Learning from experience

Background: The personal is a vital part of professional nursing practice. From a psycho-social perspective, nurses produce and reproduce conceptions of the Self through experience. A literature search on nurses’ self-understanding in a psycho-social perspective yields no results. Hence, the aim of this study was to investigate personal and professional experiences that may have formed the self-understanding of a nurse, and how this self-understanding may have influenced her professional practice.
Methods: Using a single case approach, I conducted a Biographical Narrative Interview with a 50-year-old experienced Norwegian nurse. I asked the nurse to tell me the story of her life and how her work has affected her and possibly changed the way she saw herself. The overall aim of the interpretation was to understand the historically situated subjectivity in terms of the nurse’s personal, social and professional constraints and chosen options.
Results: The nurse’s narrative of her life story made it possible to trace a common theme throughout her experiences, the experience of being “only a nurse”. The nurse experienced a low status, as well as a downgrade in the competence needed to deliver quality care in professional relationships. She felt it difficult to identify with the experience of being on the bottom of the social ladder and to identify with the female, mothering ideal connected to nursing. She desired a better position, and wanted to identify with strong women. In contrast to reality, her self-understanding influenced her relationship with her patients, her professional pride and her further professional development.
Conclusions: This study shows that the professional practice of a nurse was informed by her self-understanding. This study suggests that the individual nurse must be given the opportunity to explore her professional vulnerability based on the assumption that it is both personally and socially constituted. This study indicates that the exploration of a nurse’s self-understanding is one way to contribute to professional development.

Most risk management activity in the healthcare sector is retrospective, based on learning from experience. This is feasible where the risks are routine, but emergency operations plans (EOP) guide the response to events that are both high risk and rare. Under these circumstances, it is important to get the response right the first time, but learning from experience is usually not an option. This case study presents the rationale for taking a proactive approach to improving healthcare organizations' EOP. It demonstrates how the Prospective Hazard Analysis (PHA) Toolkit can drive organizational learning and argues that this toolkit may lead to more efficient improvement than drills and exercises.

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Wiley's copyright policies do not allow me to post the published version of the paper, but they do allow me to send out individual copies. So if you don't have access to the Journal of Healthcare Risk Management and would like a copy of this article, please email me at:
alan [dot] j [dot] card [at] gmail [dot] com

Computers are an integral part of day to day activities in engineering design and engineers have utilised various applications to assist them improve their design. Although computers are used to model a variety of engineering activities, currently the main focus of computer applications are areas with well defined rules. Activities related to the conceptual stage of the design process are generally untouched by computers.Artificial neural networks (ANN) have recently been widely used to model some of the human activities in many areas of science and engineering. Early applications of NN in civil engineering occurred the late eighties. One of the distinct characteristics of the ANN is its ability to learn from experience and examples and then to adapt with changing situations. Engineers often deal with incomplete and noisy data, which is one area where NN are most applicable. This is particularly the case at the conceptual stage of the design process.This paper presents practical guidelines for designing ANN for engineering applications.A brief introduction to NN is given; major aspects of three types of NN, multi-layer perceptron (MLP), radial basis network (RBF) and normalised RBF (NRBF) are discussed; new methods for selection and normalisation of training data are introduced and a practical example of a reinforced concrete slab design is presented.

... Professor Birchall is a regular speaker on innovation, knowledge project management, IT and learning and new forms of organisation and has designed management development programmes at all ... His latest book Capabilities for Strategic Advantage: Leading ...

The article describes the path and results of an intervention research realized at a Tuscan intercultural cooperative. The aim of the intervention, constructed and negotiated with the organization managers and with the participants, was to support one group of nine single mothers with preschool children and one group of seven adolescents residing in the cooperative to develop skills necessary to use the technological artifacts, such as the design of a website and of a thematic blog, in order to communicate, share and (to try) to enrich life experiences and identity configurations with new meanings.

Apart from biographies and memoirs of outstanding leaders, studies on the development of leaders in everyday life from childhood to maturity are rare. We propose a developmental model of leaders in which certain variables formed in early childhood are the basic components for leadership development in later life. These are a low level of trait anxiety [Spielberger, C.D. (1972). Conceptual and methodological issues in anxiety research. In C.D. Spielberger (Ed.), Anxiety: Current trends in theory and research. New York: Academic Press, vol. 1] and openness to experiences [Costa, P.T. Jr., & McCrae, R.R. (1992a). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) and NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) professional manual. Odessa, FL: Psychological Assessment Resources]. We argue that secure attachment style [Bowlby, J. (1969). Attachment and loss: Vol. 1. Attachment. New York: Basic Books] explains the formation and influence of these basic components, which in turn affect the leader's development through experience in leadership roles. Questionnaires were administered to 286 subjects. The data obtained were analyzed by structural equation modeling (SEM).The findings show that trait anxiety and openness to experience affect leaders' development via experiences. Alternative models in which formative variables may affect the magnitude and intensity of leadership experiences are discussed.

The learning achieved by individuals through their work‐based activity is unique and differentially experienced. It involves a combination of intuitive reasoning, inference and inductive thinking which is normally tacit and not available for analysis. In this paper I present research undertaken with groups of adult students training to work as mentors on a community mentoring project, in an attempt to explore how they learned from their mentoring encounters through the use of reflective practice. Each mentor was asked to keep a ...

