An Interprofessional Consensus of Core Competencies for Prelicensure Education in Pain Management: Curriculum Application for Physical Therapy

Core competencies in pain management for prelicensure health professional education were recently established. These competencies represent the expectation of minimal capabilities for graduating health care students for pain management and include 4 domains: multidimensional nature of pain, pain assessment and measurement, management of pain, and context of pain (Appendix 1). The purpose of this article is to advocate for and identify how core competencies for pain can be applied to the professional (entry-level) physical therapist curriculum. By ensuring that core competencies in pain management are embedded within the foundation of physical therapist education, physical therapists will have the core knowledge necessary for offering best care for patients, and the profession of physical therapy will continue to stand with all health professions engaged in comprehensive pain management

Learning requirements engineering within an engineering ethos

An interest in educating software developers within an engineering ethos may not align well with the characteristics of the discipline, nor address the underlying concerns of software practitioners. Education for software development needs to focus on creativity, adaptability and the ability to transfer knowledge. A change in the way learning is undertaken in a core Software Engineering unit within a university's engineering program demonstrates one attempt to provide students with a solid foundation in subject matter while at the same time exposing them to these real-world characteristics. It provides students with a process to deal with problems within a metacognitive-rich framework that makes complexity apparent and lets students deal with it adaptively. The results indicate that, while the approach is appropriate, student-learning characteristics need to be investigated further, so that the two aspects of learning may be aligned more closely

Finding the way forward for forensic science in the US:a commentary on the PCAST report

A recent report by the US President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) [1] has made a number of recommendations for the future development of forensic science. Whereas we all agree that there is much need for change, we find that the PCAST report recommendations are founded on serious misunderstandings. We explain the traditional forensic paradigms of match and identification and the more recent foundation of the logical approach to evidence evaluation. This forms the groundwork for exposing many sources of confusion in the PCAST report. We explain how the notion of treating the scientist as a black box and the assignment of evidential weight through error rates is overly restrictive and misconceived. Our own view sees inferential logic, the development of calibrated knowledge and understanding of scientists as the core of the advance of the profession

Why Information Matters: A Foundation for Resilience

Embracing Change: The Critical Role of Information, a research project by the Internews' Center for Innovation & Learning, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, combines Internews' longstanding effort to highlight the important role ofinformation with Rockefeller's groundbreaking work on resilience. The project focuses on three major aspects:- Building knowledge around the role of information in empowering communities to understand and adapt to different types of change: slow onset, long-term, and rapid onset / disruptive;- Identifying strategies and techniques for strengthening information ecosystems to support behavioral adaptation to disruptive change; and- Disseminating knowledge and principles to individuals, communities, the private sector, policymakers, and other partners so that they can incorporate healthy information ecosystems as a core element of their social resilience strategies

Designing Open Educational Resources through Knowledge Maps to enhance Meaningful learning

This paper demonstrates some pedagogical strategies for developing Open Educational Resources (OERs) using the knowledge mapping tool Compendium. It also describes applications of Knowledge Maps to facilitate meaningful learning by focusing on specific OER examples. The study centres on the OpenLearn project, a large scale online environment that makes a selection of higher education learning resources freely available via the internet. OpenLearn, which is supportedby William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, was launched in October 2006 and in the two year period of its existence hasreleased over 8,100 learning hours of the OU's distance learning resources for free access and modification by learnersand educators under the Creative Commons license. OpenLearn also offers three knowledge media tools: Compendium(knowledge mapping software), MSG (instant messaging application with geolocation maps) and FM (web-based videoconferencing application). Compendium is a software tool for visual thinking, used to connect ideas, concepts, arguments, websites and documents. There are numerous examples of OERs that have been developed and delivered by institutions across the world, for example, MIT, Rice, Utah State, Core, Paris Tech, JOCW. They present a wide variety of learning materials in terms of styles as well as differing subject content. Many such offerings are based upon original lecture notes, hand-outs and other related papers used in face-to-face teaching. Openlearn OERs, however, are reconstructed from original self study distance learning materials developed at the Open University and from a vast academic catalogue of materials. Samples of these “units” comprise a variety of formats: text, images, audio and video. In this study, our findings illustratethe benefits of sharing some OER content through knowledge maps, the possibility of condensing high volumes of information,accessing resources in a more attractive way, visualising connections between diverse learning materials, connecting new ideas to familiar references, organising thinking and gaining new insights into subject specific content

