New partnerships for learning: meeting professional information needs

This paper has been prompted by the challenges created by recent proposed reforms to social care services in the UK services which are being 'modernised', a term ubiquitous in policy documents but difficult to define with confidence. Government modernisation and e-government programmes highlight with renewed urgency the need for social care practitioners on the front line to have up-to-date, reliable information. Yet the rise in the rate and volume of information published (over new and old channels) has, paradoxically, made it increasingly difficult for them to keep up with new developments. How can higher education institutions best contribute to the social care community through a period of profound ideological and structural change? In particular, the paper discusses the key challenges of keeping abreast of research; changes in the social/organisational/professional context of social care; how social care practitioners learn; and effectively integrating practice, research and educatio

An integrated framework to classify healthcare virtual communities

Healthcare (HC) strives to improve service quality through its cost-effective social computing strategy. However, sudden rise in the count of virtual community of practices (VCoPs) introduced many choices for physicians; As a result, it is not surprising to observe current literature reporting lack of study to investigate ideas integration within and between VCoPs. VCoPs need to be categorized for HC physicians so they will be able to pin-point effective a VC to attain assistance from. This paper is one of the first investigative studies, in HC sector, that proposed a framework to classify and pin-point appropriate VCoPs, for physicians, after it reviewed and analyzed traditional and up-to-date theoretical, empirical and case study literature in the area of social computing, knowledge management (KM) and VCoPs. The implementation of this framework pinpointed professional VCoPs as most appropriate for physicians based on strict requirements, i.e. closed physician communities holding many participants, which are older than 5 years with high boundary crossing. This framework is also a “one-size-fit-all” formula to build an organizational VCoP, utilizable by other business sectors

Assessing Communities of Practice in health policy : A conceptual framework as a first step towards empirical research

Peer reviewe

Online Journal Club to Improve Perception of Interprofessional Collaboration

Problem Rural community mental health centers (CMHC) can be spread across many counties with various locations and programs. Physical isolation and professional diversity often create a perception among staff of poor interprofessional collaboration (IPC). A strong need exists in such settings to use up-to-date internet technology to manage collaboration, as mandated by the Institute of Medicine and the American Association of Colleges of Nursing. The Capstone practice question is to discover if, for staff from all sites of a mental health center who volunteer to participate, does the creation of an online asynchronous monthly journal club lead to improvement of perception of interprofessional collaboration (IPC)? Purpose This project intended to demonstrate that, given an online venue to discuss subjects of mutual interest among staff at a CMHC, a perception of improved IPC would be achieved. Goal The goal of this project was intended to evaluate the usefulness of an online journal club for improving staff perception of IPC at a rural Community Mental Health Center. Objective The objective was to identify if there was improved perception of IPC among participating staff within three months as measured by a comparison of pre-test/post-test aggregate mean scores for the Index for Interdisciplinary Collaboration (IIC) instrument. Plan In order to measure this objective, all staff of a rural CMHC were invited to participate. 32 participants were given a pre-test survey, using the modified Index for Interdisciplinary Collaboration and 20 completed the post-test . One journal article was uploaded into GoogleDocs every month for three months and sent to all participants with a request to comment. At the end of the three month pilot, the identical survey was sent to all participants and results were analyzed. There was a statistically significant improvement of 2.8% in pre-test and post-test aggregate mean scores; however, other factors may have influenced this score. Further research into the effects of a Journal Club on IPC is indicated

Knowledge sharing by entrepreneurs in a virtual community of practice (VCoP)

PurposeThis paper examines how entrepreneurs engage in a Virtual Community of Practice (VCoP) to share knowledge. Intensity of engagement is taken as a proxy to measure the strength of knowledge sharing.Design/methodology/approachThe archival data spanning over a three-year period from ‘Start-up-Nation©’ (a VCoP purposefully setup for entrepreneurs) is used for analysis. A set of indices are introduced to measure participants’ intensity of engagement in terms of message length, message frequency and reciprocity in the knowledge sharing process. Content analysis is employed to test a sample of ‘highly engaged’, ‘moderately engaged’, ‘low engaged’ and ‘not engaged’ discussion topics as part of the on-line discourse.FindingsWe find that entrepreneurs normally use short (fewer than 100 words) or medium (fewer than 250 words) message size to contribute to the discussions. In addition, we find that senior members and discussion moderators play important roles in igniting the ‘reciprocity’ behaviour in stimulating the interest of the community with the topic discussion. We also findthat highly engaged topics usually lead to further discussion threads.Originality/valueThis is the first study of its kind to explore how entrepreneurs engage in a VCoP to share their knowledge and experiences. The set of measurement indices tested here provide a tool for the owner, designer and moderator of the VCoP to measure the utility of their website in terms of its members’ participation. In addition, the set of textual and subjective interventions identified here enable the moderator (administrator) of a VCoP to design effective interventions to facilitate on-line discourse and augment the knowledge sharing process amongst its community members

