensland. https://es-es.facebook.com/events/106661226023025/?hc_location=stream

Information Experience : Approaches to Theory and Practice

"The German word for experience - Erlebnis - the experience of the life, to live through something - underpins this book: making visible scholarly opportunities for richer and deeper contextualizations and examinations of the lived-world experiences of people in everyday contexts as they be, do and become." (Ross Todd, Preface). Information experience is a burgeoning area of research and still unfolding as an explicit research and practice theme. This book is therefore very timely as it distils the reflections of researchers and practitioners from various disciplines, with interests ranging across information, knowledge, user experience, design and education. They cast a fresh analytical eye on information experience, whilst approaching the idea from diverse perspectives. Information Experience brings together current thinking about the idea of information experience to help form discourse around it and establish a conceptual foundation for taking the idea forward. It therefore "provides a number of theoretical lenses for examining people's information worlds in more holistic and dynamic ways." (Todd, Preface)

A digital airport experience : design-led innovation in support of airport strategy

The digital era is proving to be one of disruption, where new technologies matched with innovative business models can be harnessed to attack even the most established of companies. For businesses with the relative certainty of captive customer bases, such as airports, the ability to digitally diversify offers the opportunity to venture into new modes of operation. For an airport, this opportunity can also be leveraged to sustain superior customer support regardless of a customer’s location in the world. This research paper presents a case study of the development of an Australian Airport Corporation’s mobile application as part of a greater digital strategy initiative using a design-led approach to innovate. An action research method provides the platform for an intensive embedded practice and study of design-led innovation within the major Australian Airport Corporation. The findings reveal design-led innovation to be a crucial in-house idea generation and concept development capability enabling the bridging of distinct corporate domains associated with commercialisation, operations and customer experience. A Digital Innovation Checklist is presented as an output of this research which structures an organizational approach toward digital channel innovation. The practitioner’s checklist is designed to aid in the future development of digital channels within the broader spectrum of strategy by addressing business assumptions.

Design research for the real world : a design-led innovation model for action research

The aim of this paper is to aid researchers in undertaking action research within industry with a particular focus on the study of design-led innovation. This paper presents the research design of a case study shaped to solve real world problems concerning a major Australian Airport Corporation by bridging the chasm between academia and industry. The researcher’s role is one of design-innovation catalyst, facilitating the integration of design as a new strategic capability and innovation approach within an organisation’s fabric. A discussion of the researcher experience within industry will provide evidence on the challenges facing such a research role, with strategies for overcoming these barriers presented. Based on the authors’ experience as a researcher within industry and reflection within practice, a project progression model for action research is presented to enable the improved management of industry based research.

An orientation to early childhood education for sustainability and research : framing the text

This publication arose from the interests of the chapter authors, ‘a small group of thoughtful people’ almost all of whom participated in one or both Transnational Dialogues in Research in Early Childhood Education for Sustainability, held in Stavanger, Norway in 2010 and Brisbane, Australia in 2011 (Refer Appendix 1 for list of participants). These meetings were the first time that a critical mass of researchers from vastly different parts of the globe - Norway, Sweden, Australia and New Zealand at the inaugural meeting, with additional participants from Korea, Japan and Singapore attending the second - had come together to debate, discuss and share ideas about research and theory in the emerging field of Early Childhood Education for Sustainability (ECEfS. Some of the researchers who joined these Transnational Dialogues, had met serendipitously at earlier conferences and meetings, or corresponded via email, but many had never met face-to-face. Now a significant number are contributing authors in this text. It is a testament to these researchers’ interest in this agenda that they mostly self-funded their travel and other costs to attend the Transnational Dialogues research meetings. While most chapter authors come from the field of early childhood education, a few are more aligned with education for sustainability/environmental education, while a much smaller number are already working at the intersection of early childhood education and education for sustainability. What we share as a group is a range of perspectives and orientations to research and to the research focus at the heart of this book - young children and their actual and potential capabilities as agents of change for sustainability. As researchers, regardless of experience and perspectives, participants knew they had something extra to offer - their expertise as researchers - providing scholarly insights into the work of practitioners, applying critically reflective lenses to curricula, pedagogies and assumptions, testing of ideas and theories, and presenting a sense for where ECEfS might fit or, indeed, go beyond norms and orthodoxies. This is a text, then, for both researchers and those whose primary interests lie in daily interactions with children, families and communities.

Information Experience : Contemporary Perspectives

The purpose of this book is to open a conversation on the idea of information experience, which we understand to be a complex, multidimensional engagement with information. In developing the book we invited colleagues to propose a chapter on any aspect of information experience, for example conceptual, methodological or empirical. We invited them to express their interpretation of information experience, to contribute to the development of this concept. The book has thus become a vehicle for interested researchers and practitioners to explore their thinking around information experience, including relationships between information experience, learning experience, user experience and similar constructs. It represents a collective awareness of information experience in contemporary research and practice. Through this sharing of multiple perspectives, our insights into possible ways of interpreting information experience, and its relationship to other concepts in information research and practice, is enhanced. In this chapter, we introduce the idea of information experience. We also outline the book and its chapters, and bring together some emerging alternative views and approaches to this important idea.

