NW England: Greater Manchester AHSN Hackathon 'Young Carers'

Date: Thursday 31st July

Time: 8.30 – 17.00

Lunch and refreshments will be provided


On the 31st July GM AHSN invite you to an all-day hackathon focussed on developing solutions that can make a difference to the lives of young carers.

There are currently over 700,000 carers in the UK. In the addition to the difficulties of caring for a sick relative, many are placed at a disadvantage in terms of their academic and social lives. The hackathon is your opportunity to make an impact, test your skills and work collaboratively to help develop solutions to this often overlooked social problem. The event is open to everybody, regardless of experience, though we’re particularly looking for:

• Carers and anybody with experience of the challenges faced
• Software developers
• Web developers
• Designers/ UX experts
• Health and social care professionals
• Marketers
• Project managers
• Researcher
• Coders

The GM AHSN has worked with young carers to identify key challenge areas in:

• Support for epilepsy
• Alert systems for schools and offices
• Time management for young carers
• Social Networking for young carers

(Click here for more info on challenges)
The hackathon will bring together all the right people to help develop your idea in super quick time: You can meet and work with people with skills and experience from the healthcare and technology industries, all with the common goal of wanting to make a difference. The event will be attended by a group of young carers from the Manchester based charity Family Action, who will be acting as mentors and contributing to the development of your concepts.

Prizes

As a prize, the winning team will be rewarded with a day of free consultancy from Inventya, to help develop and commercialise your idea. Inventya is a science and technology commercialisation consultancy with an 80% success rate in helping early stage companies win funding for R&D and technology product development.


If you’d like more information, please contact sarah.dougan AT gmahsn.org

My source: @Stefan
 
[ I can't make it :( ]

Drupalcon Portland session: Collaborative Learning Systems in Drupal & tpm

I'm still following Drupal here in NW England and around Europe since version 4.7. The next Drupalcon is in Prague next month and I'm all set. As what seems a lifelong learner of Drupal there are usually many sessions of relevance to me. There's repetition creeping in too (at Munich last year), which is a good sign for me. Perhaps it's a sign of Drupal's maturing but there are sessions of specific interest in health and education. This week the program for Drupalcon Prague starts to really emerge.

Until the 13th when the program appears, there was an educational-learning example from Portland in May 2013 embedded below, by Avram Sand and Fabian Franz. The introduction for which begins...

How can you use Drupal to add value to a Learning Management System? In this case study we will show how Trellon helped Population Services International (PSI), a leading global health organization, build a collaborative learning environment using common Drupal modules.

There are some great pointers in this session, modules to consider and insights into functionality.  Whatever TLA is employed - LMS (learning management system), VLE (virtual learning environment), TEL (technology enhanced learning) ... the lessons are transferable.

In the latest edition of the philosopher's magazine tpm 3rd Quarter there's a paper on TEL by David Mossley and Clare Saunders: A revolution in philosophy teaching? (pp. 40-45). Mossley and Saunders argue the case for tempering our expectations of TEL, framing their article around constructivism:

... TEL, presents entirely new and exciting learning environments which students can engage with in more ways, with greater self-motivation, and with more creative possibilities than ever before. If constructivist pedagogy is right, thr more "engagement" with a perfectly modelled environment of ideas in a virtual space a student can enjoy, the higher the quality of their learning experience will be; for they will be presented with just the "optimal" set of experiences needed to create their won meanings appropriately. However, once we start to analyse what the word "appropriately" might mean in this context, we suggest this starts to point us toward a different way of thinking about epistemology and pedagogy. p.42

More positively, they conclude that - technology enhanced learning:

... can and does furnish new spaces and opportunities for social learning - it opens up new avenues for us both to practise and enhance further our philosophical knowledge and capabilities and (thereby) to co-create the future of philosophy and of knowledge more broadly. p.45.

Mossley and Saunders also refer to Hegel's idea of Bildung:

describing education as the bringing into harmony of all one's thoughts, experiences, activities and practices in existing contexts; that is, education as shared approaches to ways of making meanings, of gaining competence, based on the meanings explored by others before us. p.43.

