Harnessing technology: the learner and their context: choosing to use technology: how learners construct their learning lives in their own contexts: key findings from the first year of research

This report covers the findings from the first year of the learners and their context research and highlights emerging findings including; choosing to use technology and how learners construct their learning lives in their own contexts

E-access, e-maturity, e-safety: a learner survey

The report explored young people's access to technology in school and at home and the skills, knowledge and confidence of learners when using technology for learning.In addition, the project has sought to identify any links between learner attitudes, school characteristics, and learners' technological skills, e-confidence and levels of e-maturity. The NFER conducted a large-scale national survey with primary and secondary school learners in England. The survey was administered between November and December 2008, and was completed by over 4,000 learners: 1,990 learners in primary schools (in Year 6) and 2,061 learners in secondary schools (in Year 10)

Review of Gaelic medium early education and childcare

The National Plan for Gaelic 2007-2012 contains ambitious targets for the expansion of Gaelic medium (GM) primary school education, aiming for 4000 children enrolled in P1 by 2021. GM early years education and childcare plays a crucial role in attracting parents to the 'Gaelic system' and the great majority of children who enrol in GM primary have experienced GM preschool provision at nursery or playgroup. If the target numbers entering GM primary school are to be achieved then there will have to be a considerable expansion in the preschool sector too, given that there were just over 700 children enrolled in GM nurseries for session 2008-09. The National Plan includes a specific commitment to review GM early years education and childcare. The study reported here is a response to that call. It aims to clarify existing provision, identify gaps and make recommendations for changes or developments needed to ensure that the goals of the National Plan are achieved

The conversation: developing confidence to provide end of life care in Salford nursing homes

The study was funded by the Burdett Trust for Nursing and partly by Salford Primary Care Trust. A realistic evaluation design was used to collect data using a range of approaches, from before and after surveys of confidence in delivering end of life care, to participant observation and interviews. A total of 43 people were interviewed involving both staff, residents and relatives. Key Messages a) Significant resources are needed to engage staff, residents and relatives/carers with the idea of advance care planning b) Care home staff are optimistic about involving residents and relatives in planning care at the end of life and some relatives become very involved in care c) Clearly registered nurses and other care home workers such as care assistants have different roles, but the overlap between these and the appropriate boundaries would benefit from further work d) Talking to residents and relatives about their feelings and wishes for care at the end of life remains especially difficult, but education and training in key skills and knowledge can engender both ability and motivation e) Care homes need strong and well-informed leadership in order to implement the Gold Standards Framework f) Placing a relative in a care home involves strain and an ability to compromise ‘there’s no perfect place’ g) Advance care planning can reduce the distress and the number of inappropriate hospital admissions, but is challenging in the face of staff rotation and out of hours medical staff being unpredictable h) The principles of the Gold Standards Framework are widely seen as sensible, but clinical challenges include diagnosing and predicting dying trajectories, especially in heart failure, chronic pulmonary disease and dementia i) A particular concern of staff is how to approach nutrition and hydration as frailty and death approach j) Communicating about diagnosis and especially prognosis with residents who lack capacity is an increasing problem k) Natural justice suggests that resources should be allocated to the general standardisation of a good quality of care at the end of life in ALL care homes whatever their Care Quality Commission ratin

Surveying human habit modeling and mining techniques in smart spaces

A smart space is an environment, mainly equipped with Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies, able to provide services to humans, helping them to perform daily tasks by monitoring the space and autonomously executing actions, giving suggestions and sending alarms. Approaches suggested in the literature may differ in terms of required facilities, possible applications, amount of human intervention required, ability to support multiple users at the same time adapting to changing needs. In this paper, we propose a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) that classifies most influential approaches in the area of smart spaces according to a set of dimensions identified by answering a set of research questions. These dimensions allow to choose a specific method or approach according to available sensors, amount of labeled data, need for visual analysis, requirements in terms of enactment and decision-making on the environment. Additionally, the paper identifies a set of challenges to be addressed by future research in the field

A study of existing Ontologies in the IoT-domain

Several domains have adopted the increasing use of IoT-based devices to collect sensor data for generating abstractions and perceptions of the real world. This sensor data is multi-modal and heterogeneous in nature. This heterogeneity induces interoperability issues while developing cross-domain applications, thereby restricting the possibility of reusing sensor data to develop new applications. As a solution to this, semantic approaches have been proposed in the literature to tackle problems related to interoperability of sensor data. Several ontologies have been proposed to handle different aspects of IoT-based sensor data collection, ranging from discovering the IoT sensors for data collection to applying reasoning on the collected sensor data for drawing inferences. In this paper, we survey these existing semantic ontologies to provide an overview of the recent developments in this field. We highlight the fundamental ontological concepts (e.g., sensor-capabilities and context-awareness) required for an IoT-based application, and survey the existing ontologies which include these concepts. Based on our study, we also identify the shortcomings of currently available ontologies, which serves as a stepping stone to state the need for a common unified ontology for the IoT domain.Comment: Submitted to Elsevier JWS SI on Web semantics for the Internet/Web of Thing