Digital Storytelling: How to Bring Your Stories to Life

Everyone has a story to tell –but how can we effectively communicate these stories to our online students? Using photographs, copyright-free music, and iMovie‘09, this session will demonstrate the creation of a short digital story from start to finish. The finished movie can be posted to a website or LMS to share with students

Podcasting Essentials: Self-Paced Instruction for Instructors

The presenter\u27s handout illustrates the different principles and technologies used to develop a self-paced course for use in distributing and creating podcasts in an educational environment

Motivating Student Learning in the Middle School Math Classroom

This research studied motivating student learning in the middle school classroom. It followed a group of middle school students through three mini-mathematics units in attempt to determine which instructional strategies would best motivate the hardest to reach students. One unit was lecture based, one was an individual project and one was a problem based cooperative learning unit. The research measured student motivation in terms of time on task, homework completion, overall grades, student behavior and student comments that were made. The research concluded that over a short period of time, instruction that allows for risk taking, creativity, collaboration, real-life application and presents an appropriate level of difficulty best motivates middle school students. In the future, this should be tested over a longer duration of time in order to determine whether or not these students will carry the motivation with them outside of the classroom and into their own personal lives

Identifying better systems design in Australian maternity care: a boundary critique analysis

This article examines the background and limitations of maternity care policy and provision in Australia using the Boundary Critique method from critical systems thinking. We argue that the historical legacy of funding maternity care within medically dominated fee-for-service structures and acute hospital budgets is seriously flawed. Furthermore, it cannot deliver the policy goals of healthy and socially equitable birth practices. Despite the 2009 national Maternity Services Review and progress of a National Maternity Services Plan (2011), most mainstream Australian maternity services remain out-of-step with both health service research and evidence-based ‘best practice’. The present system drives unnecessary clinical interventions, increased expenditure, short-term adverse health outcomes and the potential for a larger, unacknowledged legacy of future chronic disease. By contrast, boundary critique analysis suggests that redesigning for good maternity service provision can act as a population-level preventative health strategy, offering better value, better health and improved equity in maternity care

Maternity funding and workforce reform: strategies for better design, better value, better health and equity

The purpose of this paper is to make transparent the connections between funding, workforce issues, and clinical outcomes in Australian maternity services, including their relationship to Casemix. It will also examine how these factors intersect and impact existing service models, emerging service models and, most importantly, contemporary consumer demand, community expectations of health care, and health outcomes for women and babies in the short and long term. Central to this purpose, the paper offers a dual critique: a) that the principles, foundation and model for funding maternity service provision in Australia within acute hospital services is seriously flawed and a significant driver for increased expenditure as well as unnecessary clinical interventions in healthy women and babies, and short term adverse health outcomes for mothers, babies and families; it also results in a larger, hitherto unacknowledged systems legacy with significant implications for long term health and economic outcomes of the population, including future health system management of the burden of chronic disease; b) that there is a current mismatch between policy and funding structure whereby biomedical/acute care models of service delivery for healthy pregnant women and babies are broadly privileged as the dominant paradigm for maternity services. This constitutes incoherent health policy and is inconsistent with both medical research and evidence- based ‘best practice,’ including a population health approach to delivery of maternity services and the view that good maternity service provision can act as a population level preventative health strategy. The paper uses Ulrich’s Systematic Boundary Critique (1) as a framework to make transparent the limitations and dysfunction of the current system and to propose an alternative design which has the capacity to improve equity, access, clinical outcomes, and reconfiguration and utilization of the skilled midwifery workforce. The new design can contribute reduced health care costs, labour force efficiency, staff retention, and economically sustainable services. The paper concludes that a national approach to policy and structural funding reform that relocates mainstream maternity services for healthy women and babies within a primary health care paradigm is urgently required in Australia, and is aligned with widespread consumer lobbying for such reform

Statistical Self-Similarity of One-Dimensional Growth Processes

For one-dimensional growth processes we consider the distribution of the height above a given point of the substrate and study its scale invariance in the limit of large times. We argue that for self-similar growth from a single seed the universal distribution is the Tracy-Widom distribution from the theory of random matrices and that for growth from a flat substrate it is some other, only numerically determined distribution. In particular, for the polynuclear growth model in the droplet geometry the height maps onto the longest increasing subsequence of a random permutation, from which the height distribution is identified as the Tracy-Widom distribution.Comment: 11 pages, iopart, epsf, 2 postscript figures, submitted to Physica A, in an Addendum the distribution for the flat case is identified analyticall

Decline in Health for Older Adults: 5-Year Change in 13 Key Measures of Standardized Health

