An ePortfolio Approach: Supporting Critical Reflection for Pedagogic Innovation

This chapter investigates the capacity of a well-supported holistic ePortfolio program, the QUT Student ePortfolio Program (QSeP), to support critical reflection for pedagogic innovation in higher education, by exploring practice examples. The chapter looks across faculty and discipline areas to illustrate a range of ePortfolio learning case studies, which have led pedagogical innovation across a whole institution, to enhance student learning and support academic teaching. The ePortfolio strategies discussed support innovation in learning and teaching where academics use the ePortfolio approach in different ways to develop connectedness (productive pedagogies) within learning. Students are supported to develop awareness of the connections between formal and informal learning opportunities and between their learning and personal and professional goals. Students are guided to understand what they have learned and how they have learned in terms of generic employability skills or graduate attributes and also in relation to professional standards and competencies and personal goals. In essence, the ePortfolio-supported pedagogy creates capstone events enabling students to develop a professional identity and understanding of ongoing professional development. The examples are drawn from distinct discipline areas and illustrate the capacity of ePortfolio to underpin pedagogic innovation across discipline areas: • Bachelor of Information Technology—the ePortfolio approach supports students to explore the IT industry as a means of clarifying personal expectations and goals, thereby enhancing student potential in the course c• Bachelor of Nursing and Master of Nursing Science—students develop a professional ePortfolio to show development of the nursing competencies • Master of Information Technology—Library and Information students compile a Professional Portfolio for assessment in the Professional Practice subject • Bachelor of Laws—Virtual Law Placement (VLP) is a unit of study that challenges students to critically reflect on their performance and development duringthe work placement Each case study illustrates the academic teaching goal and student ePortfolio task in context. Issues, challenges and support strategies are identified. Comments from the students and their lecturers give an indication of the effectiveness of the ePortfolio approach to meet learning and teaching goals.

Reflections and encounters: Exploring awareness in an academic environment

Earlier work within the CSCW community treated the notion of awareness as an important resource for supporting shared work and work-related activities. However, new trends have emerged in recent times that utilize the notion of awareness beyond work-related activities and explore social, emotional and interpersonal aspects of people’s everyday lives. To investigate this broader notion of awareness, we carried out a field study using ethnographic and cultural probe based methods in an academic setting. Our aim was to study staff members’ everyday activities in their natural surroundings; understand how awareness beyond work-related activities plays out and how it is dealt with. Our field study results shed light on two broad and sometimes overlapping themes of interaction between staff members: 1) self-representations and 2) casual encounters. We provide examples from the field illustrating these two themes. In general, our results show how awareness is closely associated with people’s everyday lives, where they creatively and artfully utilize ordinary resources from their environments to carry out their routine activities. Using the results of our field study, we describe the design of a situated display called Panorama that is meant to support non-critical, non-work-related awareness within work environments.

Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design

Anthony Dunne’s Hertzian Tales is an exploration of the aesthetic and conceptual aspects of industrial design and its potential to bring about social change for the users of electronic objects. It is a provoking and – to first-time readers – positively alarming social commentary on the interrelationship between electronic product design and culture, and the powerful but largely under-explored potential of electronic innovation to trigger social awareness. Hertzian Tales proposes an innovative approach to critical design and therefore serves as a reflection on and a critique of the commercial design practices at large. In this second edition, Dunne reiterates the original rationale for his project: a concern that the majority of industrial designers have unwittingly joined a treadmill culture of post-industrial mass-production – turning out electronic goods that have long simply met the brief of an optimally functioning and eagerly consumable technology.

Structuring time and questioning to achieve tactical awareness in games lessons

Background: A paradigm shift in educational policy to create problem solvers and critical thinkers produced the games concept approach (GCA) in Singapore's Revised Syllabus for Physical Education (1999). A pilot study (2001) conducted on 11 primary school student teachers (STs) using this approach identified time management and questioning as two of the major challenges faced by novice teachers. Purpose: To examine the GCA from three perspectives: structure—lesson form in terms of teacher-time and pupil-time; product—how STs used those time fractions; and process—the nature of their questioning (type, timing, and target). Participants and setting: Forty-nine STs from three different PETE cohorts (two-year diploma, four-year degree, two-year post-graduate diploma) volunteered to participate in the study conducted during the penultimate week of their final practicum in public primary and secondary schools. Intervention: Based on the findings of the pilot study, PETE increased the emphasis on GCA content specific knowledge and pedagogical procedures. To further support STs learning to actualise the GCA, authentic micro-teaching experiences that were closely monitored by faculty were provided in schools nearby. Research design: This is a descriptive study of time-management and questioning strategies implemented by STs on practicum. Each lesson was segmented into a number of sub-categories of teacher-time (organisation, demonstration and closure) and pupil-time (practice time and game time). Questions were categorised as knowledge, technical, tactical or affective. Data collection: Each ST was video-taped teaching a GCA lesson towards the end of their final practicum. The STs individually determined the timing of the data collection and the lesson to be observed. Data analysis: Each lesson was segmented into a number of sub-categories of both teacher- and pupil-time. Duration recording using Noldus software (Observer 4.0) segmented the time management of different lesson components. Questioning was coded in terms of type, timing and target. Separate MANOVAs were used to measure the difference between programmes and levels (primary and secondary) in relation to time-management procedures and questioning strategies. Findings: No differences emerged between the programmes or levels in their time-management or questioning strategies. Using the GCA, STs generated more pupil time (53%) than teacher time (47%). STs at the primary level provided more technical practice, and those in secondary schools more small-sided game play. Most questions (58%) were asked during play or practice but were substantially low-order involving knowledge or recall (76%) and only 6.7% were open-ended or divergent and capable of developing tactical awareness. Conclusions: Although STs are delivering more pupil time (practice and game) than teacher-time, the lesson structure requires further fine-tuning to extend the practice task beyond technical drills. Many questions are being asked to generate knowledge about games but lack sufficient quality to enhance critical thinking and tactical awareness, as the GCA intends.

