Personas and storyboards for motivating mobility

Quarterly publication containing articles related to the preservation of historic artifacts and sites in Texas. Feature articles discuss various aspects of Texas history and heritage, often highlighting museums and collections within the state. Also included are book reviews, current preservation news, and a listing of historical museums in Texas

Knowledge Driven Phenotyping

Extracting patient phenotypes from routinely collected health data (such as Electronic Health Records) requires translating clinically-sound phenotype definitions into queries/computations executable on the underlying data sources by clinical researchers. This requires significant knowledge and skills to deal with heterogeneous and often imperfect data. Translations are time-consuming, error-prone and, most importantly, hard to share and reproduce across different settings. This paper proposes a knowledge driven framework that (1) decouples the specification of phenotype semantics from underlying data sources; (2) can automatically populate and conduct phenotype computations on heterogeneous data spaces. We report preliminary results of deploying this framework on five Scottish health datasets

Reflections on the value of autistic participation in a tri‐national teacher‐training project through discourses of acceptance, othering and power

The Transform Autism Education (TAE) project is a tri‐national teacher training scheme involving Greece, Italy and the UK, whose purpose is to set up training projects to facilitate the educational inclusion of autistic children. Running over three years from 2014 to 2017, the involvement of autistic participants has been the source of some discussion. Here, TAE team members Wood and Milton reflect on narratives of participation, acceptance and struggle which emerged during a workshop they ran in Greece. Derived from 11 non‐autistic and two autistic participants, and analysed via discourse analysis, these stories suggest a high value placed on autistic participation by non‐autistic TAE team members, but an unwitting tendency to ‘other’ autistic people and a lack of awareness of the power differential. Meanwhile, as the autistic team members describe how educational and social participation can be achieved, the implications for autism education researchers and practitioners are discussed

Challenging the knowledge-transfer orthodoxy: Knowledge co-construction in technology-enhanced learning for children with autism

Experimental intervention studies constitute the current dominant research designs in the autism education field. Such designs are based on a ‘knowledge-transfer’ model of evidence-based practice in which research is conducted by researchers, and is then ‘transferred’ to practitioners to enable them to implement evidence-based interventions. While these research designs contribute important knowledge, they lead to a gap between what the research evidence may prescribe and what happens in practice, with a concomitant disparity between the priorities of researchers and practitioners. This paper discusses findings from the ESRC-funded ‘SHAPE’ project, which adopted a different model of evidence-based practice, focusing on knowledge co-construction. Pupils (N = 8), teachers (N = 10), a speech and language therapist and a parent in three different school communities investigated creative ways in which children's social communication skills could be enhanced through technology use. Through a participatory methodology, digital stories were used as a method to enable engagement with the practical realities of the classroom and empower practitioners to construct and share their own authentic narratives. Participants articulated precise knowledge about the learning opportunities afforded to them and their pupils through quality interactions that were mediated by the technologies, as evidenced through digital stories. The SHAPE project shows that it is feasible to develop methodologies that enable genuine knowledge co-construction with school practitioners, parents and pupils. Such co-construction could offer realistic opportunities for pedagogical emancipation and innovation in evidence-based practice as an alternative to the currently dominant and narrow model of knowledge transfer

Walk well:a randomised controlled trial of a walking intervention for adults with intellectual disabilities: study protocol

Background - Walking interventions have been shown to have a positive impact on physical activity (PA) levels, health and wellbeing for adult and older adult populations. There has been very little work carried out to explore the effectiveness of walking interventions for adults with intellectual disabilities. This paper will provide details of the Walk Well intervention, designed for adults with intellectual disabilities, and a randomised controlled trial (RCT) to test its effectiveness. Methods/design - This study will adopt a RCT design, with participants allocated to the walking intervention group or a waiting list control group. The intervention consists of three PA consultations (baseline, six weeks and 12 weeks) and an individualised 12 week walking programme. A range of measures will be completed by participants at baseline, post intervention (three months from baseline) and at follow up (three months post intervention and six months from baseline). All outcome measures will be collected by a researcher who will be blinded to the study groups. The primary outcome will be steps walked per day, measured using accelerometers. Secondary outcome measures will include time spent in PA per day (across various intensity levels), time spent in sedentary behaviour per day, quality of life, self-efficacy and anthropometric measures to monitor weight change. Discussion - Since there are currently no published RCTs of walking interventions for adults with intellectual disabilities, this RCT will examine if a walking intervention can successfully increase PA, health and wellbeing of adults with intellectual disabilities