Emerging Leaderships in an Online Community: A Longitudinal Network Analysis

Online communities have brought great benefits to society; however, relatively few of them are successful in sustaining community activities. It is necessary to have a better understanding of the contextual development of online communities. This study adopts the theory of networked influence to address the research objective. Data is collected from an online community which has been in operation for ten years. We investigate the community’s sustainability on a longitudinal basis, focusing on its dynamic temporal development, with regard to how it was formed, became robust, and either declined or was sustained. Adopting social network analysis with a qualitative approach, we identify several types of emerging leaders and how the relay events between them had a significant impact on communication prolongation. Their influence is found to extend across discussion entities, resulting in communication homogeneity, and leading to significant network effects that are relevant to participants’ interactions

INFORMING THE DESIGN OF A HEALTH VIRTUAL COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE: A KNOWLEDGE TRANSLATION APPROACH

Access to knowledge forms an integral part of the continuous learning processes of medical and other health professionals throughout their career. Modern technologies have become instrumental in extending learning processes to the online realm, particularly through the use of social media technologies. Health Practitioners’ (HPs) exploitation of online social media technologies for online learning and knowledge sharing purposes has evolved into Virtual Communities of Practice (VCoP). However, there is limited research on the types of knowledge being shared to fulfil the notion of ‘knowledge-into-action’ in the healthcare domain. In addition, little is known of the use of online social media technologies as a catalyst to achieve ‘knowledge-into-action’. This research in progress paper extends the conceptual model from our previous work and draws on current literature that identifies the types of knowledge being shared in a Health VCoP. We discuss some of our data using our conceptual lens as a preliminary analysis of our work. Expected outcomes are a new extended conceptual model that fulfils the notion of ‘knowledge-into-action’ that informs the design of an IT artefact based on types of knowledge being shared in a Health VCoP

SOCIAL MEDIA IN PATIENTS’ SELF-MANAGEMENT OF CHRONIC DISEASE: THE ROLE OF NURSES AS BOUNDARY SPANNERS

This paper presents research-in-progress of the adoption and use of social media as part of patients’ self-management of their chronic disease. The purpose is to investigate the social and organizational challenges that social media bring to the healthcare setting. We focus on how nurses can act as mediators between the formal healthcare institution and the informal setting in which patients engage via social media. We discuss how the use of social media influences nurses’ professional identity, roles and responsibilities. Preliminary findings and existing literature point to two issues of interest: 1) The inclusion of the informal system of self-management and use of social media into the formal healthcare system and 2) The development of the role of nurses as boundary spanners. We wish to pursue these issues in a three-year research project, conducting in-depth case studies in 10 General Practices to investigate the collaborative partnership between patients and nurses

Design Considerations for a Virtual Community of Practice for Health Practitioners: A Learner Centred Design Approach

Online social networks are increasingly utilised by health practitioners, leading to development of virtual communities of practice where practitioners share knowledge and learn from other peers in the network. Yet, there is limited research on identifying design methods to retain participation in health virtual communities of practice based on the learning interaction imposed. Currently, research is focused more on health practitioners’ behaviour from using the virtual community and not the tool itself. In this study, we propose a conceptual model based on the Learner Centred Design approach to designing a health virtual community of practice to increase interaction leading to sustainment of the community. Expected outcomes of this study would validate the design considerations put forth and can be used as guidelines for future research as an evaluation metrics for current and future health VCoP projects

When to Signal? The Contextual Conditions for Career-Motivated User Contributions in Online Collaboration Communities

This paper examines the contextual conditions for users’ career concern as a motivational driver of contributions in online collaboration communities. On the data of user-level activities from a computer programming-related online Q&A community (Stack Overflow), merged with job-market data for software-developer, we find robust evidence of a positive association between individual users’ career concern and their contributions. More important, we find that this positive relationship is further strengthened through the contextual conditions: the number of vacancies in the job market, the expected salaries from these jobs, and the transparency in the flow of career-related information within the community. We contribute to the literature on motivation in online collaboration communities. Our study thus offers insight into how career concern can be effectively utilized to motivate contributors in these communities. Our findings also foreshadow a possible paradigm change by characterizing online collaboration communities as institutions of career concern and skill signaling