Situation awareness application

This thesis describes the design and implementation of a situation awareness application. The application gathers data from sensors including accelerometers for monitoring earthquakes, carbon monoxide sensors for monitoring fires, radiation detectors, and dust sensors. The application also gathers Internet data sources including data about traffic congestion on daily commute routes, information about hazards, news relevant to the user of the application, and weather. The application sends the data to a Cloud computing service which aggregates data streams from multiple sites and detects anomalies. Information from the Cloud service is then displayed by the application on a tablet, computer monitor, or television screen. The situation awareness application enables almost all members of a community to remain aware of critical changes in their environments.

Towards a situation-awareness-driven design of operational business intelligence & analytics systems

With the swamping and timeliness of data in the organizational context, the decision maker’s choice of an appropriate decision alternative in a given situation is defied. In particular, operational actors are facing the challenge to meet business-critical decisions in a short time and at high frequency. The construct of Situation Awareness (SA) has been established in cognitive psychology as a valid basis for understanding the behavior and decision making of human beings in complex and dynamic systems. SA gives decision makers the possibility to make informed, time-critical decisions and thereby improve the performance of the respective business process. This research paper leverages SA as starting point for a design science project for Operational Business Intelligence and Analytics systems and suggests a first version of design principles.

Environmental science and sustainability: some critical thoughts

Environmental science is often described as an interdisciplinary subject, but one firmly grounded in positivist science. Less well recognized is the idea that interdisciplinarity actually challenges fundamental conceptions concerning how reality is understood from an orthodox science perspective. Drawing on recent non-dualism (or post-natural) literature, it is suggested in this paper that there is a need for greater awareness and debate concerning the underlying challenges that ideas of interdisciplinarity and holism present for environmental science. It is argued by aligning environmental science more strongly with non-dualistic traditions (spanning the sciences, arts and religion), fundamental issues are raised concerning how reality is understood and what constitutes valid research methodologies. The concept of intrinsic value is used as one example of the way non-dualistic theory can open up new territories for exploring reality.

Quality Management and Managerialism in Healthcare:: A Critical Historical Survey

Quality Management and Managerialism in Healthcare creates a comprehensive and systematic international survey of various perspectives on healthcare quality management together with some of their most pertinent critiques. Chapter one starts with a general discussion of the factors that drove the introduction of management paradigms into public sector and health management contexts in the mid to late 1980s. Chapter two explores the rise of risk awareness in medicine; which, prior to the 1980s, stood largely in isolation to the implementation of managerial performance targets. Chapter three investigates the widespread adoption of performance management and clinical governance frameworks during the 1980s and 1990s. This is followed by Chapters four and five which examine systems based models of patient safety and the evidence-based medicine movement as exemplars of managerial perspectives on healthcare quality. Chapter six discusses potential future avenues for the development of alternative perspectives on quality of care which emphasise workforce involvement. The book concludes by reviewing the factors which have underpinned the managerialist trajectory of healthcare management over the past decades and explores the potential impact of nascent technologies such as 'connected health' and 'telehealth' on future developments.

The sound of a breaking string: critical environmental law and ontological vulnerability

This is a thought-provoking contribution on the space of ontological vulnerability as the awareness of being existentially exposed. This space, conceptualised as a space of ‘the middle’ (as opposed, emphatically, to ‘the centre’) offers an opportunity to think away from the sterile debate on eco/anthropocentricity and from such limiting hierarchies as animal/human, human/environmental, natural/artificial. This new, vulnerable position of the middle allows the reconfiguration of ecological processes, and more specifically the position of environmental law in relation to them. Environmental law now finds itself amidst a new, moving, ‘open ecology’ of social, biological and ecological processes. This is a new, radical conceptualisation of what the author has called ‘critical environmental law,’ based upon an epistemology of observation and an ontology of being part of this open ecology. Environmental law, in this light, is simultaneously reformulated as an invitation to disciplinary and ontological openness and yet a call to remain immanent within existing legal structures. This finds expression in four critical environmental positions that set the stage for the further elaboration of a critical environmental law.

