Collaborative Awareness Research Articles

Year-round dengue fever in Pakistan, highlighting the surge amidst ongoing flood havoc and the COVID-19 pandemic: a comprehensive review.

Dengue fever (DF) is an arthropod-borne viral infection caused by four serotypes of dengue virus (DENV 1-4) transmitted to the host by the vector mosquito Aedes, which causes fever, vomiting, headache, joint pain, muscle pain, and a distinctive itching and skin rash, ultimately leading to dengue hemorrhagic fever and dengue shock syndrome. The first case of DF in Pakistan was documented in 1994, but outbreak patterns began in 2005. As of 20 August 2022, Pakistan has 875 confirmed cases, raising alarming concerns. Misdiagnosis due to mutual symptoms, lack of an effective vaccine, the weakened and overburdened health system of Pakistan, irrational urbanization, climate change in Pakistan, insufficient waste management system, and a lack of awareness are the significant challenges Pakistan faces and result in recurrent dengue outbreaks every year. The recent flood in Pakistan has caused massive destruction, and stagnant dirty water has facilitated mosquito breeding. Sanitization and spraying, proper waste management, an adequate and advanced diagnostic system, control of population size, public awareness, and promotion of medical research and global collaboration, especially amidst flood devastation, are recommended to combat this deadly infection in Pakistan. This article aims to comprehensively review the year-round DF in Pakistan, highlighting the surge amidst ongoing flood havoc and the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic.

Providing Dual Awareness using Multimodal Cues for Collaborative Manipulation in Virtual Environments

Virtual reality (VR) collaborative manipulation requires a proper understanding of the user’s self, other collaborators, and shared objects in the virtual environment. Users must be aware of the movements of themselves and others to coordinate their actions when they hand over an object or move it together. The awareness of collaboration plays an essential role in virtual environments. However, previous studies have focused on providing awareness only for cooperative manipulation. This study proposes a novel framework for dual awareness that comprehensively manages the state of interactions between multiple users and shared virtual objects and provides distinct sensory cues to distinguish themselves from collaborators. The experimental results showed that participants could easily and quickly collaborate on manipulation using our feedback, and they also answered positively in the subjective evaluation.

Spatial Multi-Presence System to Increase Security Awareness for Remote Collaboration in an Extended Reality Environment

Enhancing the sense of presence of participants is an important issue in terms of security awareness for remote collaboration in extended reality. However, conventional methods are insufficient to be aware of remote situations and to search for and control remote workspaces. This study proposes a spatial multi-presence system that simultaneously provides multiple spaces while rapidly exploring these spaces as users perform collaborative work in an extended reality environment. The proposed system provides methods for arranging and manipulating remote and personal spaces by creating an annular screen that is invisible to the user. The user can freely arrange remote participants and their workspaces on the annular screen. Because users can simultaneously view various spaces arranged on the annular screen, they can perform collaborative work while simultaneously feeling the presence of multiple spaces and can be fully immersed in a specific space. In addition, the personal spaces where users work can also be arranged through the annular screen. According to the results of the performance evaluations, users participating in remote collaborative works can visualize the spaces of multiple users simultaneously and feel their presence, thereby increasing their understanding of the spaces. Moreover, the proposed system reduces the time to perform tasks and gain awareness of the emergency in remote workspaces.

Strategies for Peer Teaching to Promote Collaborative Skills in Primary and Junior High School Students

"Practice, active exploration, and cooperative exchange should be an important way for students to learn knowledge", which is the latest requirement of the New Curriculum Standard, and is an indispensable factor for students to adapt to society in the future and gain a foothold in society. Through peer teaching, students will be guided to work together gradually according to the physical and mental characteristics of primary and secondary school students. They will exchange various ways of thinking and exploring in the process of peer education, and through interaction, cultivate their thinking ability, raise their awareness of collaboration, and enhance their ability to collaborate. Students will learn how to work together and take the initiative to work together to meet the demands of our era and our society.

