I continue to be surprised, informed and stimulated by the many contrasts and similarities between nursing and information technology. A constant encounter as a mentor is hearing accounts about student nurses and their learning experience. After 12-18 months since beginning their student career what are student's learning, being taught? And yes: nursing theory and models of care still seem twee, out-of-date, out-of fashion.
Change is inevitable of course; in tech if you are not on-board (as in the web), there is a progression of buses and you can get on at any time. At least I hope that's the case. As Web Design magazine asks: "How will CSS be styling the web in 2017, 2018 or 2019?" So for students there are many university blocks, lectures, clinical placements, mentors...: so many buses. Hopefully they really do get on-board sooner rather than later.
The snapshot of evidence as I have it re. models of care, nursing theory and reflection suggests there is quite a vacuum at a time when there is both a need for a tool like Hodges' model and an opportunity.
There are valuable lessons in the history of models of care while we relish the challenges of the future. Those lessons are still relevant as the nursing community and its practitioners constantly travel between the mechanistic and humanistic forms of knowledge that nursing demands.
Technology changes all the time and with it, the buses, the roads and even the bus stops. Clearly, we need our students to be as well equipped as possible. Not to deal with change, then it is too late. We need future practitioners to be able to critique potential change. This is crucial when future change involves nursing itself and nursing's values.
Two weeks ago Drupal ScienceCamp was a great success thanks to the organisers and sponsors. There were about 60 attendees with a European flavour too. Being a Science Park we had to circumvent the fence, the alternate access gates closed over the weekend. The three of us who left the hotel soon became six ... as we walked around to the very smart venue - Napp Pharmaceuticals Limited.
On the Saturday I attended sessions on responsive design, Drupal modules, Less CSS (at this point I wish I could have split in two Drupal search and Solr Wizardry had very positive comments), From flipcharts to Drupal Features, and Migration, upgrading and moving house. All very helpful.
Sunday was spontaneously self-organising. People offered to deliver sessions and meetings in a BoF - birds of a feather format, others requested the things they were seeking. Whether a sign of my time in Drupal [v. 4.7], or possibly Drupal's ever increasing diffusion or both; seven of us gathered around mental health and disability.
More on this to follow. ...
I am writing up my reading of From A to <A> Keywords of Markup, Bradley Dilger and Jeff Rice, editors, University of Minnesota Press for the Journal of Community Informatics.
In reading the text I noticed how Cartesianism is alive and well not only in Hodges' model but in HTML markup also:
<HEAD>
| <BODY> |
| narrative | protocol |
It's been a busy week:
$this is not available to them. Suddenly I'm thinking well that's different. In nursing our abstractions on nursing care are complete - in the idealised sense. It's the concrete / practical (dynamic) delivery that sadly falls short.The key benefits of a DSL - greater productivity and communications with domain experts - really kick in when you are using an alternative computational model. Domain experts often think about their problems in a nonimperative way, such as via a decision table. An Adaptive Model allows you allows you capture their way of thinking more directly in a program and the DSL allows you to communicate that representation more clearly to them (and yourself). p.116.I'm really taking liberties with definitions. My domain experts might actually be student nurses.
For more than I care to remember I've recognised that version control is an essential facet of software development. During this time though I've not had a need for version control. Renewed awareness of this tool was inevitable as I decided to identify a content management system [CMS], which brought me to Drupal and I simultaneously also discovered Ruby.
Now I'm pleased that over the past three years I did not commit to Concurrent Versions System [CVS] as used by the Drupal community. I listened to talks, downloaded, and tinkered, but now - the (old) news that Drupal 8 development will use GIT.
So, for me it is time to jump on-board with git for version control: a book and presentations next week.
It's not that I'll be contributing to D8, it just makes sense to git up to speed on this (sorry!). I've been through the program and created my schedule for next week in Copenhagen. There is so much to look forward to!
Version control is one thing, having the need and discipline for testing is another ...
There are now three archive pages more or less complete. I'm using HTML 5 and CCS3 (well trying) to mark and style the pages, with the addition of the new semantic tags:
article, aside, figure, footer, header, hgroup, menu, nav, section {display:block;}
(I'm not sure if these disappeared at one point in the editor, so everything is a work in progress.)
Next up - the FAQs. As a live document this will be styled differently. As yet I am not quite sure how, but I still need to sort the way to handle quotes. The method I found includes blockquote: hover: after in the style sheet, then combines blockquote, cite and p on the page. The problem is you can't copy and paste, something that visitors may wish to do. A related issue is how to display when the page was updated and accessed - an essential piece of page furniture. A search reveals many other examples and now is the time to experiment.