Valuing and encouraging critical reflection in pre-service teacher education

This qualitative study was designed to investigate aspects related to valuing and encouraging critical reflection in pre-service teacher education. An examination of the place and function of practicum logbooks as used at Covenant Canadian Reformed Teachers' College, a small private college which offers pre-service teacher education formed the core of the research. An analysis of the practicum logbooks written by five student teachers during three different practicum placements was performed at two levels. First, a content analysis served to identify general and specific categories within the practice teaching contextas a learning experience. Secondly, in-depth intuitive and thematic analyses of the entries which related specifically to reflection as a learning experience gave rise to critical questions. Throughout the process, the five participants formed an active and involved group of co-researchers, adding their voices to the narrative of the learning experience. Variables such as personality type, learning style and self-directedness added a dimension which deepened and emiched the study. The result of the study suggests that practicum logbooks form a valuable base for valuing and encouraging critical reflection in pre-service teacher education. The results also suggest that not all students appear to be equally capable of critical reflection. Recognizing that teacher education exists as a continuum appears to support the findings that in their journey along this continuum, student teachers not only move from reflection-on-action to reflection-in-action, but also from content to process to premise reflection. An awareness of contributing factors such as personality type, degree of risk-taking, preferred learning style and self-directedness on the part of teacher-educators will serve to create a climate of trust in which student teachers can safely develop critical reflection, using practicum logbooks as one possible medium.

Finding the Open Spaces in Closed Systems: An Exploration of Critical Pedagogy with a Social Justice Directive in an Ontario Secondary School Classroom

This study examines the first experience of students, teachers, and an administrator in implementing a teacher-designed Leadership in Social Justice Program at a large urban Ontario secondary school. The program aimed to infuse a Freirean concept of critical pedagogical praxis (Freire, 1970/1993) in a grade 12 integrated educational experience with a social justice directive. Data were collected through two questionnaires and eight in-depth interviews. The data identified three areas of awareness that described ways in which student participants were impacted most profoundly (a) developing self-awareness, (b) understanding a new educational paradigm, and (c) finding a place in the world. The study found that the program was successful in highlighting the possibility for more meaningful education and engaged many students deeply; however, its success was limited by the lead teacher’s failure to fully grasp and implement tenets of Freirean critical pedagogy that involved the role of the teacher in pedagogical processes.

'A load too heavy': Critical reflections on the child labor problem in Africa's small-scale mining sector

This paper provides an extended analysis of the child labor problem in the artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) sector, focusing specifically on the situation in sub-Saharan Africa. In recent years, the issue of child labor in ASM has garnered significant attention from the International Labor Organization (ILO), which has been particularly active in raising public awareness of the problem; and, has proceeded to implement policies and collaborative project work aimed at Curtailing children's participation in ASM activities in a number of African countries. The analysis concludes with a critical appraisal of an ILO project recently launched in the Talensi-Nabdam District in the Upper East Region of Ghana, which sheds light on how the child labor problem is being tackled in practice in ASM communities in sub-Saharan Africa. (c) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The futures of construction: A critical review of construction future studies

Anticipating the future is increasingly being seen as a useful way to align, direct and improve current organizational strategy. Several such 'future studies' have been produced which envision various construction industry scenarios which result from technological and socio-economic trends and influences. Thirteen construction-related future studies are critically reviewed. Most studies fail to address the complexities and uncertainties of both the present and the future, and fail to explore the connections between global, local, construction-specific and more widespread factors. The methodological approaches used in these studies do not generate any significantly different advice or recommendations for the industry than those emerging from the much larger canon of non-future oriented construction research. As such, these reports are less about the future than the present. If future studies are to make a worthwhile contribution to construction, it is critical that they develop our appreciation of the practical ability of stakeholders to influence some aspects of the future and not others, and an awareness of the competing agendas and the relative benefits and disadvantages of specific futures within the construction sector. Only then can future studies provide insights and help in preparing for the opportunities and threats the future may bring.

Critical, issues and needs in management of primary immunodeficiency diseases in Latin America

Experts from six Latin American countries met to discuss critical issues and needs in the diagnosis and management of primary immunodeficiency diseases (PIDD). The diagnosis of PIDD is generally made following referral to an immunology centre located in a major city, but many paediatricians and general practitioners are not sufficiently trained to suspect PIDD in the first place. Access to laboratory testing is generally limited, and only some screening tests are typically covered by government health programmes. Specialised diagnostic tests are generally not reimbursed. Access to treatment varies by country reflecting differences in healthcare systems and reimbursement policies. An online PIDD Registry Programme for Latin America has been available since 2009, which will provide information about PIDD epidemiology in the region. Additional collaboration across countries appears feasible in at least two areas: a laboratory network to facilitate the diagnosis of PIDD, and educational programmes to improve PIDD awareness. In total, these collaborations should make it possible to advance the diagnosis and management of PIDD in Latin America. (C) 2010 SEICAP. Published by Elsevier Espana, S.L. All rights reserved.