Here is another avenue to support the role of Hodges' model in education and practice.

3rd Int. Conference on Integrated Information: IC-ININFO, Prague Sept

Hi everyone!

I have been invited to Chair a session at the IC-ININFO 2013 conference in Prague in September and am now looking for abstracts by people interested in attending.

I am particularly interested in papers around sociotechnology or knowledge management. At this stage an abstract is required of around 250 words to me in the first instance and if I accept it, then it will go through the online review system. After acceptance of their abstract the authors have to prepare their Conference paper of up to 8 pages.

The paper submission will initiate a further single blind peer review process and the final paper will be published in the Conference Proceedings Book. More over, each author can submit a full paper to one of the supporting journals.

Please get in touch if you have an idea for this conference.

Elayne Coakes (Dr)
Senior Lecturer, Information and Knowledge Management
Room M112
The University of Westminster
coakese at WESTMINSTER.AC.UK

My source: SOCIOTECH at JISCMAIL.AC.UK

Visual Methodologies Doctoral Training Workshop 26 - 27 June 2012

Developing Theory & Practice in Visual Methodologies

The School of Education, Communication & Language Sciences and Durham University’s School of Education are holding a two-day workshop for doctoral students on the development and use of visual methodologies.

The workshop will take place on Tuesday, 26 June and Wednesday, 27 June 2012 at Newcastle University.

Further information about the workshop and how to register can be found at:

http://www.dur.ac.uk/education/postgraduate/visualmethodologies/

The workshop is part of the North East Doctoral Training Centre’s (NEDTC) annual programme of advanced training in the social sciences.

Please do not hesitate to contact Anne Parks ( NEDTC Secretary email a.l.park AT durham.ac.uk ) if you need any further information about the event.

My source:
ESA-ALL at JISCMAIL.AC.UK

SocInfo2012: 4th Int. Conference on Social Informatics

Dear all,
The Fourth International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo2012) will be hosted at the EPFL in Lausanne (CH), in collaboration with the team Humanités Digitales@unil (University of Lausanne), on the 5-7 December 2012.

The general co-chairs are Karl Aberer, School for Computer and Communication Science, EPFL, Switzerland and Andreas Flache, Director of Studies, Department of Sociology, University of Groningen, The Netherlands.

The call for papers is open until the 7th of July, the tutorial proposals, Poster/Demonstration Papers and Panel Proposals until the 28th of July.

All information here: http://www.socinfo2012.com

The International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo 2012) is an interdisciplinary venue for researchers from Computer Science, Informatics, Social Sciences and Management Sciences to share ideas and opinions, and present original research work on studying the interplay between socially-centric platforms and social phenomena. The ultimate goal of Social Informatics is to create better understanding of socially-centric platforms not just as a technology, but also as a set of social phenomena. To that end, we are inviting interdisciplinary papers, on applying information technology in the study of social phenomena, on applying social concepts in the design of information systems, on applying methods from the social sciences in the study of social computing and information systems, on applying computational algorithms to facilitate the study of social systems and human social dynamics, and on designing information and communication technologies that consider social context.

A special focus of SocInfo'2012 is on how technology can influence social phenomena through better motivation of human agents, through the use of social norms, through better modeling, or through a better understanding of social concepts like trust, credibility, privacy, and fairness. To this end we are especially inviting contributions demonstrating how behavioral theory can be formalized in agent-based models to study social dynamics. It is the expectation that this contributes to a further development of the social sciences with respect to studying and explaining various behavioral dynamics, such as opinion dynamics, social conflict, innovation diffusion, market dynamics, and
crowd behavior. On the other hand, the creation of a coherent social behavioral model that is formulated as an agent system is a prerequisite for further development of socially-centric platforms and for the testing of new algorithms that use social concepts and attempt to realize social goals.
Best regards,

Claire Clivaz, University of Lausanne