James Ballard and Philip Ian Butler
The purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual model of engagement, appropriated from social media marketing, as a sense-making framework to understand engagement as a…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual model of engagement, appropriated from social media marketing, as a sense-making framework to understand engagement as a measurable process through the development of engagement profiles. To explore its potential application to education the paper follows previous work with Personalised Learning strategies to place emphasis on the promotion of the learner voice – their ability to influence decisions affecting them and their community.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper will position engagement as a sociocultural process and adopt an Activity Theory based methodology demonstrated through a desk analysis of VLE data from a further education college.
Findings
The analysis suggests that the approach can yield insights that may be elusive in traditional measures reinforcing the overall conceptual proposal for a multi-method approach to profiling learner engagement.
Research limitations/implications
The paper has focused on presentation and exploration of the conceptual approach, which has limited the scope to broaden the discussion of the desk analysis and wider findings that this approach reveals.
Practical implications
It is intended that the approach offers a generalizable model that can be adopted by institutions planning to measure engagement or develop learner activity profiles. Several areas of immediate potential are identified throughout the paper.
Originality/value
This paper contributes a multi-method approach to engagement as argued for in recent engagement literature. This should offer institutions a way to realise value from emerging ideas within related domains of Learning Design and Learning Analytics.
Details
Keywords
Netzsch (UK) Ltd. announce the opening of their customer test facility in Newcastle‐under‐Lyme, Staffordshire. The test facility contains mixing and milling equipment of the…
Abstract
Netzsch (UK) Ltd. announce the opening of their customer test facility in Newcastle‐under‐Lyme, Staffordshire. The test facility contains mixing and milling equipment of the latest design with a totally flameproofed test area which is able to handle highly volatile products.
To analyse the relationship between China, patriachy, ageing, and social theory grounded in Judith Butler's notion of performativity.
Abstract
Purpose
To analyse the relationship between China, patriachy, ageing, and social theory grounded in Judith Butler's notion of performativity.
Design/methodology/approach
This is a novel theoretical framework to examine instances of patriachal identities by using China as a case study.
Findings
Performativity, we suggest, offers productive insights into the processes of subjection and the nature of power relations that may be usefully incorporated into studies of the elderly in China.
Research limitations/implications
This is a theoretical paper.
Practical implications
It raises questions to relationship of patriachy to understanding Chinese culture.
Originality/value
It is an original paper in that an application of Butler's conceptual tools have bot been applied elsewhere to examining China and ageing.
Details
Keywords
Gerard Lambe, Niall Linnane, Ian Callanan and Marcus W. Butler
Ireland’s physicians have a legal and an ethical duty to protect confidential patient information. Most healthcare records in Ireland remain paper based, so the purpose of this…
Abstract
Purpose
Ireland’s physicians have a legal and an ethical duty to protect confidential patient information. Most healthcare records in Ireland remain paper based, so the purpose of this paper is to: assess the protection afforded to paper records; log highest risk records; note the variations that occurred during the working week; and observe the varying protection that occurred when staff, students and public members were present.
Design/methodology/approach
A customised audit tool was created using Sphinx software. Data were collected for three months. All wards included in the study were visited once during four discrete time periods across the working week. The medical records trolley’s location was noted and total unattended medical records, total unattended nursing records, total unattended patient lists and when nursing personnel, medical students, public and a ward secretary were visibly present were recorded.
Findings
During 84 occasions when the authors visited wards, unattended medical records were identified on 33 per cent of occasions, 49 per cent were found during weekend visiting hours and just 4 per cent were found during morning rounds. The unattended medical records belonged to patients admitted to a medical specialty in 73 per cent of cases and a surgical specialty in 27 per cent. Medical records were found unattended in the nurses’ station with much greater frequency when the ward secretary was off duty. Unattended nursing records were identified on 67 per cent of occasions the authors visited the ward and were most commonly found unattended in groups of six or more.
Practical implications
This study is a timely reminder that confidential patient information is at risk from inappropriate disclosure in the hospital. There are few context-specific standards for data protection to guide healthcare professionals, particularly paper records. Nursing records are left unattended with twice the frequency of medical records and are found unattended in greater numbers than medical records. Protection is strongest when ward secretaries are on duty. Over-reliance on vigilant ward secretaries could represent a threat to confidential patient information.
