Upcoming events: September-October 2011

I'm going to be attending all kinds of exciting stuff this fall semester! Even though I'm not officially in school (Uni, whatever), I can still work on getting edumacated. This is not to say that I don't learn anything the rest of the time-- I read academic papers and reference books for work just about every week, and have the highly illuminating the hands-on experiences of working with children + technology, and playing project politics.

Tomorrow, September 8th: SCERTS framework follow-up day 
(University of Birmingham)
 I am a big fan of the SCERTS framework for autism intervention, having gone to the big three-day training session last September with one of the SCERTS founders and authors, Emily Rubin, and then having used elements of SCERTS within the ECHOES project. Emily Rubin will also be leading this day, with many of the same attendees from last time. The goal is for people to present examples of using SCERTS in practice and to get feedback. ECHOES has submitted some video/written material for Emily to view and comment on later, at the end of the day. I am a bit nervous, as she will look at the ECHOES video coding scheme (which we have based on the assessment process and behavioural goals in SCERTS). As I have written almost the entirety of that document, I feel like I am somewhat on the line here-- I really hope she approves!

A few words describing SCERTS, excerpted from my intro to the video coding document:

SCERTS is most accurately called a framework rather than an intervention programme in its own right, because it is compatible with a range of other approaches and interventions already in use with people on the autism spectrum, such as TEACCH (Schopler & Mesibov, 1995), the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS, Bondy & Frost 1994), and many others.

SCERTS stands for Social Communication, Emotional Regulation, and Transactional support, the three main areas on which it focuses for helping children to achieve social and communicative competence, and for helping social partners (e.g. teachers, parents, peers) to support the child in achieving this competence. The SCERTS curriculum targets the “core deficits” of autism which are usually an impediment to social and communicative competence by setting specific, developmentally appropriate goals. These may be both educational goals, and identifying transactional supports (changes to child’s environment, and to social partners’ interactions) which help the child to achieve the target goals. For a summary of some of the main goals/targeted areas in the SCERTS framework, see Table 1, reproduced from a paper by Prizant, Wetherby, Rubin, and Laurent (2003). The curriculum is designed to be administered by a team across all of the child’s usual settings—not only the child’s teacher and other school staff, but family members and even peers. The entire team ideally uses the same methods for supporting and communicating with the child, and is aware of that child’s behavioural goals and progress toward them.

Friday, September 9th: One-day conference on Autism Education
(University of Birmingham)
From the official conference materials: "This conference on autism and education brings together leading experts from the UK and the USA who will present some of the latest developments in education research and practice. The particular focus of this event will be to showcase and discuss some of the critical ways in which children with autism can be assessed in school settings and how these assessments of progress can be related to meaningful targets, particularly for adult life."

I am hoping to further inform one of my still-nebulous PhD project ideas. Specifically, finding out about good resources and strategies for embedding technology and other intervention programmes into classroom practice. "Embedding" technology in educational practice is a current big topic in the AIED (artificial intelligence in education) community, partly because it has been realised that the most successful project are those which are embedded, and also because that community is becoming savvier to what the education research people have known all along: teachers are an invaluable research resource in terms of contributing to what you build, and how, not just what to do with it now it's finished. Anyway, I digress.

October 12th, SICSA Workshop for Technology on Health & Wellbeing
Glasgow Caledonian University
I don't know as much about this event as yet, but I will say that I am not presenting anything, and I don't think anyone else from ECHOES will be either. However, it still  might be useful/informative to me so I am happy to go along and be the attentive audience! Health technology seems like it will be increasingly important in the future, especially as the population ages. I also think it is likely to mutate significantly, along with other changes in the fields of pervasive, ubiquitous and mobile computing in increasingly "smart" environments. 

Take-home messages from the Vitae researcher engagement workshop

I have been meaning to write up a bit on what I thought were the most useful parts of this workshop since I attended it on July 26^th. You can see how prompt I have been! Better a bit delayed than never.

 Admittedly, I had expected that the content would be much more concretely about types of engagement activities you could do with different audiences. Instead, it was much more about cognitive tools for thinking about mutually beneficial public involvement. Before hitting what I thought were some of the key points, I would like to say that I thought that the workshop was very well-run, aimed at the right level of difficulty, and delivered at a comprehensible pace. The two sessions in Glasgow are pilot sessions for what is intended to be a nationwide programme, run by universities for their staff. The day went back and forth between one of the organisers talking through a chunk of material (such as the models of engagement, discussed below) and then a small-group activity to try applying it. I have definitely been to some events that force you into a small group with the aims of 1. Meaning that the whole thing is not just one person at the front of the room talking, and 2. Forcing “communication” and “net working” and “collaboration” onto a bunch of people who want to drink the free coffee and then get the hell out of there and back to dealing with their real to-do lists. Thus, I was surprised to find that the Vitae workshop used small-group working to good effect: the discussions with the others in my group really did help to illuminate the material, as we were from a variety of disciplines and a range of ages/career phases. So, good on you, organisers!

