MOVE: Measuring ontologies in value-seeking environments: CSCW for human adaptation

© 2020 ACM. The interest in sharing the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom (DIKW) continuum has been amplified by the latest multi-scale social changes including but not limited to pandemics, economic crises, climate change, and racial issues. This workshop aims to inspire research and discussion on measuring sharing of the DIKW continuum, including through computer-mediated methods, represented by its ontologies. The implied suggestion is that there are ways to improve human adaptation by social technologies that enable rapidly finding solutions for complex global situations. We therefore invite research on (1) ontologies as a medium that enables comparing and measuring the DIKW continuum, (2) ontologies and their convergence or divergence with the values that motivate and determine DIKW sharing, (3) properties and dynamics of ontologies shared via social technologies in their relation to human adaptation

A day (nearly) like any other: healthcare work in an influenza pandemic

The World Health Organization has long anticipated an outbreak of a highly pathogenic influenza. Fear of a highly virulent influenza has been compounded by the 2003 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) where some health workers refused to work. In light of this, the question has been asked whether healthcare workers would continue to work during an influenza pandemic. Worryingly, surveys suggest that many would not. The thesis explores past experience of some ‘new’ infectious diseases and how these impacted on the health workforce. It considers evidence from the 1918 influenza pandemic, where (for the most part) nurses were not over-represented in the death statistics. It is argued that all infectious disease is not the same and a one-size approach by way of either compulsion or incentives to work should not be adopted. In situations where a healthcare worker faces a higher risk of infection and serious illness than the general population and attending at work could expose their family to additional risk (as was the case in SARS) consideration may need to be given to incentives to encourage work performance rather than any form of compulsion. However, the thesis argues that the health workforce would not be at greater risk during an influenza pandemic and the common law contract of employment sufficiently compels work performance, with public sector employees having a greater obligation to work than might their private sector counterparts. During an influenza pandemic workloads may increase but it will be a day (nearly) like any other

By hand and by computer – a video-ethnographic study of engineering students’ representational practices in a design project

In engineering education there has been a growing interest that the curriculum should include collaborative design projects. However, students’ collaborative learning processes in design projects have, with a few exceptions, not been studied in earlier research. Most previous studies have been performed in artificial settings with individual students using verbal protocol analysis or through interviews.  The context of this study is a design project in the fifth semester of the PBL-based Architecture and Design programme at Aalborg University. The students had the task to design a real office building in collaborative groups of 5–6 students. The preparation for an upcoming status seminar was video recorded in situ. Video ethnography, conversation analysis and embodied interaction analysis were used to explore what interactional work the student teams did and what kind of resources they used to collaborate and complete the design task. Complete six hours sessions of five groups were recorded using multiple video cameras (2 – 5 cameras per group). The different collaborative groups did not only produce and reach an agreement on a design proposal during the session – in their design practice they used, and produced, a wealth of tools and bodily-material resources for representational and modelling purposes. As an integral and seamless part of students’ interactional and representational work and the group’s collaborative thinking bodily resources such as “gestured drawings” and gestures, concrete materials such as 3D-foam and papers models, “low-tech” representations such as sketches and drawings by hand on paper and “high-tech” representations as CAD-drawings were used. These findings highlight the cognitive importance of tools and the use of bodily and material resources in students’ collaborative interactional work in a design setting. Furthermore, our study demonstrates that a focus primarily on digital technologies, as is often the case in the recent drive towards “digital learning”, would be highly problematic