Category: Research
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Emotions and assessment: considerations for rater‐based judgements of entrustment
We identify and discuss three different interpretations of the influence of raters’ emotions during assessments: (i) emotions lead to biased decision making; (ii) emotions contribute random noise to assessment, and (iii) emotions constitute legitimate sources of information that contribute to assessment decisions. We discuss these three interpretations in terms of areas for future research and…
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You are your Metadata: Identification and Obfuscation of Social Media Users using Metadata Information
We spend a lot of time focusing on the content of messaging systems as a means of identifying people but it looks like the metadata encoded alongside the content may be just as important when it comes to de-anonymising the data. This wasn’t always a problem because it’s hard to analyse multivariate relationships in large…
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OpenPhysio | A new physiotherapy education journal
I’m really excited to announce a new project that I’ve been working on together with the folks at Physiopedia. Today we’re launching an open access, peer reviewed journal with a focus on physiotherapy education, with a few features that we think are pretty innovative in the academic publishing space. The journal is called OpenPhysio and represents…
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Action research as liberation
Kemmis & Mctaggert’s (1990) definition of action research is that it is about improving the lives of people through transformation. It is an emancipatory approach to the research process that does as much for the participants as for the researchers. I’m busy reading Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, so the idea of a research process…
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Abstract for RCTs in educational research
There seems to have been a resurgence in calls for the use of systematic reviews and randomised controlled trials in educational research lately. There’s a lot to like (in my opinion) about RCTs in certain contexts because of how they are designed. For example, when you want to figure out the effect of variable A on…
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The CONSORT guidelines for systematic reviews of RCTs
When I was at the WCPT conference last year I came across the CONSORT guidelines for the publication of systematic reviews of RCTS, which I’d never heard of before. I made a note to look it up and finally got around to doing it. I thought would be quite helpful in planning and carrying out…
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Digital literacy survey: Outcome of reliability testing
Earlier this year we started the International Ethics Project, a collaboration between physiotherapy departments from several countries who intend offering an online course in professional ethics to their undergraduate students. You can read more about the project here. In June we started the process of developing a questionnaire that we can use to establish some…
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Proposal abstract: Training in the ICU for physiotherapy students with a visual impairment (a case study)
Abstract for a project proposal that I submitted for ethics review earlier this week. If it gets approved we’ll begin data collection on our first visually impaired undergraduate student placement in the intensive care unit. The Department of Physiotherapy at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) began accepting students with visual impairments (VI) into…
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Proposal abstract: Case-based learning in undergraduate physiotherapy education
Abstract for a project I submitted earlier this week for ethics clearance. During 2012 – 2014 we converted one of our modules that runs in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th year levels from a lecture-based format to a case-based learning format. We are now hoping to have a closer look at whether or not the…
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Proposal abstract: The use of medical and health-related smartphone apps by South African physiotherapists (a survey)
Abstract for a proposal I submitted earlier this week. This proposal is part of a larger project where we are developing an evaluation tool for decision-making around app use for physiotherapists in clinical practice, determining reliability of a range of pedometer apps on different hardware platforms, and evaluating the information provided by the top exercise-prescription…
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Abstract: Student Success and Engagement project
Our faculty has implemented a 3 year research project looking at improving Student Success and Engagement in the faculty. The project is being coordinated across several departments in the faculty and is the first time that we are collaborating on this scale. I will be using this blog as a public progress report of the project,…
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Activity Theory, Authentic Learning and Emerging Technologies
For the past few years I’ve been involved in an NRF-funded research project looking at the use of emerging technologies in higher education. One of the products of that collaborative project was an edited book that has recently been published. Professor Denise Wood, one of the editors, describes the book on her blog: This edited…
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“I offer this to you”
Last week I shared a post that followed from a comment made by a colleague share some ideas on research. She began her presentation saying “I offer this to you…”, which I thought was a wonderful way of sharing her thoughts. Here are the notes I took during the session. Research is not linear, clean…
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Mixed methods research: John Cresswell seminar
For me, mixed methods research (MMR) is about using qualitative and quantitative data to strengthen an argument that is difficult to support with only one type of data. It’s about bringing together the numbers (quantitative) and stories (qualitative) to gain a more complete understanding of the world (research problems and questions). We often think of…
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Publish or perish: A nifty little research tool
“Publish or perish” is a great little research tool that retrieves and analyses your citations. It uses Google Scholar for the raw data and is then able to calculate the following: Total number of papers and total number of citations Average citations per paper, citations per author, papers per author, and citations per year Hirsch’s…
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Between Cape Town and Khartoum
Earlier this month I spent a week in Khartoum as part of an international exchange programme between the following organisations: University of the Western Cape (my institution in Cape Town) Ahfad University for Women (Khartoum) Comprehensive Community Based Rehabilitation in Tanzania Bergen University (Norway) FK Norway The project is an attempt to facilitate the exchange…
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Faculty member on FAIMER Brazil (2014)
I’m spending a week in Fortaleza, Brazil as part of the FAIMER-Brazil programme for 2014. FAIMER is an international programme aimed at developing capacity in medical education and research, especially in developing countries. There are regional institutes in South Africa, Brazil, India and China, and the main organisation in Philadelphia. I was here in 2013…
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Postgraduate student supervision workshop
A few weeks ago I attended a seminar on postgraduate supervision, presented by some of the more experienced research supervisors on campus. While I couldn’t stay for the full session, I did manage to see two of the presenters. Here are the notes I took. Introduction (Prof. Ramesh Bharuthram) All academics will be required to complete…
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Emerging ICTs in South African higher education
For the past few years I’ve been involved in an NRF-funded research project that looked at the use of emerging ICTs in South African higher education. In addition to the range of conference presentations, publications and postgraduate student progression, we also recently saw the first draft of a set of guidelines for South African lecturers…