Predictors of delayed consultation in undescended testis patients at a Rwandan referral hospital

INTRODUCTION: Delayed management of undescended testes (UDT) is associated with an increased risk of malignancy and impaired fertility. To identify causes of delayed consultation of patients with UDT at a Rwandan referral hospitalMETHODS: This was a retrospective study of patients with delayed UDT presentations from 2012 to 2016. A delayed UDT presentation was defined as any patient presenting with UDT at >1 year of age. RESULTS: There were 44 cases of delayed UDT presentations. Most patients (n = 35, 79.5%) were born at a hospital; the rest (n = 9, 20.5%) were born at home. The patient’s parent with higher education in the family was considered. Most of the patients’ parents (n = 29, 65.9%) had a primary education, 6 (13.6%) had a secondary education (high school graduate), 1 (2.3%) had a university education, and 8 (18.2%) never went to school. The reported reasons for delays as they appear in the patient chart were 16 (36.4%) patients due to ignorance, 12 (27.3%) due to poor physical examination at birth, 7 (15.9%) due to poor guidance, 4 (9.0%) due to poverty and 5 (11.4%) due to long appointments. There were no overlapping reasons for delay reported. Patients born at home were more likely to identify ignorance as a reason for the delay (p = 0.007). Of the 16 patients who reported a delay due to ignorance, 12 of their parents had primary education, and 3 had no education. Most (n = 34, 77.3%) patients were fertile in adulthood, but 9 (20.4%) presented with infertility and 1 (2.3%) presented with testicular torsion. CONCLUSION: A number of reasons are responsible for delayed consultation in patients with UDT, including ignorance, poor physical examination, poor guidance, and poverty. Most of the causes are preventable. The urgent need for awareness of UDT and collaboration between physicians is paramount for early consult and management.

Determining the Research Priorities for Adult Primary Brain Tumours in Australia and New Zealand: A Delphi Study with Consumers, Health Professionals, and Researchers.

The aim of this project was to determine research priorities, barriers, and enablers for adult primary brain tumour research in Australia and New Zealand. Consumers, health professionals, and researchers were invited to participate in a two-phase modified Delphi study. Phase 1 comprised an initial online survey (n = 91) and then focus groups (n = 29) which identified 60 key research topics, 26 barriers, and 32 enablers. Phase 2 comprised two online surveys to (1) reduce the list to 37 research priorities which achieved consensus (>75% 2-point agreement) and had high mean importance ratings (n = 116 participants) and (2) determine the most important priorities, barriers, and enablers (n = 90 participants). The top ten ranked research priorities for the overall sample and sub-groups (consumers, health professionals, and researchers) were identified. Priorities focused on: tumour biology, pre-clinical research, clinical and translational research, and supportive care. Variations were seen between sub-groups. The top ten barriers to conducting brain tumour research related to funding and resources, accessibility and awareness of research, collaboration, and process. The top ten research enablers were funding and resources, collaboration, and workforce. The broad list of research priorities identified by this Delphi study, together with how consumers, health professionals, and researchers prioritised items differently, and provides an evidence-based research agenda for brain tumour research that is needed across a wide range of areas.

Youths’ Perceptions Regarding Access to Sexual and Reproductive Health Services

Sexual and reproductive health services in Thailand have been provided in accordance with a national policy and strategic plan, but youths’ sexual and reproductive health problems remain relatively high. A significant problem is youths’ low access to appropriate services. This paper reports the first qualitative descriptive phase of participatory action research project, which aimed to develop a model for improving access to sexual and reproductive health services among youths. The study’s purpose was to explore perceptions of youths regarding access to sexual and reproductive health services in northern Thailand. Qualitative data were collected from September 2019 to March 2020 through focus group discussions with 59 youths aged 15-24 years and in-depth interviews with four youths who had experienced an adolescent pregnancy. All participants were purposively recruited and volunteered. The data were recorded, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed using content analysis.Reflecting factors emerged from youths’ needs and contexts toward access to sexual and reproductive health services. Five categories were classified: 1) inaccessibility to existing services, 2) unacceptability of available services, 3) unaware of access to effective information, 4) community’s negative attitude toward youths accessing services, and 5) availability of other convenience services. These findings provide useful information for healthcare providers, particularly nurses and other stakeholders to better understand the perspectives of youths, enhance awareness of collaboration, and promote participation among youths in the development of intervention and strategies to improve access to sexual and reproductive health services.