I also have to remember that I still don't know what the final theme and look for the site will be. So global settings, columns and such like need to be kept in-check for the moment. There may be Drupal modules to add page access / updated details, so time to check on this and accessibility. And all with just ten days more to work - then Drupalcon! :-)
The questions and answers are being be completely revised; so if you have any you would like to see please get in touch: h2cmng at yahoo.co.uk
I've been editing the basic html pages (as mentioned before on W2tQ) these include:
At Manchester airport in May I noticed Web Design Essentials (WDE). Reasons of cost £14.99 and weight meant it was put back on the news stand. The content was excellent! Back in the UK a week later, no sign of it in the supermarket. I found a copy this week at WH Smiths and made the 'investment' - a belated holiday treat.
This is gold mine of nuggets on HTML5, design - wireframes, user experience (UX), fonts and typography:
http://www.font-face.com/
http://fontdeck.com/
- personas, CSS3, jQuery and much more. Now I think about it UX has been around for quite a while, it's a sure sign of how web design has matured such that practitioners can and must focus on the experience. There's another blog post there contrasting UX in web design with UX in health services. Reading about the use of personas in design and planning for a site might also deserve a specific post. As WDE indicates there are companies dedicated to UX. I do not have that luxury and yet I do have to define my initial target audience and their anticipated experience.
The web design related listing I maintain at LINKS I (Intrapersonal) are being updated as a result of the leads in WDE.
Through the scheduling and poll services of Doodle (thanks Chris) and with the Drupal NW England list I'm checking on which day in the autumn - November - is best for a group of volunteers to help jump start the new site. Everything is sorted now for Drupalcon next month.
It should be a stimulating week ahead as the clocks spring forward (why not two weeks ago?) and I check the schedule for Scotland on Rails and plan the sessions to attend. Now with a new Eee PC I should also have something to write on and connectivity.
Yesterday jQuery in Action arrived. I've started to read it and am finding already that the two CSS books that were until recently just sitting on the shelf are helping me to grasp what jQuery is about. One of those titles - Keith or Cederholm - highlighted that learning CSS helps you to understand and learn other languages and this really does seem to be the case. jQuery in Action will definitely be travelling to Edinburgh. Even though I'm only at chapter 2 it's a good read. There's a Selector Lab a web page to enter jQuery selector strings and see how the code relates to the DOM (document object model).
Over the past week I've been investigating Ruby graphical user interface (GUI) toolkits - specifically Tk (must check version 8.5). Just as with Drupal and settling on a theme, eventually - it seems? - I will have to choose a GUI. For now it's a case of seeing what they offer and how to run them within Eclipse (and without). The jQuery book will help push me with Drupal and enliven what will be essentially be static (archive) content:
Pippa's query about the HUMANISTIC & MECHANISTIC axis within Hodges' model, got me thinking not only in terms of her Occupational Health Nursing context, but how can I display the questions and answers in a new way - at least for me?
For web designers this is noddy stuff, but I worked on an effort using some jQuery, plus a style sheet. The idea is to work through the questions THEN click the question to reveal / hide a response.
Time as ever has not allowed me to consult with OH professionals and their course curricula. Despite this, the pointers appear to have helped Pippa and may inform general readers.
As to the page itself, there is much more to do. Refine the code, test it across browsers and consider some additional touches - possibly rounded corners. How might this sit in Drupal? There is one CSS (javascript?) technique that I really must tackle - a gift for Hodges' model: opacity and layers.
I will be checking what Drupal can do from an educational perspective and contrast this with tools like Moodle.
Just to finalise the details for a meeting with Brian (Hodges) in Manchester next week - it's half-term. It is not often we get to meet, so I'm really looking forward to catching up again. This blog was just an idea last time we met.
Reading through the Pro Drupal Book VanDyk & Westgate on page 115 there's a pointer to chapter 22 for more details on CSS and the way styling is processed in Drupal, but I can't find anything of note there. I'll check the publisher's - Apress - site and with fellow Drupaler's in Manchester on 20th Feb.
Chapter 21 is on Development Best Practices. Reading this I think when the upgrade is made, then Drupal 6 will be Concurrent Versions System (CVS) aware. May as well: in for a penny in for a pound(ing)....
I'm still itching to get to Eclipse - Ruby and CVS will be useful there too. I was in Border's over the weekend and checking the IT publications (Mac....!) . I lamented the absence of programming titles (.EXE was a favourite). There used to be so many in the heady days of mid-80s through 90s, and not just imports - JOOP, Dr Dobbs.
