We met in the delightful surroundings of the Teaching Commons at the University of Canberra.

Ultimately the resource will be used by postgraduate critical care nursing students and critical care clinicians to develop a patient education guide that will lead to a clinical support site. The resource will include support for and education of:

• Patients in the critical care environment
• Families of patients
• Staff working in critical care
• Visitors

It was great to be part of a discussion with Holly and Laura.

Holly is a Registered Nurse and Midwife. She has spent over 30 years in critical care nursing areas. She is the convener of the Postgraduate Critical Care Nursing courses at the University of Canberra and teaches in the undergraduate Ethics and Law unit. Holly has a specialist interest in organ and tissue donation and has worked for ACT Health as the ACT Organ and Tissue Donor Coordinator.

Laura is a passionate advocate for wiki collaboration. She notes on her Wikipedia user page that “I am not a WikiMedia Foundation (WMF) employee or intern, nor am I based in WMF offices or affiliated with them in any official capacity. I just love the idea of sharing knowledge and trying to help people”. She has a particular interest in women and sport. I have found Laura’s work on gender issues in wiki production to be particularly thought provoking.

I am looking forward to supporting the development of the wiki resource and note that news of it will be shared with the tag #CCare.

Photo Credit

Critical Care – An attentive nurse and a lot of machines that go “ping”

There is a notice board at the entrance to Clyde Street in the village that shares news of events.

Last week the board was alerting everyone to Clean Up Australia Day on 4 March.

To my great delight there was an addition to the notice board this weekend.

I love the idea that the Year of Reading has come to Mongarlowe and that it is housed in a Tardis-like location.

The Year of Reading 2012 “is about children learning to read and keen readers finding new sources of inspiration. It’s about supporting reading initiatives while respecting the oral tradition of storytelling. It’s about helping people discover and rediscover the magic of books. And most of all, it’s about Australians becoming a nation of readers”.

I think a telephone kiosk library in rural Australia is a great place to look for the magic of books. Wonderfully, all the books are at readers’ heights.

For more information about the National Reading Year have a look at the wiki developed to support the Year.

I did sign up for it but failed to make any of the synchronous presentations or conversations.

However since then I have returned regularly to look at the great resources available. The EpCop site will be a perfect reference site for participants in the Sport Coaching Pedagogy unit I am running this semester at the University of Canberra.

Participants in the Sport Coaching Pedagogy unit will develop an e-portfolio as part of their practice and assessment. I have been looking at ways to support their e-portfolio awareness and development.

It has been interesting to see the number of Scoop.It sites that have appeared and share e-portfolio news. These include:

• Heath Sawyer
• Sigi Jakob
• Carole McCulloch
• Susan Bainbridge
• Ray Tolley
• Ramesh Sharma
• Dominique-Alain Jan

After looking at all these sources I was delighted to find Sarah Stewart’s discussions of e-portfolio thoughts and actions. I really admire Sarah’s ability to share ideas and practices. Her e-portfolio posts are a great resource and one that I will use with Sport Coaching Pedagogy students.

Photo Credit

Managing to Know: cave paintings, e-portfolios, printing press & PLE

Tech & the Profession

The Sport Coaching Pedagogy (#SCP12) unit starts this week at the University of Canberra.

There are 70 participants in the unit. They have a great range of coaching and teaching backgrounds.

The unit has a:

• Wikiversity page that provides information about unit content and assessment
• Facebook page that shares information about #SCP12 activities
• Moodle site hosted by the University’s remarkable Teaching and Learning Centre.

This week I aim to explore the themes of the unit and discuss generic issues in coaching and teaching. I am going to use these images to trigger my discussion.

In the tutorials for the unit this week I aim to look at personal learning environments and the development of an e-portfolio for each of the participants in the unit.

I think I will use this presentation as a way to start discussion:

One of the opportunities for me on this course is to model in practice some of the ideas I am discussing about coaching, teaching and pedagogy!

Photo Credit

Wielrenners beklimmen bewaakte overweg

I have been thinking a lot about the possibilities afforded by the scheme.

