Call for Papers - 2011 CHI Workshop on Bridging Practices, Theories, and Technologies to Support Reminiscence

CALL FOR PAPERS

CHI Workshop on Bridging Practices, Theories, and Technologies to Support Reminiscence 2011
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/~danco/remchiwork/

CHI 2011 Workshop

This one-day workshop explores how HCI-related practice and research can understand and support reminiscence. The workshop has two main goals. First, we hope to bring together academics and practitioners from a variety of backgrounds, disciplines, levels of experience, and approaches to studying and supporting reminiscing. Second, we hope to explore a variety of topics around current and potential uses of technology to support reminiscence, including but not limited to:

- understanding people's current practices around reminiscing;
- exploring empirical studies and theories of memory that might inform technology designs;
- presenting, critiquing, and evaluating existing technologies for reminiscence,
- considering how technology might support new reminiscing practices, and
- supporting social aspects of reminiscence.

We are particularly interested in participants from outside the CHI community to foster new perspectives and collaborations. Our plan is to conduct three short discussion-focused panels organized around participants' interests. Those discussions will ground small groups in articulating interesting directions, studies, designs, and outlines of potential grant and book proposals at the intersection of reminiscing and technology

SUBMISSION

Interested participants should mail position papers of up to 6 pages in .pdf versions of the CHI Extended Abstracts format to danco at cs.cornell.edu by January 14, 2011. Papers should clearly express how the authors' participation will further the goals of the workshop: what do authors offer and hope to gain by participating? They should also clearly, but briefly, present participating authors' backgrounds, in order to support our goals of creating a diverse group of participants.

We will notify accepted participants on or before February 11, 2001. A limited amount of funding will be available, primarily to support attendance for people from other disciplines who are not regular CHI attendees. The workshop will be held on Sunday May 8, 2011 in Vancouver, Canada. Please note that at least one author of an accepted position paper must register for the workshop and for one or more days of the CHI 2011 conference.

IMPORTANT DATES

- Jan 14, 2011: Position papers due
- Feb 11, 2011: Notifications of participation
- Apr 1, 2011: Final versions of position papers (to be shared with other participants)
- May 8, 2011: (Sunday) The workshop! (Here's the list of all workshops.)
- May 9-12 2011: CHI itself

ORGANIZERS

- Dan Cosley, Information Science, Cornell University danco at cs.cornell.edu
- Maurice Mulvenna, School of Computing and Mathematics, University of Ulster md.mulvenna at ulster.ac.uk
- Victoria Schwanda, Information Science, Cornell University vls48 at cornell.edu
- S. Tejaswi Peesapati, Information Science, Cornell University stp53 at cornell.edu

Caution! spanning the Theory - Practice Gap

As a new academic year begins and we endeavour to bridge the theory - practice gap we need to be cautious:


While we may not burn our bridges we need to be aware of which bridge spans are redundant and which are still active and serving their purpose.

As ever - standards, inspection, audit and governance are critical.

So in our efforts to bridge the theory - practice gap do we also maintain it?

Walls, Lines, Dykes and Health Care

We are accustomed to defensive care and medicine.


Costs aside it seems the driving mantra (always served with a smile) is avoid risk at all cost; but we also recognise the need to balance risk in its negative and positive forms.



When it comes to thinking about care though we need to be open to new ideas, territories and opportunities and what being defensive means in practice and theory in the 21st century.



Additional links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offa%27s_Dyke

It is unlikely that the Dyke was constructed as a defensive earthwork. No army of the period could defend a 120 plus mile long earthwork. It is more likely that the Dyke was constructed as a political statement of power and intent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Wall_of_China

Evidence Hodges' model #1: Research in Nursing

When as a nurse (OT, physio, medic....) you are on a course, especially one about research you may be required to complete a study or more significant piece of research. Courses at graduate and post graduate level invariably include such demands and stress the hope that this course will spur you to continue the research effort in the work place. The ideal is of course to routinise research in clinical settings. Whatever the debate regarding the merits of evidence-based nursing, medicine and so on, this still needs to happen in part to help bridge the theory - practice gap.