Diversifying Information Literacy Research : An Informed Learning Perspective

This article uses the idea of informed learning, an interpretation of information literacy that focuses on people’s information experiences rather than their skills or attributes, to analyse the character of using information to learn in diverse communities and settings, including digital, faith, indigenous and ethnic communities. While researchers of information behaviour or information seeking and use have investigated people’s information worlds in diverse contexts, this work is still at its earliest stages in the information literacy domain. To date, information literacy research has largely occurred in what might be considered mainstream educational and workplace contexts, with some emerging work in community settings. These have been mostly in academic libraries, schools and government workplaces. What does information literacy look like beyond these environments? How might we understand the experience of effective information use in a range of community settings, from the perspective of empirical research and other sources? The article concludes by commenting on the significance of diversifying the range of information experience contexts, for information literacy research and professional practice.

Adoption of accountable-eHealth systems by future healthcare professionals: An empirical research model based on the Australian context

This paper provides a first look at the acceptance of Accountable-eHealth systems, a new genre of eHealth systems, designed to manage information privacy concerns that hinder the proliferation of eHealth. The underlying concept of AeH systems is appropriate use of information through after-the-fact accountability for intentional misuse of information by healthcare professionals. An online questionnaire survey was utilised for data collection from three educational institutions in Queensland, Australia. A total of 23 hypothesis relating to 9 constructs were tested using a structural equation modelling technique. A total of 334 valid responses were received. The cohort consisted of medical, nursing and other health related students studying at various levels in both undergraduate and postgraduate courses. The hypothesis testing disproved 7 hypotheses. The empirical research model developed was capable of predicting 47.3% of healthcare professionals’ perceived intention to use AeH systems. A validation of the model with a wider survey cohort would be useful to confirm the current findings.

A Statutory interpretation EXperience : putting the SEX into statutory interpretation

With the growing proliferation of statute laws, the skill of statutory interpretation is an increasingly important aspect of legal practice. Despite the importance, statutory interpretation can be a challenging area of law to teach to undergraduate law students, who may find the topic dry and disengaging when taught through traditional methods. Such disengagement may adversely affect knowledge retention, particularly if the material is taught in the first or second year of study and not explicitly reinforced in subsequent years. Concern over the present standard of statutory interpretation skills being exhibited by practitioners, has prompted the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Queensland to contact law schools, enquiring how and to what extent statutory interpretation is being taught...

Experience has no shadow : Bell tower III

I created Experience Has No Shadow (2010) following a successful Ausdance Qld choreographic grant in 2010, which comprised of two solos and a video-dance at the Performance Space at the Judith Wright Centre. The aim of the Bell Tower III residency was to research and construct a Stage One Development that explored choreographic approaches to oral histories. Like many first generation Australians, oral histories are the way memories and experiences of distant homelands often offer the only connection to cultural origins. Consequently, I drew on auto-ethnographic references in the form of family stories – specifically those of my mother’s family - told and retold by my mother and her family as East German refugees during World War II. While working on the video, I explored a way to make a direct connection to the past stories by using a recording of my mother’s voice. She is re-telling a favourite story about Salamo the circus horse that was sold to my great grandfather as a work horse. Rather than representing the text literally, I attempted to capture the intensity of the storytelling which accompanied abstract footage of Avril Huddy filmed through perspex glass producing animal-like shapes that continually blur and morph in and out of focus. Strangely, by tying the story in with the filmed images a whole new story seems to emerge. Two distinct solos were created in collaboration with the performers, Expressions Dance Company’s Elise May and QUT’s Avril Huddy. These were performed at the Judith Wright Centre for Contemporary Arts, Performance Space, 1st April, 2010. The simplicity of its design became a key concept behind the work in terms of sets, spacing requirements, and costumes – almost minimalist. The choreographic process was conceived as highly collaborative, with commissioned music (and eventually lighting features) to act as equal partners in the performance.

Neural bases for individual differences in the subjective experience of short durations (less than 2 seconds)

The current research was designed to establish whether individual differences in timing performance predict neural activation in the areas that subserve the perception of short durations ranging between 400 and 1600 milliseconds. Seventeen participants completed both a temporal bisection task and a control task, in a mixed fMRI design. In keeping with previous research, there was increased activation in a network of regions typically active during time perception including the right supplementary motor area (SMA) and right pre-SMA and basal ganglia (including the putamen and right pallidum). Furthermore, correlations between neural activity in the right inferior frontal gyrus and SMA and timing performance corroborate the results of a recent meta-analysis and are further evidence that the SMA forms part of a neural clock that is responsible for the accumulation of temporal information. Specifically, subjective lengthening of the perceived duration were associated with increased activation in both the right SMA (and right pre-SMA) and right inferior frontal gyrus.

Information experience : approaches to theory and practice

The Queensland University of Technology Research Team has recently edited a book on the idea of information experience. Authors from many parts of the world and focussed on many contexts have contributed chapters. The book represents the first attempt to profile and discuss information experience as a research domain and a research object, together with emphasis on different theories and methods being used in workplace, educational and community contexts. In this session members of the editorial team will introduce the book. We anticipate it will be of interest to any information professionals, students or researchers interested in understanding peoples' information experience.