Aligning business processes and work practices

Current business process modeling methodologies offer little guidance regarding how to keep business process models aligned with their actual execution. This paper describes how to achieve this goal by uncovering and supervising business process models in connection with work practices using BAM. BAM is a methodology for business process modeling, supervision and improvement that works at two dimensions; the dimension of processes and the dimension of work practices. The business modeling component of BAM is illustrated with a case study in an organizational setting

Child Welfare Partnership for Research and Training: A Title IV-E University/Community Collaborative Research Model

University-community partnerships are increasingly recognized as valuable in educating students for professional practice and bridging the gap between research and practice. This manuscript describes the evolution and design of a university-community partnership between a School of Social Work in one urban university and local child welfare agencies: the Child Welfare Partnership for Research and Training (CW-PART). This local partnership illustrates types of opportunities and outcomes that emerge when state and local entities leverage greater results from federal funding through partnerships with local universities. The manuscript describes 1), the community-engaged framework used to inform the overall approach and partner roles; 2) evolution of the model from early partnered research successes; 3) core elements of the CWPART university-community partnered research model, and 4) preliminary lessons learned from the pilot phase of model

Neural Collaborative Subspace Clustering

We introduce the Neural Collaborative Subspace Clustering, a neural model that discovers clusters of data points drawn from a union of low-dimensional subspaces. In contrast to previous attempts, our model runs without the aid of spectral clustering. This makes our algorithm one of the kinds that can gracefully scale to large datasets. At its heart, our neural model benefits from a classifier which determines whether a pair of points lies on the same subspace or not. Essential to our model is the construction of two affinity matrices, one from the classifier and the other from a notion of subspace self-expressiveness, to supervise training in a collaborative scheme. We thoroughly assess and contrast the performance of our model against various state-of-the-art clustering algorithms including deep subspace-based ones.Comment: Accepted to ICML 201

Incorporating popular music and dance: A student-centered approach to middle school chorus

Middle school chorus in the United States is, from an adolescent perspective, primarily a means of socializing and making friends. Using Green’s (2008) notion of critical musicality, I designed a constructionist learning environment. Using critical participatory action research, conducted with my students rather than on them, we explored alternative pedagogical approaches to choral teaching and learning. We learned that collaborative learning fostered musical and social development in a heterarchical classroom environment that contributed to intersubjective understandings. It became possible for students to apply prior knowledge from outside of school to holistic, contextual, self-generated learning goals in the choral classroom. Incorporating popular music, technology and dance into the curriculum made learning relevant for these students. Choral educators may be able to implement student-centred curricula in choral settings more easily than is on occasion assumed.Accepted manuscrip

Community engagement: Talking about mathematics

Implementing assessment into early childhood (EC) undergraduate courses necessitates supporting learners in informed and intentional ways; since knowing how to teach comes from within the act of teaching itself. Consequently their practical knowledge builds through deliberate events which stimulate further insight and skill in what they do. Taken-for-granted assumptions that undergraduate students bring to the classroom can be challenged in such ways that they make implicit ideas explicit subsequently changing them to correspond with their new practices. Students can “test” out alternative approaches in real classroom contexts and then refine their own practical knowledge through reflection

An overview of the nature of the preparation of practice educators in five health care disciplines

Practice education is a core element of all educational programmes that prepare health care professionals for academic award and registration to practice. Ensuring quality and effectiveness involves partnership working between Higher Education Institutions (HEI’s) and health care providers, social care communities, voluntary and independent sectors offering client care throughout the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland. Clearly practitioners who support, supervise and assess learners for entry to their respective professions need to be well prepared and supported in their roles as practice educators. However it would appear that the nature of this support and preparation varies across disciplines and that good practice is not easily shared. With this in mind, the Making Practice Based Learning Work (MPBLW) project aims to make practitioners more effective at supporting and supervising students in the workplace across a range of health care disciplines namely Dietetics, Nursing, Occupational Therapy, Physiotherapy and Radiology. The Department of Employment and Learning (Northern Ireland) and the Higher Education Funding Council for England has funded this collaborative project involving staff from Ulster, Northumbria and Bournemouth Universities. The outcomes for each phase of the project are: Phase One: • Identify and document good practice on how practitioners are prepared for their educational role. Phase Two: • Develop and evaluate learning materials for use by practitioners across five health care disciplines. • Make learning materials available in a number of efficient media, e.g. paper, electronic, CD-ROM and web-based. • Develop a programme applicable to interprofessional and uniprofessional contexts. • Widen access for a multicultural workforce. Phase Three: • Embed best educational practice through the establishment of an academicpractitioner network. • Disseminate a range of materials and processes across the wider academic and health and social care communities

Collaborative concept mapping: an education research team leveraging their collaborative efforts

Collaborative concept mapping (CCM) has been a tool deployed by educators to enhance learning in such situations as primary science classes, supported learning environments and asynchronous computer-mediated learning. Of its outcomes, CCM has produced rich group discussion about ideas and possibilities pertinent to the topic or problem at hand. The majority of research into CCM has been explicitly pointed at enhancing learning. This chapter takes a different tack by reporting on how the authors used CCM to seek understandings of its utility in enabling collaborative research by creating synergies within a research team located in the Faculty of Education at the University of Southern Queensland. The following questions were used to focus the research: • What was the research team’s experience of collaborative concept mapping? • What propositions did the team construct about teamwork and collaboration? • How did the interactions among team members facilitate meaning-making about teamwork and collaboration? The data consisted of this team’s collaborative concept map and recordings of the dialogue during the process of constructing the map. Analysis revealed the team’s emerging propositions about teamwork and collaboration and also contributed understandings of the co-constructed patterns of talk that produced this dynamic map. The chapter concludes that collaborative concept mapping is a useful tool for research and other team development, and possibly for the collaborative conceptualisation of future team research projects

The Public Education Network Study of LEF Leadership: Report on Baseline Survey Findings

Many nonprofit organizations seek to make change. To that end, much needed "capital" -- variously described as social, public, professional, and human -- is being brought to bear upon pressing social issues. Researchers across the country are attempting to understand how these resources are being generated, deployed, and administered, and to what avail. Of particular interest here are local education funds (LEFs) and their leaders. LEFs are a set of voluntary, intermediate, and mission-driven organizations, conceived by the Ford Foundation in 1983, which sit strategically at the nexus of educational and civic capacity building. This report provides the results of the first phase of the Public Education Network (PEN) leadership study, a baseline survey administered to 59 LEF executive directors.The survey had two purposes: to provide a snapshot of leadership characteristics and perceptions of executive directors -- information never before compiled and examined -- and to gather contextual information on the LEFs and the communities they serve. The results will be used as a foundation for subsequent research on LEF leadership. In time, the findings from this research will assist PEN in its efforts to nurture and sustain LEF leadership

Decoding Each Other through Coding: Sharing Our Unlikely Research Collaboration

This narrative is a story of our cross-disciplinary collaboration. While teachers and researchers in English studies often share stories of teaching, we too infrequently share those of research. The consequence is that the everyday, lived experiences of conducting inquiry and doing research—the key intellectual activities in all learning— become muted, if not hidden. In response, we relate here our journey of teaching and learning the method of qualitative coding