Introduction The health of older adults declines over time, but there are many ways of measuring health. We examined whether all measures declined at the same rate, or whether some aspects of health were less sensitive to aging than others. Methods We compared the decline in 13 measures of physical, mental, and functional health from the Cardiovascular Health Study: hospitalization, bed days, cognition, extremity strength, feelings about life as a whole, satisfaction with the purpose of life, self-rated health, depression, digit symbol substitution test, grip strength, ADLs, IADLs, and gait speed. Each measure was standardized against self-rated health. We compared the 5-year change to see which of the 13 measures declined the fastest and the slowest. Results The 5-year change in standardized health varied from a decline of 12 points (out of 100) for hospitalization to a decline of 17 points for gait speed. In most comparisons, standardized health from hospitalization and bed days declined the least while health measured by ADLs, IADLs, and gait speed declined the most. These rankings were independent of age, sex, mortality patterns, and the method of standardization. Discussion All of the health variables declined, on average, with advancing age, but at significantly different rates. Standardized measures of mental health, cognition, quality of life and hospital utilization did not decline as fast as gait speed, ADLs, and IADLs. Public health interventions to address problems with gait speed, ADLs, and IADLs may help older adults to remain healthier in all dimensions

Renovasculopathies of nephrosclerosis in relation to atherosclerosis at ages 25 to 54 years

Renovasculopathies of nephrosclerosis in relation to atherosclerosis at ages 25 to 54 years. Renovasculopathies of hypertension include arteriolar hyalinization and arterial intimal fibroplasia. Atherosclerotic features of coronary arteries and aorta include fatty streaks and raised lesions. Data were obtained from a series of 573 autopsies of black and Caucasian males and females aged 25 to 54 years, who died of violent and natural causes unrelated to atherosclerosis. Analysis showed positive correlations of coronary and aortic raised lesions with arteriolar hyalinization. Arterial intimal fibroplasia correlated positively with raised lesions in the aorta but only weakly and inconsistently in the coronary arteries. The extent of fatty streaks in the coronaries, as in the aorta, did not correlate with either form of renovasculopathy. These results provide evidence that hyalinization of renal arterioles may be a marker for young people who have the most advanced coronary atherosclerosis, and who therefore have an early start upon a course toward coronary heart disease later in life

From Ideas to Practice, Pilots to Strategy: Practical Solutions and Actionable Insights on How to Do Impact Investing

This report is the second publication in the World Economic Forum's Mainstreaming Impact Investing Initiative. The report takes a deeper look at why and how asset owners began to include impact investing in their portfolios and continue to do so today, and how they overcame operational and cultural constraints affecting capital flow. Given that impact investing expertise is spread among dozens if not hundreds of practitioners and academics, the report is a curation of some -- but certainly not all -- of those leading voices. The 15 articles are meant to provide investors, intermediaries and policy-makers with actionable insights on how to incorporate impact investing into their work.The report's goals are to show how mainstream investors and intermediaries have overcome the challenges in the impact investment sector, and to democratize the insights and expertise for anyone and everyone interested in the field. Divided into four main sections, the report contains lessons learned from practitioner's experience, and showcases best practices, organizational structures and innovative instruments that asset owners, asset managers, financial institutions and impact investors have successfully implemented

Sesamoid Bones in Tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus) Investigated With X-Ray Microtomography, and Implications for Sesamoid Evolution in Lepidosauria

Sesamoids bones are small intra‐tendinous (or ligamentous) ossifications found near joints and are often variable between individuals. Related bones, lunulae, are found within the menisci of certain joints. Several studies have described sesamoids and lunulae in lizards and their close relatives (Squamata) as potentially useful characters in phylogenetic analysis, but their status in the extant outgroup to Squamata, tuatara (Sphenodon), remains unclear. Sphenodon is the only living rhynchocephalian, but museum specimens are valuable and difficult to replace. Here, we use non‐destructive X‐ray microtomography to investigate the distribution of sesamoids and lunulae in 19 Sphenodon specimens and trace the evolution of these bones in Lepidosauria (Rhynchocephalia + Squamata). We find adult Sphenodon to possess a sesamoid and lunula complement different from any known squamate, but also some variation within Sphenodon specimens. The penultimate phalangeal sesamoids and tibial lunula appear to mineralize prior to skeletal maturity, followed by mineralization of a sesamoid between metatarsal I and the astragalocalcaneum (MTI‐AC), the palmar sesamoids, and tibiofemoral lunulae around attainment of skeletal maturity. The tibial patella, ulnar, and plantar sesamoids mineralize late in maturity or variably. Ancestral state reconstruction indicates that the ulnar patella and tibiofemoral lunulae are synapomophies of Squamata, and the palmar sesamoid, tibial patella, tibial lunula, and MTI‐AC may be synapomorphies of Lepidosauria