To my great delight I heard about a different set of freedom wheels this morning.

Stella Young was a guest on Radio National’s Life Matters program. The Life Matters website has a podcast of the interview with the great title A Wheelchair Named Desire.

Stella has had the same wheelchair for seventeen years “but it is not without regret that she must let it go for a new one”. In the interview she speaks about her personal relationship to her wheelchair and what it means for those who need wheelchairs to have adequate care and funding”.

The interview was a wonderfully clear sharing of the freedom wheelchairs offer to their owners and a daunting discussion about the affordability of the technology that makes such freedom possible.

Photo Credit

Ramp Up website

The Olympic Medal Tracker “projects the winners in each medal event for the 2012 London Olympics, based on an algorithm that monitors athletes’ performances leading up to the Games”.

The Tracker projects “finishes for the top eight athletes in each event, plus country-by-country projections based on the accumulated results of individual events”.

The Tracker is updated monthly. The February 2012 projections were published on 3 February.

This month’s projections for total medals at the Games are:

There has been no change to the top ten ranked nations by total medals. In the top twenty nations, Brazil (16th to 13th) and Spain (24th to 19th) are two nations that have enhanced their standing in the table.

I think the podcast service available since 2007 has been outstanding. I have even contemplated getting into bed with Phillip Adams.

More recently I think The Conversation has added a new dimension to sharing news about Australia’s university and research sector.

This week I was directed to Australian Collaboration through a Diigo Teacher-Librarian alert.

I am fascinated by the possibilities of open sharing and am thinking about a portal to share information to support lifelong learning. I believe that the ABC, The Conversation and The Australian Collaboration sites have set a standard for what such a portal could be.

I liked this slide from Krish Krishnan’s Webinar on Integrating Big Data this week as a check to my idealism:

Like Krish I can we have some interesting opportunities ahead to put things together:

Photo Credit

Playing with Legos at SXSW 2007

One of the posts on this blog that receives regular hits is a post about Charles Reep.

I based the post on a 1997 article I wrote after meeting Charles.

Recently I have heard from Neil Lanham about Charles’s work and this post addresses some of the issues Neil has raised with me. Neil met Charles for the first time in 1962. Neil has pointed out that:

• Charles Reep did not analyse a single game for Wimbledon Football Club or had any influence on their play.
• Neil took Charles to meet Dave Basset for about half an hour one afternoon when Wimbledon were in Division 3. Neil had been working for them for some time.
• Neil kept his head below the parapet “as professionally requested by Dave Bassett and others” and did not publish his work in academic circles.
• Neil’s work as a professional soccer performance analyst is the subject of a forthcoming book.
• His paper at the 2003 World Congress of Science and Football reports on some of the teams with whom he worked.
• Neil’s network of colleagues includes Simon Hartley (the first full-time match analyst at Watford) and Richard Pollard (who worked with Watford prior to Simon’s appointment).
• Neil produced an unpublished book on the effect behind every possession in every match in Wimbledon’s first season the former English League Division 1. Neil’s data were hand notated and then computer analysed.

In a paper written in 1991, Figures do not cease to exist because they are not counted,  Neil reports data from 500 games (including Wimbledon games). He notes that “the ball changed sides 180 times for each team on average in between goals with 1.33 average goals/team”.

In his correspondence with me (February 2012) Neil suggests that:

the big thing about Reep is that the pundits seem to think that he invented a sort of winning game that included long balls. Not so – what Reep invented was a method of recording what happens to every possession of both teams on a soccer field that over a series shows the truth of how goals come. (My emphasis in bold.)

Neil hand notated and then computer analysed every touch of the ball in all 52 games of the 1990 World Cup … “the ratios were exactly as Reep predicted”.

In a paper published in 2005 in Science and Football V, Neil presents further detailed evidence about his own work. He notes that:

Employed since 1981 in a professional capacity, by League and International teams, over 3000 games have been fully recorded by using a previously noted shorthand code of every move in every possession in each match for both For and Against teams.  Since 1985 this has been fed into a database computer system programmed to average long runs of matches so that rate and quality can be examined.  The 15 teams selected for this paper were all recorded in long runs and all had success in either achieving promotion or top of the table status.  From their figures we can pinpoint the measured difference that brought success.

