Facilitating Knowledge Visualisation as Communication and Knowledge Transfer Mechanism in Postgraduate Learning

Advances in technology and subsequent access to inexpensive software have made visualisation, as a method of knowledge creation and transfer, more accessible. Visualisations have been used to support knowledge representation and transfer in teaching but the focus has primarily been on creating visualisations for learner consumption. The idea of students becoming active participants in producing visualisations, as part of knowledge creation and learning, has largely been overlooked. The study reported here investigated the use of visualisation for summarising knowledge at postgraduate level. The student’s need to assimilate and organise knowledge is an important part of their learning. We suggest that it would be useful for students to learn how to produce knowledge visualisations as part of this activity. The production is an act of knowledge creation, which can improve their comprehension of the research literature. Producing visualisations is not necessarily straightforward and it is therefore advisable to scaffold the process. We propose a faded-struts learning process that gradually removes scaffolding as the learner masters the principles and becomes more adept. The contribution of this research is to present the idea of providing worked examples and faded examples to support postgraduate learning. This helps postgraduates to craft knowledge visualisations so that they can slowly become more proficient and independent. Due to the ubiquity of mobile devices we propose providing this support on these devices, incorporating their unique constraints and affordances in our learning process. This is essentially a proof of concept paper, suggesting how the idea could be realised. Further work is necessary to test the idea with students and to extend the repertoire of mobile learning (m-learning) visualisation tasks.College of Engineering, Science and Technolog

The Vulnverability Cube: A Multi-Dimensional Framework for Assessing Relative Vulnerability

The diversity and abundance of information available for vulnerability assessments can present a challenge to decision-makers. Here we propose a framework to aggregate and present socioeconomic and environmental data in a visual vulnerability assessment that will help prioritize management options for communities vulnerable to environmental change. Socioeconomic and environmental data are aggregated into distinct categorical indices across three dimensions and arranged in a cube, so that individual communities can be plotted in a three-dimensional space to assess the type and relative magnitude of the communities’ vulnerabilities based on their position in the cube. We present an example assessment using a subset of the USEPA National Estuary Program (NEP) estuaries: coastal communities vulnerable to the effects of environmental change on ecosystem health and water quality. Using three categorical indices created from a pool of publicly available data (socioeconomic index, land use index, estuary condition index), the estuaries were ranked based on their normalized averaged scores and then plotted along the three axes to form a vulnerability cube. The position of each community within the three-dimensional space communicates both the types of vulnerability endemic to each estuary and allows for the clustering of estuaries with like-vulnerabilities to be classified into typologies. The typologies highlight specific vulnerability descriptions that may be helpful in creating specific management strategies. The data used to create the categorical indices are flexible depending on the goals of the decision makers, as different data should be chosen based on availability or importance to the system. Therefore, the analysis can be tailored to specific types of communities, allowing a data rich process to inform decision-making

Design for Mobile Mental Health:An Exploratory Review

A large number of mobile mental health apps are available to the public but current knowledge about requirements of designing such solutions is scarce, especially from sociotechnical and user centred points of view. Due to the significant role of mobile apps in the mental health service models, identifying the design requirements of mobile mental health solutions is crucial. Some of those requirements have been addressed individually in the literature, but there are few research studies that show a comprehensive picture of this domain. This exploratory review aims to facilitate such holistic understanding. The main search keywords of the review were identified in a cross-disciplinary requirements workshop. The search was started by finding some core references in the healthcare databases. A wider range of references then has been explored using a snowball method. Findings showed that there is a good understanding of individual design requirements in current literature but there are few examples of implementing a combination of different design requirements in real world products. The design processes specifically developed for mobile mental health apps are also rare. Most studies on operational mobile mental health apps address major mental health issues while prevention and wellbeing areas are underdeveloped. In conclusion, the main recommendations for designing future mobile mental health solutions include: moving towards sociotechnical and open design strategies, understanding and creating shared value, recognizing all dimensions of efficacy, bridging design and medical research and development, and considering an ecosystem perspective

Facilitating knowledge visualisation as communication and knowledge transfer mechanism in postgraduate learning

Advances in technology and subsequent access to inexpensive software have made visualisation, as a method of knowledge creation and transfer, more accessible. Visualisations have been used to support knowledge representation and transfer in teaching but the focus has primarily been on creating visualisations for learner consumption. The idea of students becoming active participants in producing visualisations, as part of knowledge creation and learning, has largely been overlooked. The study reported here investigated the use of visualisation for summarising knowledge at postgraduate level. The student’s need to assimilate and organise knowledge is an important part of their learning. We suggest that it would be useful for students to learn how to produce knowledge visualisations as part of this activity. The production is an act of knowledge creation, which can improve their comprehension of the research literature. Producing visualisations is not necessarily straightforward and it is therefore advisable to scaffold the process. We propose a faded-struts learning process that gradually removes scaffolding as the learner masters the principles and becomes more adept. The contribution of this research is to present the idea of providing worked examples and faded examples to support postgraduate learning. This helps postgraduates to craft knowledge visualisations so that they can slowly become more proficient and independent. Due to the ubiquity of mobile devices we propose providing this support on these devices, incorporating their unique constraints and affordances in our learning process. This is essentially a proof of concept paper, suggesting how the idea could be realised. Further work is necessary to test the idea with students and to extend the repertoire of mobile learning (m-learning) visualisation tasks