In the same way all nurses have a professional responsibility to educate their student peers, (patients and carers...) there is an expectation that nurses are like embedded media commentators in a war zone. Part of your time in practice will be devoted to research, audit and governance.

While there are audit and governance teams there willing to help, many people multi-task in their work and nurses are seasoned practitioners. Many just want to do what they were trained for and nurse. They recognize this as they hear the expectations of the course leaders, lecturers and yet they are aware of the constraints. The scope for research is weighed against other commitments, notably:

• direct(ing) patient care and safety
• management and supervision
• audit duties for management information

There are of course a host of psychosocial influences that come into play. What is my personal interest in research? Where do I prefer to be at work: office, ward, or home or retired? Cynical? No! Just being realistic. The information systems frequently in place can assist as a research tool, but their chief role is to provide management information through the collation of aggregated data. This is done by-and-large transparently in the background ('back-end'), and that is the problem. Nurses need to get their feet wet. The option must be there, and not just when on courses. Nurses need to immerse themselves in the data and information streams they help to create and source.

As the list above suggests nurses and not just senior nurses need direct access to the icon labelled 'reports'. There should be ways for nursing work to be captured in-situ, but how? Many clinical information system vendors have their solutions to this, but as regular readers know for a long time I've been wondering about -

1. How can the balance between management data and intelligence needs and clinical needs be supported and bridged?*
   
2. What is the evidence base to support Hodges' model in theory, practice, management and policy?
3. What is the state, characteristics, access and usability of nursing terminology, taxonomy, classification systems in informatics - information and communication systems?
4. If I am individually compelled (nuts!) to create a new website could I ally this aim with a course?

More to follow - including some of the sessions at Drupalcon Paris.....

*To this list we also need to add other stakeholders - members of the public.

Additional links:
http://www.icn.ch/icnp.htm

Image sources:
Mind the gap: http://ci.coe.uni.edu/facstaff/zeitz/web/itag/mindthegap/
Report icon: http://artistsvalley.deviantart.com/art/Free-Task-Icons-Reports-Icons-89509953

Informing Science (with Thor to follow) ...

The problem with the web is you search, find and save stuff and then it virtually disappears on hard drives and folders only to somehow bubble-up back to life hopefully at a time of need. So with the Informing Science Journal.

I know the details are only a click away, but here they are:

The academically peer refereed journal Informing Science endeavors to provide an understanding of the complexities in informing clientele. Fields from information systems, library science, journalism in all its forms to education all contribute to this science. These fields, which developed independently and have been researched in separate disciplines, are evolving to form a new transdiscipline, Informing Science.

Informing Science publishes articles that provide insights into the nature, function and design of systems that inform clients. Authors may use epistemologies from engineering, computer science, education, psychology, business, anthropology, and such. The ideal paper will serve to inform fellow researchers, perhaps from other fields, of contributions to this area.

Ever since reviewing Gary Hall's "Digitize This Book!" the future of academic publishing, the university as an institution and scholarly disciplines has been on my mind. I did have another book on my wish list that predicted I believe the death of the university if things do not change. This is lost somewhere... I am really pleased to rediscover this journal, its contents and look forward to reading more and possibly contributing once existing projects are completed...

In the substance misuse paper draft, in addition to the usual key concepts I am wondering about the use of holistic bridges and so...

More to follow soon on the aims of the Informing Science Journal with reference to Thor, bridges and what informing science means for Hodges' model ....

Holistic care and 'where' it means....

Delivering holistic care does not mean being -

here	here
here	- or here

Holistic care is not even
about being in all these
places at the same time.

It means you have already
been to these places and you
will be going back again.

Holistic care also means
none of the participants travel alone ...

'Information' a definition

Exactly what information is (at least one very useful technical definition of it) is answered by the mathematical theory of information. A rich field with many applications to biology, linguistics, and electronics, the theory is couched in the language of bits, each bit of information conveying one binary choice. [Hence 5 bits, for example, convey 5 such choices and are sufficient to distinguish from among 32 (or 2⁵) alternatives, there being 32 (2⁵) possible yes-no sequences of length 5.] Bits serve too as units in the numerical measure of such notions as the entropy of information sources, the capacity of communication channels, and the redundancy of messages.

