Confidence and performance in objective structured clinical examination

Introduction: The objective structured clinical examination (OSCE )is commonly used as a standard assessment approach in midwifery education. Student’s confidence may impact on the OSCE performancebut the evidence on this is very limited. Objectives: This study aimed to evaluate the relationship between confidence and OSCE performance in midwifery students. Methods: 103 pre-registration midwifery students (42 year one students: 61 year three students) from Sheffield Hallam University took part in this study as part of their routine OSCE assessment. They completed pre- and post-exam questionnaires, which asked them to rate their confidence in the clinical skills being assessed on a scale from 1 to 10 (1=not confident; 10 =totally confident). Results: The results showed significant increases in mean confidence levels from before to after OSCE for both first and third year students (5.52 (1.25) to 6.49 (1.19); P=0.001 and 7.49(0.87) to 8.01(0.73); P<0.001, respectively). However, there was no significant correlation between confidence levels before undertaking the OSCE and the final OSCE test scores (r= 0.12; P=0.315). Conclusions: The increased level of confidence after the OSCE is important but how thisis transformed into improved clinical skills in practical settings requires further investigation. The lack of significant correlation between OSCEresults and student’s confidence, may indicate additional evidence for the objectivity of the OSCE . This, however, may be due to the inherent complexity of assessing such relationships. Larger studies with mixed methodology are required for further investigation of this important area of education and assessment research

Textility of Code: A Catalogue of Errors

This article presents a series of informal experiments in software and weaving, most of which were conducted as part of the Weaving Codes, Coding Weaves project. Different aspects of weaving, including plain weave, a four-shaft loom, tablet weaving and warp-weighted weaving are simulated, in order to gain greater understanding of the craft from the perspective of computer science. The production rules of L-Systems are employed to begin to explore the expansive possibilities offered even by our simple simulations. In order to test our models and gain deeper understanding, the languages we produce are interpreted both as computer simulations and by our human selves, through the weaving of textile by hand. Physical user interfaces are introduced, in order to help communicate the structures and thought processes of weaving. Finally, we share our approach to representing a weave from the point of view of a thread. Throughout, our aim is not to simulate a weave in its entirety, but to gain and share insights into its complexity, and begin see how the long history of weaving, as a fundamentally digital yet ancient craft, can inform the younger fields of computer science and engineering. This is the open-access author’s version of a closed access article published by Taylor and Francis in TEXTILE: Journal of Cloth and Culture, May 2017. It is shared under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license, with doi: 10.5281/zenodo.832582

What does the community want from their public library?: Getting in touch with non-users

Non-Peer ReviewedIn 2020, the Prince Albert Public Library Board set a new strategic plan that included developing a community research program. The Library Director began working with a researcher from the University of Saskatchewan, a research plan was devised, and plans made for summer 2020. When the pandemic began we had to rethink our original plan to survey the community in person at public events. As the pandemic continued and we were unable to gather in person, we identified alternate options. We decided to focus on an online survey and work with community groups for recruitment. We looked at existing non-user research from a variety of enterprises, and created a survey adapted to a public library environment. We worked with the Canadian Hub for Applied and Social Research (CHASR) to refine our study and build some maps to visualize our data. Our survey sowed the seeds, and will close in October 2021, so we do not yet know what we will harvest, but we look forward to analyzing and sharing our data. The goal of this research is to help the public library develop services and programs based on community-identified needs. The library strives to continue to grow and build services, programs, and branches, and to expand our outreach in response to this survey. We are excited to see the outcomes from this study as we build a research program that will continue to be responsive to the needs of our community as we build a public library for the future