Interoperability in IoT through the semantic profiling of objects

The emergence of smarter and broader people-oriented IoT applications and services requires interoperability at both data and knowledge levels. However, although some semantic IoT architectures have been proposed, achieving a high degree of interoperability requires dealing with a sea of non-integrated data, scattered across vertical silos. Also, these architectures do not fit into the machine-to-machine requirements, as data annotation has no knowledge on object interactions behind arriving data. This paper presents a vision of how to overcome these issues. More specifically, the semantic profiling of objects, through CoRE related standards, is envisaged as the key for data integration, allowing more powerful data annotation, validation, and reasoning. These are the key blocks for the development of intelligent applications.Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (FCT) [UID/MULTI/00631/2013

Collaborative action research for the governance of climate adaptation - foundations, conditions and pitfalls

This position paper serves as an introductory guide to designing and facilitating an action research process with stakeholders in the context of climate adaptation. Specifically, this is aimed at action researchers who are targeting at involving stakeholders and their expert knowledge in generating knowledge about their own condition and how it can be changed. The core philosophy of our research approach can be described as developing a powerful combination between practice-driven collaborative action research and theoretically-informed scientific research. Collaborative action research means that we take guidance from the hotspots as the primary source of questions, dilemmas and empirical data regarding the governance of adaptation, but also collaborate with them in testing insights and strategies, and evaluating their usefulness. The purpose is to develop effective, legitimate and resilient governance arrangements for climate adaptation. Scientific quality will be achieved by placing this co-production of knowledge in a well-founded and innovative theoretical framework, and through the involvement of the international consortium partners. This position paper provides a methodological starting point of the research program ‘Governance of Climate Adaptation’ and aims: · To clarify the theoretical foundation of collaborative action research and the underlying ontological and epistemological principles · To give an historical overview of the development of action research and its different forms · To enhance the theoretical foundation of collaborative action research in the specific context of governance of climate adaptation. · To translate the philosophy of collaborative action research into practical methods; · To give an overview of the main conditions and pitfalls for action research in complex governance settings Finally, this position paper provides three key instruminstruments developed to support Action Research in the hotspots: 1) Toolbox for AR in hotspots (chapter 6); 2) Set-up of a research design and action plan for AR in hotspots (chapter 7); 3) Quality checklist or guidance for AR in hotspots (chapter 8)

Alignment of professional, academic and industrial development needs for quantity surveyors

The academic, professional and training needs of Quantity Surveyors are pulled by different stakeholders in different directions. Academics are interested in producing a rounded graduate with the basic foundation in knowledge for further development whereas professional bodies are interested in graduates capable of progression to full professional status through the achievement of the required core competencies (RICS, 2009). The industry is looking for a graduate who can straight away contribute to the growth and daily functions of business activity. Hence, there is a three directional pull on the development needs of the Quantity Surveyor (QS). The present education system of the QS does not recognise these multi-directional needs and hence often produces a graduate whom the industry sees as not fulfilling their requirements. This leads to many problems with greater levels of employer and graduate dissatisfaction and obstacles to early career development of the QS graduate. This research aims at investigating the changing development needs of Quantity Surveyors within a post recession industrial environment that satisfies the aspirations of industrial, professional and academic stakeholders. The paper will present the initial findings of the research based on a series of stakeholder interviews examining RICS competencies and academic curricular

Entrepreneurial ecosystems: a dynamic lifecycle model

The concept of entrepreneurial ecosystems has been used as a framework to explain entrepreneurial activities within regions and industrial sectors. Despite the usefulness of this approach, the concept is under-theorized, especially with regard to the evolution of entrepreneurial ecosystems. The current literature is lacking a theoretical foundation that addresses the development and change of entrepreneurial ecosystems over time and does not consider the inherent dynamics of entrepreneurial ecosystems that lead to their birth, growth, maturity, decline, and re-emergence. Taking an industry lifecycle perspective, this paper addresses this research gap by elaborating a dynamic entrepreneurial ecosystem lifecycle model. We propose that an ecosystem transitions from an entrepreneurial ecosystem, with a focus on new firm creation, towards a business ecosystem, with a core focus on the internal commercialization of knowledge, i.e., intrapreneurial activities, and vice versa. Our dynamic model thus captures the oscillation that occurs among entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs through the different phases of an ecosystem’s lifecycle. Our dynamic lifecycle model may thus serve as a starting point for future empirical studies focusing on ecosystems and provide the basis for a further understanding of the interrelatedness between and co-existence of new and incumbent firms