Ethical challenges of social work in Spain during COVID-19

This article presents the main ethical challenges faced by social work professionals in Spain during the "first wave" of COVID-19 in 2020. The pandemic had a serious impact not only on the health sector, but also in the field of social work. During this time, social workers had to address serious ethical questions regarding issues such as confidentiality breaches, how to fairly distribute available resources, the lack of personal contact and emotional connection with the service users, the difficulties of working in isolation and online, doubts about the reliability of the information they were handling and the difficulty of making proper diagnoses. An international research group led by Dr.Sara Banks conducted a broader research project in collaboration with the International Federation of Social Workers,which collected information through an online questionnaire aimed at social workers from various countries. In this article we analyse the results related tothe main ethical challenges faced by social workersin Spain.The research group identified two types of ethical challenges that they haveseparated into two sections: the first sectionis related to direct interventionwith users, which includes topics such as the lack of emotional support, reliability, use of technology, the appropriate care, compliance with the highest professional standards,confidentiality, vulnerability, and the fair distributionof resources. The other sectionis related to the ethical challenges around the daily workwithin social entities, which involveddealing with issues such as the e-social work and coordination difficulties, the management of pressure in social bodies and changes in the intervention methodology

New times for learning

Experience of time and technology also has an important impact on learning. The drastic reduction on lifetime of knowledge, connected with the overflow of information and fragmentation of sources, are just some of the features that are changing the way we learn. This situation challenges us to think more creatively about the interaction between communication technologies and learning, and to explore how our educational models are being impacted by the processes of social change that come with digitalization, the emergence of social media and the Web 2.0. Since February 2011 the group ECO (Education & Communication), driven by teachers of Information and Communication Studies at UOC, has been providing a forum for researching communication and learning, and for sharing teaching innovation through e-learning environments based on collaboration, creativity, entertainment and audiovisual technologies. The five articles in this edition of eLC Research Paper Series reflect the short but intense trajectory of the group. Some of them are a selection of papers presented at the International Conference BCN Meeting 2012, organized by ECO. The other articles were written specially for this issue by members of the group and give a picture of the themes and questions we are now exploring.&nbsp

Impact of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) on construction projects

The changing face of construction projects has resulted in a movement towards the use of technology as a primary means of communication. The consequences of this rise in the use of information and communication technology (ICT) is a loss of interpersonal communication skills. A number of resulting issues within the human – electronic and human – human interfaces are identified in an attempt to define the efficiency of communication in projects. The research shows how ICT effects the social environment of construction project teams and the project outcome. The study seeks to confirm the need for further work in order to develop new forms of communication protocols and behaviour. An initial literature review was undertaken to develop a theoretical review of the impacts of ICT on construction project teams. This review identified a number of issues that were then tested in the field through an observation and two verification interviews. The research confirms the existence of tensions and conflicts in the human – electronic and human - human communication interfaces within the studies environment. It is proposed that the increasing use of ICT occur at the expense of soft system communication. The principal impact of this is a form of ‘human distraction’ which adversely affects the performance of project teams. There is limited theory exploring these issues that suggests the problems identified are not well understood and consequently indicates a gap in knowledge

A bibliometric analysis of Australia's international research collaboration in science and technology: analytical methods and initial findings

This paper presents the initial findings from an exploratory bibliometric analysis of Australia's international collaboration in science and technology. This paper is focusses on: (a) Assessing the methodological challenges faced in comprehensively mapping Australia's science and technology research activity from an international engagement perspective; (b) Suggesting solutions to these challenges; (c) Providing some policy-relevant findings of potential use to the Australian Government and the European Commission

The Impact of Cultural Familiarity on Students’ Social Media Usage in Higher Education

Using social media (SM) in Higher education (HE) becomes unavoidable in the new teaching and learning pedagogy. The current generation of students creates their groups on SM for collaboration. However, SM can be a primary source of learning distraction due to its nature, which does not support structured learning. Hence, derived from the literature, this study proposes three learning customised system features, to be implemented on SM when used in Higher Education HE. Nevertheless, some psychological factors appear to have a stronger impact on students’ adoption of SM in learning than the proposed features. A Quantitative survey was conducted at a university in Uzbekistan to collect 52 undergraduate students’ perception of proposed SM learning customised features in Moodle. These features aim to provide localised, personalised, and privacy control self-management environment for collaboration in Moodle. These features could be significant in predicting students’ engagement with SM in HE. The data analysis showed a majority of positive feedback towards the proposed learning customised SM. However, the surveyed students’ engagement with these features was observed as minimal. The course leader initiated a semi-structured interview to investigate the reason. Although the students confirmed their acceptance of the learning customised features, their preferences to alternate SM, which is Telegram overridden their usage of the proposed learning customized SM, which is Twitter. The students avoided the Moodle integrated Twitter (which provided highly accepted features) and chose to use the Telegram as an external collaboration platform driven by their familiarity and social preferences with the Telegram since it is the popular SM in Uzbekistan. This study is part of an ongoing PhD research which involves deeper frame of learners’ cognitive usage of the learning management system. However, this paper exclusively discusses the cultural familiarity impact of student’s adoption of SM in HE

Evolving cohesion metrics of a research network on rare diseases: a longitudinal study over 14 years

[EN] Research collaboration is necessary, rewarding, and beneficial. Cohesion between team members is related to their collective efficiency. To assess collaboration processes and their eventual outcomes, agencies need innovative methods-and social network approaches are emerging as a useful analytical tool. We identified the research output and citation data of a network of 61 research groups formally engaged in publishing rare disease research between 2000 and 2013. We drew the collaboration networks for each year and computed the global and local measures throughout the period. Although global network measures remained steady over the whole period, the local and subgroup metrics revealed a growing cohesion between the teams. Transitivity and density showed little or no variation throughout the period. In contrast the following points indicated an evolution towards greater network cohesion: the emergence of a giant component (which grew from just 30 % to reach 85 % of groups); the decreasing number of communities (following a tripling in the average number of members); the growing number of fully connected subgroups; and increasing average strength. Moreover, assortativity measures reveal that, after an initial period where subject affinity and a common geographical location played some role in favouring the connection between groups, the collaboration was driven in the final stages by other factors and complementarities. The Spanish research network on rare diseases has evolved towards a growing cohesion-as revealed by local and subgroup metrics following social network analysis.The Spanish Ministry of Economics and Competitiveness partially supported this research (Grant Number ECO2014-59381-R).Benito Amat, C.; Perruchas, F. (2016). 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