Towards Immersive Collaborative Sensemaking

When collaborating face-to-face, people commonly use the surfaces and spaces around them to perform sensemaking tasks, such as spatially organising documents, notes or images. However, when people collaborate remotely using desktop interfaces they no longer feel like they are sharing the same space. This limitation may be overcome through collaboration in immersive environments, which simulate the physical in-person experience. In this paper, we report on a between-groups study comparing collaborations on image organisation tasks, in an immersive Virtual Reality (VR) environment to more conventional desktop conferencing. Collecting data from 40 subjects in groups of four, we measured task performance, user behaviours, collaboration engagement and awareness. Overall, the VR and desktop interface resulted in similar speed, accuracy and social presence rating, but we observed more conversations and interaction with objects, and more equal contributions to the interaction from participants within groups in VR. We also identified differences in coordination and collaborative awareness behaviours between VR and desktop platforms. We report on a set of systematic measures for assessing VR collaborative experience and a new analysis tool that we have developed to capture user behaviours in collaborative setting. Finally, we provide design considerations and directions for future work.

What we cannot see in Sound of Metal and Her Smell: Interplays of awareness, perspective and language in the screenplay text

A common belief in screenwriting practice dictates that a screenplay should only include what can be heard and seen, keep emotions at bay and avoid literary inflections. Perspective, however, only becomes visible with the limitations of its visibility. What cannot be seen can be as meaningful for the story as what can. In considering the collaborative translation process from what is written to what is filmed, I will investigate the communicative effects of using different storytelling languages in the writing of perspective. Establishing the interrelationship of perspective, awareness and languages, this article will analyse examples from two screenplays, The Sound of Metal and Her Smell, to explore the different impacts of writing styles on awareness and perspective in telling the screen story. I will argue that processes of individual and collaborative awareness play a crucial role in screenwriting to communicate outside and inside perspectives of character.

Food safety knowledge and practice of abattoir and butcher shop workers: a health risk management perspective

BackgroundMeat is rich in essential proteins and valuable nutrients for human health. Despite these benefits, it is a favorable medium for microbial growth and transmission to humans unless recommended safety procedures are followed. This research aimed to assess the level of knowledge and practice of the abattoir and butcher shop workers who were working in the meat value chain.MethodsThe cross-sectional study design, using structured questionnaire interviews was used to assess the knowledge and practice of abattoir and butcher shop workers. A total of 226 randomly selected workers were participated in this study and bivariate logistic regression was used for data analysis.ResultsOf 226 total participants, 46% were abattoir workers and 54% were butcher shop workers. Majority (88.9%) of the participants did not know about meat safety and 74.3% of the participants had insufficient practices. The cumulative knowledge of both abattoir and butcher shop workers was significantly associated (p = 0.001) with their knowledge of the presence of diseases causing agents in meat, the source of meat contamination, and the common critical points of meat contamination along the meat value chain. The cumulative practice of abattoir workers was significantly associated with their practices on daily meat transporting vehicle washing (p = 0.007), reducing meat contamination (p = 0.001), duration of animal fasting before slaughter (p = 0.039), cleaning of the animal body before slaughter (p = 0.002), cleaning material used in the abattoir (p = 0.003), disposal of abattoir waste (p = 0.002), and type of biosecurity measures used (p = 0.013). Similarly, the cumulative practice of butcher shop workers was associated (p = 0.001) with their practices of attracting customers, storing remaining meat from daily sales, and measures on contaminated food. Employment of the participants was significantly associated with both the cumulative knowledge (p = 0.007) and practice (p = 0.001) of the participants while the age of the participants was associated (p = 0.001) with only their cumulative practices.ConclusionsIn general, the participants’ food safety knowledge and practice were unsatisfactory. As a result, the integrated food safety policy formulation in a One Health framework, and collaborative awareness creation among different food safety stakeholders were recommended.

The Effect of Teacher Collaboration as the Embodiment of Teacher Leadership on Educational Management Students’ Critical Thinking Skills

<p style="text-align: justify;">The embodiment of teacher leadership has currently shifted onto the practice of teacher collaboration due to its potential to solve students’ problems such as low critical thinking skills. Accordingly, this study quantitatively aimed to examine the effect of teacher collaboration on educational management students’ critical thinking skills as well as their critical thinking retention. Subsequently, it qualitatively investigated the students’ perspectives on teacher collaboration. 60 students selected randomly took part in the experimentation, in which 30 students were taught with teacher collaboration, and other 30 students were taught with individual lecturing. 10 students taught with teacher collaboration were further selected purposively to be interviewed for the qualitative investigation. Descriptive statistics alongside paired and independent t-tests were deployed to analyze the experiment results, and an interactive model was adopted to analyze the qualitative findings. The experiment showed that teacher collaboration had a more positive and significant effect on students’ critical thinking skills than its counterpart did. The students taught with teacher collaboration enjoyed good retention of critical thinking skills as well. The students perceived that teacher collaboration improved their collaborative skills, awareness, and metacognitive skills in learning. Implication, limitation, and recommendation are discussed.</p>