To explore the feasibility and acceptability of translating a successful voluntary counselling and testing (VCT) service model from Kenya to African communities in London. Qualitative study with focus group discussions and a structured workshop with key informants. Five focus group discussions were conducted in London with 42 participants from 14 African countries between August 2006 and January 2007. A workshop was held with 28 key informants. Transcripts from the group discussions and workshop were analysed for recurrent themes. Participants indicated that a community-based HIV VCT service would be acceptable to African communities in London, but also identified barriers to uptake: HIV-related stigma, concerns about confidentiality, and doubts about the ability of community-based services to maintain professional standards of care. Workshop participants highlighted three key requirements to ensure feasibility: (a) efficient referrals to sexual health services for the newly diagnos...

This paper uses network analysis (NA) to study task interactions in the product development process (PDP) at a small engineering company (Smallcomp). We examine Smallcomp's organizational changes by comparing its PDP network properties at two points in time. The analysis identifies patterns of centralization, role specialization, and formalized control. This validates themes from organizational behavior and quality management literature regarding how organizations learn from experience, grow in size, and control their process variation. It demonstrates several insights to manage the PDP as both a second (i.e., effectively executing) and third order (i.e., highlighting underlying premises and assumptions) form of organizational control. First, reducing variation in task outputs is an understandable approach to controlling a PDP. However, it is important to reduce variation in task inputs as well. Second, tasks have varying roles and burdens in terms of how they share information with other tasks in the PDP. Companies seeking to support multiple concurrent projects must align their organizational resources to the distribution of labor created by the information flow among PDP tasks. Finally, an NA metric called Simmelian ties can measure effective concurrency in a PDP by identifying both valuable and ineffective iteration among groups of tasks.

Abstract. Roboethics is a recently developed field of applied ethics which deals with the ethical aspects of technologies such as robots, ambient intelligence, direct neural interfaces and invasive nano-devices and intelligent soft bots. In this article we look specifically at the issue of (moral) responsibility in artificial intelligent systems. We argue for a pragmatic approach, where responsibility is seen as a social regulatory mechanism. We claim that having a system which takes care of certain tasks intelligently, learning from experience ...

There have been many studies on the subject of project management and project success. Early studies in the mid 1900s linked project management and project success to the triple objectives of Time, Cost & Quality. As such it was concluded that, project management techniques have a significant impact on project success. Subsequently, by the turn of the century, it was pointed out that project management literature often confusingly equate project management success to project success as studies indicate that there are other dimensions to project success namely policy & strategy, team & leadership, stakeholder management, communication, financial resources, learning from experience, contracting, external environment, performance measurement baseline, innovation and contractor’s competence. Further researchers pointed out that there are two separate components of project success i.e. success criteria and success factors. This study conducted literature reviews in an attempt to list t...

Learners of programming need to master group work skills. This paper reports on a field study of group work in Information Technology (IT) classrooms. The study employed two field tech- niques: a questionnaire and journals kept by student teachers throughout the semester. IT student teachers participated in the initial questionnaire, which investigated their previous experience of working in groups. Student

Understanding the way in which design interventions in an office affect everyday users, and thus shape organisational behaviour, should be high on the agenda for architects, designers and consultants alike. Surprisingly, this seems rarely to be the case. Here we aim to help close this gap by studying a variety of organisations in depth both before and after an office move from the point of view of design practice. This paper thus aims at understanding how a newly designed office is seen, used and filled with life by staff, so that planners can ...

In this article we present and outline depth-hermeneutics as a new application of a theoretically founded psychosocial approach, with the ambition of inspiring teachers to explore challenging aspects of their relational work with students. Empirical knowledge and psychodynamic theory suggest that teaching and learning are profoundly rooted in relationship based processes. Hence it is a prerequisite for improving learning and supporting teachers’ professional development that challenging aspects in the student-teacher relationship be taken seriously by being examined, with the aim of enabling and supporting learning from experience in reflective practice. We suggest that group-based depth-hermeneutics, a qualitative psychosocial method, may allow for analysis and interpretation of situations and relations in school that may be experienced by teachers as difficult or incomprehensible. Drawing on an empirical example from fieldwork in a Norwegian middle school, we illustrate the nature of a challenging situation and relation in teaching and show step-by-step how depth-hermeneutics can be adapted, adopted, implemented, and facilitated in teacher groups, to increase scenic understanding of such complex phenomena.

Nanotechnologies are commonly touted as instruments to be exploited for the ben- efit of developed, as well as for developing countries, and especially for alleviating the problems of the poor. Defenders of nanotechnology argue that it is possible to learn from experience, avoiding the errors made with past technologies. Precaution, however, should not slow down innovation, which is the key factor in solving many of the problems of the poor. Clearly the focus is on innovation, and finding a solution to the problems of the poor is just a mechanical consequence. But it is not necessary, and nor is it true, that the faster the technological path, the narrower the gap be- tween rich and poor. Indeed, judging from past experience, the opposite has usually been shown to be the case. We put forward the argument that nanotechnologies, like any other type of technology, cannot be separated from the socio-economic and political context in which they are generated, commercialized and utilized....