These are some of the things that I felt were the “take-home messages” of the day. They are not ordered by importance. Of course, another attendee with a different background would probably come up with a different list!

1. Public engagement is a two-way (or even more than two-way) process. It does not simply mean “how do I TELL the public about my research” but “how do I INVOLVE the public in my research.” The former is about handing down words of wisdom from the ivory tower (or ivory privately-funded research institution, whatever), and the latter is about mutual benefit. Yes, involvement could mean providing information to the public in the role of an expert , but also soliciting input from the members of the public to inform research-in-progress or future projects.

                In discussing types of public engagement, the group looked at the triangle model of engagement. This model was developed by the BIS (Department for business innovation and skills) science follow-up group, and a PDF of the triangle (and how to try using it) is available here.

The three points are TRANSMIT (information to others), RECEIVE (information from others), and COLLABORATE (information with others). This model was something of an “ah ha!” for me, as I could mentally re-cast many of the ECHOES project participatory design activities into this framework. I think it would be useful to re-visit the language of participatory design and the language of public engagement to see the ways in which the actual work may overlap a great deal, even if it is being described differently. By this standard, ECHOES has done a lot of public engagement so far, even if relatively little of it has been transmission (though we should be ramping that up in the next few months). 

2. “Everyone is someone’s public.” This is a place where the small-group working provided an immediate and clear illustration of a concept: Researchers in one discipline do not automatically understand researchers in another discipline because they are both doing research. Yes, there may be some shared jargon and a firm belief in hypothesis testing and/or the need for p< 0.05, but a PhD is not a Babel fish.  Researchers are perhaps not even a good example of being a possible public, because they are more likely to already be convinced that what you are doing has value and relevance (even if it is not immediately apparent to them).  When speaking to a non-specialist public, being able to convey why your work is relevant (and, perhaps, worth public funding!) is a huge deal. Figuring out how to convey that relevance can also be a good way in to more practically planning what type of engagement activity you will do with a particular audience. 

3. Jargon can be a huge barrier to comprehension—and until you involve or consult others outside your immediate area, it may not be clear to you the extent of your language which is perceived as jargon, complex, and off-puttingly scary.  We were challenged to describe our current research area/project to the others at our table as simply as possible (50 words or less). This was HARD. Surprisingly, those who seemed to have most trouble explaining their work were not the people working on extremely complex and specialised biochemistry stuff where almost every term is easily identifiable as jargon, but the people for whom crucial descriptors of their work are, or come close to, words with common everyday usages which are not the sense in which the researcher is using that word. It can be hard to get people to really listen to you when they are afraid that they will not understand what you are saying... and equally hard to get them to listen when they think they already know what your work is about (and may be far off the mark).

I was reminded forcefully of a. In it, she discussed the results of the Adventure Author project (will not describe in detail here), and students’ attitudes toward “computing” before and after the project. She identified that one possible issue with the lack of improved attitudes was that the researchers-- including those on the project and those who wrote the attitudes survey—likely had a very different definition of “computing” than the young people in the study. There had also not been a specific effort to acquaint the participants with the researchers’ definition of computing before taking the survey. Thus, the survey was unlikely to have measured what the researchers wanted to measure, and indeed initially thought they were measuring. As Dr. Robertson writes in a more recent, related blog post, “The results may not be very reliable if some of the kids think programming is merely typing.”

Back to public engagement....Partly as a result of the derailed computing survey and partly after the “explain your project in 50 words” workshop exercise, I have set several short-term research goals that are all about cutting the jargon and coming up with a comprehensible description of what I do (see subsequent post).

4.  “The argument for science has to be made at all levels, not just in grant applications.” (Dr. Martin Coath, University of Plymouth). I spotted this quote in some of the hand-out materials, and without having a rant on the state of science education/ science in mainstream media/ public distrust of science and scientists, all I have to say is AMEN. Whether you are transmitting or receiving information, this is the ideal end goal. Next time I have an incredibly frustrating talk with my grandfather (who is very disappointed that I am not a politician, or an economist), I will try to grit my teeth and remind myself that I am making the argument for science...