PC Pro Feb 2008 features an opinion piece 'It's time our kids really got back to Basic and the principles of programming' Tim Danton, p. 7. A couple of years ago there was the chance of a trip to India to help with software from a nursing 'user' perspective. Unfortunately, this adventure didn't happen. In terms of economies around the world it surely helps to have programmers at home too: in-house in-deed.
I've been reading up on CSS and tables, testing ideas on the links pages.
The revised POLITICAL and SCIENCES links pages have been uploaded.
At present the style statements are within the links pages themselves. I need to separate the styles from the content and combine them into an external CSS file. Much more to check and improve - the colour schemes and cell border colours which will make the table headers stand out a bit more (but subtly so). I've started to add 'scope' which I gather is used by non-visual browsers - to indicate 'column'.... There are other attributes to consider. I tried to move the links to the left a little, but the bullets are all over in different browsers.
I managed to get the updated style sheet to work in Drupal, but only with the full HTML filter on. This needs to be addressed as security is a key concern.
The jQuery book should be on its way. Which makes me wonder if in future I could present the subject headings in collapsed form? Then when one is clicked that row would open up.
CSS really is fun. Challenging, but fun.
The work to re-style - OK actually 'style' - the existing site content is ongoing.
There are two drop capital formats at present, still experimenting. The first gets upset in Netscape (although I gather NS is no longer supported beyond this or next month). There is much still to do -
The directory for Hodges' model on my PC is full of erm* - essential files, plus quite a few that never saw service beyond the first writing. A timely find with spring not too far away!
Working on another iteration of the Q&A page, I came across a trial layout from one of my brief and sporadic forays into CSS.
The idea was to feature a case study with accompanying reference to h2cm. I'm glad I left that file sitting there, because now the idea of creating a community of h2cm users would fit in with this. It's a layout that begs for a database to populate it.
There are of course some critical data governance issues to investigate too!
Playing with this old page you realise the universality of context. Database or not, in the interview dialogue I've a health care worker (hcw) and client. Reading Dan Cederholm's Web Standards Solutions I've used label harnessing contextual CSS to highlight (colour) the speakers.
The CSS on the links pages (and in general) is a real mess and worth exploring; then I'll look at the h2cm content within Drupal. I never realised there were so many other tags associated with tables.
If this running around pages past and present seems a little haphazard, well one thing I'm trying to figure out is dividing the main (theme) style master.css and what would be custom.css ...? As I've started to use example pages there are a lot of CSS stuff and jQuery functions I don't need:
$(document).ready(function() {
$("#orderedlist dd:eq(1)").hover(function() {
$(this).addClass("green");
},function(){
$(this).removeClass("green");
});
});
I managed to sort the image in the Drupal archive (trial and error - learning!) page. Now to get to grips with CSS, DOM and Drupal themes. Human nature often wins out to the detriment of learning: you pick up just sufficient HTML, a limited amount of javascript to get your website up and running and then your learning stops.
Reading through DOM Scripting there is so much more I can do by correctly and comprehensively using CITE, 'title', 'ID' and 'class'. ... There's a name for it starting from scratch. So, the old content I have copied and pasted thus far needs a lot of tweaking stylistically. I plan on to spend some time on this, but not as long as I feared. Using CSS stylesheets a single change can be reflected across the whole site.
I've also downloaded a Drupal print module and will ask about this next Wednesday night in Manchester.
I just watched Can Gerry Robinson Fix The NHS? One Year On and must dash soon 22:30 BBC2 Newsnight with Jeremy Paxman there's a follow-up to the programme. This should be available online for 24 hours after and VERY 'interesting' too? [Hope they do re-visit this topic].
 |
| Brian E. Hodges - c/o Brian's family. |
Born in Liverpool, NW England, UK.
Community Mental Health Nurse NHS, Part-time Lecturer,
Researcher Nursing & Technology Enhanced Learning
Registered Nurse - Mental Health & General
Community Psychiatric Nursing (Cert.) MMU
PG Cert. Ed.
BA(Joint Hons.) Computing and Philosophy - BIHE - Bolton
PG(Dip.) Collaboration on Psychosocial Education [COPE] Univ. Man.
MRES. e-Research and Technology Enhanced Learning, Lancaster Univ.
Live and work in NW England - seeking a global perspective.
The views expressed on W2tQ are entirely my own, unless stated otherwise.
Comments are disabled.
If you would like to get in touch please e-mail me at
h2cmng AT yahoo.co.uk
orcid.org/0000-0002-0192-8965