From collaborative awareness to collaborative information enhancement in vehicular networks

An increasing number of innovative technologies are fostering Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), thus setting the milestones of future paradigms in vehicular mobility. Among these technologies, Positioning Navigation and Timing (PNT) systems and low-latency communication networks play a fundamental role. This synergy can enable cooperative approaches leading to innovative, advanced services. Research contributions proposing these approaches rely on hypothetical protocols not being yet in place. An extension of current protocols is advisable to push forward the state-of-the-art solutions in PNT collaborative applications. To this aim, this work proposes a new type of vehicular message, namely Cooperative Enhancement Message (CEM), along with a related open protocol to permit the use of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) raw measurements in vehicular networks. CEM aims at enabling information sharing beyond what is currently allowed by Cooperative Awareness Messages (CAM) and Collective Perception Messages (CPM). It complements such paradigms supporting the enhancement of localization accuracy, precision, and integrity guaranteed by state-of-the-art cooperative algorithms. Furthermore, a validation of the proposed study is accomplished through a novel network simulation framework. Contextually, the paper presents an analysis assessing network performance when concurrent CEM and CAM transmissions are intended to supply cooperative vehicle applications in IEEE 802.11p and Cellular-V2X.

A Data-Driven Optimized Mechanism for Improving Online Collaborative Learning: Taking Cognitive Load into Account.

Research on online collaborative learning has explored various methods of collaborative improvement. Recently, learning analytics have been increasingly adopted for ascertaining learners’ states and promoting collaborative performance. However, little effort has been made to investigate the transformation of collaborative states or to consider cognitive load as an essential factor for collaborative intervention. By bridging collaborative cognitive load theory and system dynamics modeling methods, this paper revealed the transformation of online learners’ collaborative states through data analysis, and then proposed an optimized mechanism to ameliorate online collaboration. A quasi-experiment was conducted with 91 college students to examine the potential of the optimized mechanism in collaborative state transformation, awareness of collaboration, learning achievement, and cognitive load. The promising results demonstrated that students learning with the optimized mechanism performed significantly differently in collaboration and knowledge acquisition, and no additional burden in cognitive load was noted.

Exploration on the collaborative relationship between government, industry, and university from the perspective of collaborative innovation

Abstract The idea that reform drives innovation and entrepreneurship, and innovation and entrepreneurship drive development, has gradually become the main theme of the new era of Chinese society. As the ‘cradle’ of knowledge and technology innovation and the training and output of innovative talents, colleges and universities are the inevitable choices of the times to conform to the social trend and change to the development model of ‘entrepreneurial universities’. This article takes the reform of the development model of universities in Heilongjiang Province as the research object, and it qualitatively explores the status quo of the reform and development of universities in Heilongjiang Province to entrepreneurial universities, with the aid of the Loet Leydesdorff triple helix algorithm, based on the Web of Science database and national intellectual property ‘patent search and analysis’. The platform conducts data mining, conducts quantitative measurement research on the collaboration relationship between government, industry, university and research, and focuses on Heilongjiang Province for horizontal and vertical empirical analyses. The study proposes suggestions for improvement from the three dimensions of condensing the collaborative awareness of innovation subjects, reforming the development model of scientific research institutions, and improving the efficiency of the absorption and transformation of enterprise scientific and technological achievements. It has certain practical guidance for strengthening the mutual information coordination and structural stability of the government, industry, university and research under the collaborative innovation ecosystem.

COVID-19 and Distance Education: Evaluation in the Context of Twenty-first Century Skills

In this study, we aimed to investigate the prospective primary school teachers’ opinions about their experiences in distance education within the scope of twenty-first century skills during COVID-19 pandemic. The phenomenological research method was used for the purpose of enlightening this specific context. The study group involved 16 prospective primary school teachers. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews. The credibility of the data were provided by obtaining the consent of the participants and by comparing the consistency of codes and themes created by experts in accordance with the twenty-first century skills. The key findings were: (1) no opinion is expressed on information and media literacy; also, participants were not aware of the importance of technology literacy. (2) Emergency remote education cannot provide effective learning and teaching. Participants’ awareness of collaboration and communication skills was insufficient. (3) There were positive and negative aspects of emergency distance education towards face-to-face one. The educational environment, which has become digitalized with distance education, shows that there are changes in the views of the participants about the technology competence that they should have in their careers. As a result, remote education does not cause a significant difference in 21st century skills of participants. But the importance and need of twenty-first century skills in the distance education process become more apparent.