Source: Paulos, J.A., (1991) Binary numbers and codes, Beyond Innumeracy, p.26.

Additional links:

W2tQ 'information'

W2tQ 'Ye Olde paper: 1996 "Humans, information and science'

Nursing theory - conceptual spaces: Where's my T-shirt?

Tripp-Reimer's 1996 paper The Dimensional Structure of Nursing Interventions has been sitting in my dsw - 'do something with' - pile for ages. Now reading Gardenfors I came across multidimensional scaling and realised that Tripp-Reimer et al. have also been there done that. They have been wearing the T-shirt for well over a decade.

Their paper begins with the evolution of nursing’s substantive structures and the emergence through the late 1960s to the early 1980s of a plethora of conceptual models (including - but not mentioned Hodges’ model). According to Tripp-Reimer these models while clearly possessed of nursing credentials, they were not always produced as combined research and practice tools. They argue that this failure may have contributed to the rise of the metaparadigm of nursing, with the effect that:

‘At best, the metaparadigm myth provided a rationale and mechanism for the discipline to displace (transcend) the conceptual models.’ p.11.

Ah! So that would account for why Hodges' model (and other global conceptual frameworks) have languished in the lay-bye!

‘Currently, nursing conceptual models have limited utility beyond their historical importance. That utility is derived from the structures they can provide for nursing education programs. Analogously, they also provide a framework that is useful for beginning nurses, assisting them in cognitively framing a clinical situation. These models provide a map, stimulating the new nurse in a clinically familiar space.’ p.15.

The paper goes on to contrast the way these models are used a-consciously by experts. I would suggest that there is a problem in nursing theory; or if not so severe as to be deemed a 'problem' then a tension at least. Educationalists (theorists) will rightly justify the case for nursing to be defined and boundaries set; otherwise, curricula will not support delivery of the desired learning experience, would lack focus and integrity in terms of evaluation of content and professional credibility. Socio-politically professional groups need a sense of (group) identity. The intention to develop models – theories in order to delineate nursing and establish professional identity is, however, at odds with the practice objectives of holistic and (interdisciplinary) integrated health and social care. Nurses need conceptual models and spaces that extend - from the outset - beyond the clinical situation.

It is the unfamiliar spaces (patient, carer, community... occupied) that we must seek or at least be able to account for in assessment, planning, interventions, evaluation (research) and information governance. Clinical situations should certainly be familiar within the bounds (latitude) of the curricula and including the match between what is taught and practical experience (practicum).

Health and social care, education and policy are constantly changing. Amid the rapid pace of T-shirt slogan turnover tools such as Hodges’ model retain their relevance for experts and beginners alike.

Tripp-Reimer, T., Woodworth, G., McCloskey, J.C., Bulechek, G. (1996). The dimensional structure of nursing interventions. Nursing Research; 45(1):pp.10-17.

T-shirt image source Copyright © 2001 - 2008 The CELDirect Group: http//www.blazingclothing.co.uk/

H2CM: Some Reflections on Purposes

Of the purposes associated with h2cm:

1. To produce a curriculum development tool.
2. Help ensure holistic assessment and evaluation.
3. To support reflective practice.
4. To reduce the theory-practice gap.

(Source: Brian Hodges)

- the primary purpose must be to facilitate and support holistic practice. The reasoning for this runs (it is hoped) as follows:

Although reflection is often conducted with a particular task - frequently a question - and hence a set of associated experiences in mind; the individual should be encouraged to think universally. If in general reflection is constrained then perhaps the activity is no longer reflection?

If the curriculum developers intend to produce holistic practitioners* then once again holistic considerations should pre-empt and influence curriculum development.

Theory and practice are surely as 'holistic' as holistic is? This purpose though seeks to assist in closing the theory-practice gap and the existence of this gap suggests that there is something else – even if only space. This space means we must once again defer to holistic.

Or am I getting confused...? What do you think? h2cmng at yahoo.co.uk

*holistic in terms of the range of thought - not holistic new-age therapies.