Cloudworks: social networking for learning design

Why do some social networking services work and others fail? Can we apply the best of Web 2.0 principles to an educational context? More specifically can we use this as a means of shifting teaching practice to a culture of sharing learning ideas and designs? Can we harness the potential of technologies to create more engaging learning experiences for students? These are the key questions this paper addresses. We describe how we are using the concept of 'object-orientated social networking' to underpin the creation of a social networking tool, Cloudworks, for sharing learning ideas and designs

Sensory semantic user interfaces (SenSUI)

Rapid evolution of the World Wide Web with its underlying sources of data, knowledge, services and applications continually attempts to support a variety of users, with different backgrounds, requirements and capabilities. In such an environment, it is highly unlikely that a single user interface will prevail and be able to fulfill the requirements of each user adequately. Adaptive user interfaces are able to adapt information and application functionalities to the user context. In contrast, pervasive computing and sensor networks open new opportunities for context aware platforms, one that is able to improve user interface adaptation reacting to environmental and user sensors. Semantic web technologies and ontologies are able to capture sensor data and provide contextual information about the user, their actions, required applications and environment. This paper investigates the viability of an approach where semantic web technologies are used to maximize the efficacy of interface adaptation through the use of available ontology

Cloudworks: Social networking for learning design

Can we apply the best of Web 2.0 principles to an educational context? More specifically can we use this as a means of shifting teaching practice to a culture of sharing learning ideas and designs? This paper describes a new social networking site, Cloudworks, which aims to provide a mechanism for sharing, discussing and finding learning and teaching ideas and designs. We describe the development of the site and the key associated concepts, 'clouds' and 'cloudscapes'. We provide a summary of recent activities and plans for the future. We conclude by describing the underpinning theoretical perspectives we have drawn on in the development of the site and in particular the notion of 'social objects' in social networking and a framework for 'sociality' for transforming user practice online

Planning ahead with children with life-limiting conditions and their families : development, implementation and evaluation of ‘My Choices’

Background: The United Kingdom has led the world in the development of children’s palliative care. Over the past two decades, the illness trajectories of children with life-limiting conditions have extended with new treatments and better home-based care. Future planning is a critically under-researched aspect of children’s palliative care globally. This paper describes the development, implementation and evaluation of innovative child and parent-held palliative care planning resources. The resources were designed to facilitate parent and child thinking and engagement in future planning, and to determine care preferences and preferred locations of care for children with life-limiting conditions from diagnosis onwards. These resources fill a significant gap in palliative care planning before the end-of-life phase. Methods: Drawing on contemporaneous research on producing evidence-based children’s health information, we collaborated with leading children’s not-for-profit organisations, parents, children, and professionals. A set of resources (My Choices booklets) were developed for parents and children and evaluated using interviews (parents, children, professionals) and questionnaires (professionals) and an open web-based consultation. Results: Parents and children responded in three ways: Some used the booklets to produce detailed written plans with clear outcomes and ideas about how best to achieve desired outcomes. Others preferred to use the booklet to help them think about potential options. Remaining parents found it difficult to think about the future and felt there was no point because they perceived there to be no suitable local services. Professionals varied in confidence in their ability to engage with families to plan ahead and identified many challenges that prevented them from doing so. Few families shared their plans with professionals. Parents and children have far stronger preferences for home-care than professionals. Conclusion: The My Choices booklets were revised in light of findings, have been endorsed by Together for Short Lives, and are free to download in English and Welsh for use by parents and young people globally. More work needs to be done to support families who are not yet receptive to planning ahead. Professionals would benefit from more training in person-centred approaches to future planning and additional communications skills to increase confidence and ability to engage with families to deliver sensitive palliative care planning

Thinking, Interthinking, and Technological Tools

Language use is widely regarded as an important indicator of high quality learning and reasoning ability. Yet this masks an irony: language is fundamentally a social, collaborative tool, yet despite the widespread recognition of its importance in relation to learning, the role of dialogue is undervalued in learning contexts. In this chapter we argue that to see language as only a tool for individual thought presents a limited view of its transformative power. This power, we argue, lies in the ways in which dialogue is used to interthink – that is, to think together, to build knowledge co-constructively through our shared understanding. Technology can play an important role in resourcing thinking through the provision of information, and support to provide a space to think alone. It can moreover provide significant support for learners to build shared representations together, particularly through giving learners access to a wealth of ‘given’ inter-related texts which resource the co-construction of knowledge

Considering Evaluation: Thoughts for Social Change and Movement-Building Groups

The aim of this guide is to present an easy-to-use resource for evaluation and assessments of social justice, social change and movement building work. It is not meant to be a comprehensive guide to evaluation, but rather goal is to share some of our tools, resources, and lessons learned in this area. This booklet is intended for practitioners working to build organizations, organize networks, alliances and movement building projects

What do people want from their lifelogs?

The practice of lifelogging potentially consists of automatically capturing and storing a digital record of every piece of information that a person (lifelogger) encounters in their daily experiences. Lifelogging has become an increasingly popular area of research in recent years. Most current lifeloggiing research focuses on techniques for data capture or processing. Current applications of lifelogging technology are usually driven by new technology inventions, creative ideas of researchers, or the special needs of a particular user group, e.g. individuals with memory impairment. To the best of our knowledge, little work has explored potential lifelogs applications from the perspective of the desires of the general public. One of the difficulties of carrying out such a study is the balancing of the information given to the subject regarding lifelog technology to enable them to generate realistic ideas without limiting or directing their imaginations by providing too much specific information. We report a study in which we take a progressive approach where we introduce lifelogging in three stages, and collect the ideas and opinions of a volunteer group of general public participants on techniques for lifelog capture, and applications and functionality