Originality/value
While other studies identified data protection as an issue, this study assesses how data security varies inside and outside conventional working hours. It provides a rationale and an impetus for specific changes across the whole working week. By identifying the on-duty ward secretary’s favourable effect on medical record security, it highlights the need for alternative arrangements when the ward secretary is off duty. Data were collected prospectively in real time, giving a more accurate healthcare record security snapshot in each data collection point.
Details
Keywords
The relationship between ontology, realism, and normativity is complex and contentious. While naturalist and realist stances have tended to ground questions of normativity in…
Abstract
The relationship between ontology, realism, and normativity is complex and contentious. While naturalist and realist stances have tended to ground questions of normativity in ontology and accounts of human nature, critical theories have been critical of the relationship between ontological and normative projects. Queer theory in particular has been critical of ontological endeavors. Exploring the problem of normativity and ontology, this paper will make the case that the critical realist ontology of open systems and complex, contingent, conjunctural causation deeply resonates with queer theory, generating a queer ontology that both allows for and undermines ontological and normative projects.
Details
Keywords
Johanna Kingsman and Ian Davis
This paper examines the impact of lived experiences and attitudinal blueprints on researchers within the context of masculinities research. It explores the negotiation of gendered…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper examines the impact of lived experiences and attitudinal blueprints on researchers within the context of masculinities research. It explores the negotiation of gendered roles, exploring how personal narratives shape our engagement in gender research and the collaborative process of meaning-making. It discusses the methodological tensions surrounding narrative research and naturalistic inquiry when investigating masculinities.
Design/methodology/approach
Adopting a feminist post-structuralist lens, this paper analyses the discursive nature of masculinities and its theoretical and historical construction, alongside the use of narrative research methodologies in research practices.
Findings
The paper reinforces the importance of feminist frameworks in deconstructing gender norms and challenging implicit assumptions. The role of reflexivity in the research process and the potential for researcher subjectivity as a resource is emphasised. Drawing on existing scholarship and the authors' empirical research experiences, the importance of researcher reflexivity in recognising the potential for gender performativity in the research setting is emphasised, especially in gendered research spaces and when engaging with methodologies tacitly understood through gendered ideological lenses.
Research limitations/implications
The paper contributes to ongoing scholarly discussions exploring the intersection of gender, theory and practice.
Originality/value
The paper's theoretical exploration contributes to understandings of gender dynamics in research and offers insights into the complexities of conducting masculinities research from a critical perspective. The paper contributes to ongoing scholarly discussions exploring the intersection of gender, theory and practice.
Details
Keywords
Visual representations of teachers and teachers’ work over the past century and a half, in both professional literature and popular media, commonly construct teachers’ work as…
Abstract
Visual representations of teachers and teachers’ work over the past century and a half, in both professional literature and popular media, commonly construct teachers’ work as teacher‐centred, and built around specific technologies that privilege the teacher as the active, dominant and legitimate principal agent in the educational process. This article analyses a set of photographs that represent an ‘alternative’ educational approach to normalised mainstream schooling, to explore the ways such practices might enact pedagogy within different social relations. Butler’s discussions of performativity and Foucault’s concept of technologies of self, offer a theoretical framework for understanding the educative and political work such visual representations of teachers work might perform, in the construction of capacities to imagine what teachers’ work looks like, with implications for capacities to enact teaching. The photographs analysed present a pedagogy in which the teacher is less visibly central and less overtly directive in relation to children’s learning than in normalised pedagogy. Thus, in important respects, they offer material from which to construct a different vision of what teachers’ work looks like, and, consequently, to enact teachers’ work differently. In this article I explore a set of photographs of Montessori methods at Blackfriars School in Sydney in the early twentieth century. I do so in order to establish whether such photographs offer a representation of teaching that differs significantly from conventional ‘normalised’ understandings of teachers’ work. This in turn is intended to inform one part of a transformative agenda to address problematic aspects of contemporary schooling.