Artist-Programmers and Programming Languages for the Arts

We consider the artist-programmer, who creates work through its description as source code. The artist-programmer grandstands computer language, giving unique vantage over human-computer interaction in a creative context. We focus on the human in this relationship, noting that humans use an amalgam of language and gesture to express themselves. Accordingly we expose the deep relationship between computer languages and continuous expression, examining how these realms may support one another, and how the artist-programmer may fully engage with both. Our argument takes us up through layers of representation, starting with symbols, then words, language and notation, to consider the role that these representations may play in human creativity. We form a cross-disciplinary perspective from psychology, computer science, linguistics, human-computer interaction, computational creativity, music technology and the arts. We develop and demonstrate the potential of this view to inform arts practice, through the practical introduction of software prototypes, artworks, programming languages and improvised performances. In particular, we introduce works which demonstrate the role of perception in symbolic semantics, embed the representation of time in programming language, include visuospatial arrangement in syntax, and embed the activity of programming in the improvisation and experience of art

The PENELOPE Project: A Case Study in Computational Thinking

Weaving is presented in this paper with relation to the four key categories of computational thinking: decomposition, pattern recognition, abstraction, and algorithms. The role of weaving for the development of theoretical concepts is underestimated, because we perceive weaving as a minor craft with little technological challenge and impact. Where technological progress is measured in terms of gaining time from dull and tedious repetitive tasks, weaving appears to be the archetype of such repetitive work and thus as the more technological the faster it goes. We address this framing of perception by presenting ancient weaving as the earliest binary and digital technology. The PENELOPE project (ERC CoGrant no. 682711) aims to develop a theory of weaving as part of a deep history and epistemology for digital technology. In explicating the mathematical and computing principles invoked in weaving, we furthermore explore weaving as a kind of education that has the potential to engage tacit knowledge that is necessary to make technical and aesthetic choices in coding. By this, we argue for an alternative history of digital art

Big data optical music recognition with multi images and multi recognisers

In this paper we describe work in progress towards Multi-OMR, an approach to Optical Music Recognition (OMR) which aims to significantly improve the accuracy of musical score digitisation. There are a large number of scores available in public databases, as well as a range of different commercial and open source OMR tools. Using these resources, we are exploring a Big Data approach to harnessing datasets by aligning and combining the results of multiple versions of the same score, processed with multiple technologies. It is anticipated that this approach will yield high quality results, opening up large datasets to researchers in the field of digital musicology

European integration and the social science of EU studies: the disciplinary politics of a subfield

This article takes the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome as an opportunity to reflect upon half a century of academic discourse about the EU and its antecedents. In particular, it illuminates the theoretical analysis of European integration that has developed within political science and international studies broadly defined. It asks whether it is appropriate to map, as might be tempting, the intellectual 'progress' of the field of study against the empirical evolution of its object (European integration/the EU). The argument to be presented here is that while we can, to some extent, comprehend the evolution of academic thinking about the EU as a reflex to critical shifts in the 'real world' of European integration ('externalist' drivers), it is also necessary to understand 'internalist' drivers of theoretical discourse on European integration/the EU. The article contemplates two such 'internalist' components that have shaped and continue to shape the course of EU studies: scholarly contingency (the fact that scholarship does not proceed with free agency, but is bound by various conditions) and disciplinary politics (the idea that the course of academic work is governed by power games and that there are likely significant disagreements about best practice and progress in a field). In terms of EU studies, the thrust of disciplinary politics tends towards an opposition between 'mainstreaming' and 'pluralist versions' of the political science of EU studies. The final section explores how, in the face of emerging monistic claims about propriety in the field, an effective pluralist political science of the EU might be enhanced

Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Live Coding

Open Access peer reviewed papers on live coding published at the 1st International Conference on Live Coding (ICLC) in Leeds

Interfacing with the Night

In  this  paper,  the  authors  consider  the  interfaces  between academia and dance music. Dance music and club culture are, we argue, important to computer music and the live performance of electronic music, but there are many different difficulties encountered when trying to present electronic dance music within academic contexts. The authors draw upon their experiences as promoters, performers, researchers and audience members to discuss these difficulties and how and why we might negotiate them