Go hand in hand: Showcasing lecturers’ online collaborative teaching practices

Collaborative teaching has been performed by special educators in K-12 schools for decades, and myriads of studies have witnessed its promising impacts on both students and teachers. Notwithstanding its vogue, only a few studies have primarily dealt with its implementation in higher education. Furthermore, empirical attempts accentuating lecturers’ stepwise practices during collaborative teaching implementation remain under-explored, especially when the practices are undertaken online. This study, henceforth, intends to fill the void. In total, the experiences of two collaborating lecturers, leading Teaching English for Foreign Language (TEFL) and Technology-Enhanced Language Learning (TELL) course, were scrutinized. Their practices were documented for 20 weeks and their views were also assembled to grasp how they perceived their online co-teaching practices. In addition, the views from six representative students were assembled at the end of the term through focused group discussion. Through Joint Practice Development (JPD) framework, lecturers’ online collaborative teaching practices were captured and conceptually grouped into five developed stages – collaborative planning, collaborative instruction, peer feedback and evaluation, follow up, and refinement stage. Admitting lecturers’ online co-teaching approach, students contended that its implementation was opportune in bridging their needs of pedagogical knowledge and related technology, facilitating learning efficiency, and fostering their collaboration awareness. Albeit its effectiveness, students are also concerned with collaboration appearance clarity, learning proficiency, and autonomy. Thus far, this teaching approach is worthy of continuing in the higher education, with clear format to adopt.

Design and Evaluation of Accessible Collaborative Writing Techniques for People with Vision Impairments

Collaborative writing tools have been used widely in professional and academic organizations for many years. Yet, there has not been much work to improve screen reader access in mainstream collaborative writing tools. This severely affects the way people with vision impairments collaborate in ability-diverse teams. As a step toward addressing this issue, the present article aims at improving screen reader representation of collaborative features such as comments and track changes (i.e., suggested edits). Building on our formative interviews with 20 academics and professionals with vision impairments, we developed auditory representations that indicate comments and edits using non-speech audio (e.g., earcons, tone overlay), multiple text-to-speech voices, and contextual presentation techniques. We then performed a systematic evaluation study with 48 screen reader users that indicated that non-speech audio, changing voices, and contextual presentation can potentially improve writers’ collaboration awareness. We discuss implications of these results for the design of accessible collaborative systems.

A practical privacy-preserving communication scheme for CAMs in C-ITS

In a Collaborative Intelligent Transportation System (C-ITS), vehicles send collaborative awareness messages (CAMs) carrying information such as speed, position, and identity, to interact with other vehicles and to obtain transportation services. Traditionally, CAMs are broadcasted in plaintext over unsafe networks, which may leak sensitive information of the vehicle. On one hand, many existing works attempting to solve this problem focused on anonymous authentication, but ignored the confidentiality of CAMs. Conversely, some other attempts trying to keep the privacy of CAMs have backward security problems in key management or vehicle revocation. Therefore, in this paper, we present a practical privacy-preserving communication scheme for CAMs in C-ITS. To ensure the privacy of a vehicle's identity, our scheme mainly uses the re-randomizable PS signature method to realize anonymous authentication; and to meet backward security, we use the complete subtree method to realize both key management and vehicle revocation. In more details, our proposal fulfills more security and privacy requirements, such as correctness, anonymity, traceability, revocability, backward security and anti-illegal message dissemination, while also hiding the content of CAMs.

Influence of Learning with One-to-One Computing on the Awareness of Collaboration among Students with Different Learning Motivation and Academic Abilities

Influence of Learning with One-to-One Computing on the Awareness of Collaboration among Students with Different Learning Motivation and Academic Abilities

From Collaborative Awareness to Collaborative Information Enhancement in Vehicular Networks

From Collaborative Awareness to Collaborative Information Enhancement in Vehicular Networks