The 2005 paper presents data from:

• 2001/2002 English Premier League
• World Cup and Euro Cup 1978-1996
• Wimbledon 1986/1987 and 1987/1988

Neil uses his data from these data sets to argue that:

… there is a Near Constant Law of Chance that 180 possessions on average are lost and won back supporting the single possession of ‘goal’.  At an assumed 240 possessions per match this represents 1.33 goals on average for and against.  This is the same at all levels of the game, however it is played, and whether fast or slow…

I am delighted to have corresponded with Neil about these matters. At present I am supervising a PhD student, Ron Smith, who is investigating goal scoring in football. Ron has had a distinguished career as a coach and performance analyst. I am hopeful that his work will add to the community of practice that has flourished as a result of Neil’s, Charles’, Simon’s and Richard’s foundational work.

Photo Credits

Wales versus Ireland football international at Wrexham

San Mames

I learned about Paul Barach’s work in health teams and in my post I noted:

My ears pricked up with an early reference to “highly coordinated team efforts, leadership and a calm alignment”. Paul was discussing a team effort that drew upon routines developed in training and a team that did not panic … in the context of the response to the emergency on the Qantas QF32 flight out of Singapore recently.

This week I received an alert to another account of expert decision making in an airline incident.

Dave Ferguson has written about Flight 1549. Dave has been reading the National Transportation Safety Board report about the incident “to learn more about the interplay between training, learning, performance support, and the environment in which this emergency took place”.

The incident:

On January 15, 2009… US Airways Flight 1549…experienced an almost complete loss of thrust in both engines after encountering a flock of birds and was subsequently ditched on the Hudson River about 8.5 miles from LaGuardia Airport (LGA), New York City… The flight… had departed LGA about 2 minutes before the in-flight event occurred.

I think Dave has written a fascinating account of the incident and the report. I was particularly interested in two points he made:

• For all of 1549′s crew–in the cockpit and in the cabin–performance resulted from experience, and experience was shaped not only through time in the air, but through regular training intended to focus on critical events, to provide feedback, and to increase the likelihood of success in critical, unpredictable situations.
• In an interview the captain observed:

One way of looking at this might be that for 42 years, I’ve been making small, regular deposits in this bank of experience, education, and training. And on January 15 the balance was sufficient so that I could make a very large withdrawal.

Photo Credit

Door Number 3 – Decisions Decisions

Flight 1549

They played twelve games in total: 10 games in the regular season and 2 in finals games.

The team won 9 games (7 regular season, 2 finals games) and drew 3 games.

Canberra United finished third in the 2010-2011 W-League competition and in the 2011-2012 season had a new coach, Jitka Klimkova.

The end of the regular season 2011-2012 ladder was:

In their twelves games, Canberra United:

• Scored first in eight games
• Had one 0-0 game (v Sydney)
• Were one goal down in three games (Perth Glory, Brisbane Roar, Melbourne Victory)

Canberra United defeated a higher ranked team (2010-2011) in Game 3 (Sydney) and drew with a a higher ranked team (2010-2011) in Game 6 (Brisbane Roar). Both these games were played away from home.

The team was very successful in scoring consecutive goals:

• v Adelaide (three second half goals in 20 minutes)
• v Perth Glory (three second half goals in 16 minutes)
• v Melbourne Victory (two first half goals in 15 minutes)
• v Newcastle (two goals)
• v Brisbane (two goals)
• v Newcastle (two second half goals in 11 minutes)
• v Adelaide (five goals in total, 2 goals in 6 minutes in the first half and 3 goals in 10 minutes in the second half)
• v Brisbane (two first half goals in 7 minutes)

It took Canberra from:

• the 21st minute in the first half until the 64th minute in the second half to equalise against Perth (Game 2)
• the 8th minute in the first half to the 12th minute in the first half to equalise against Brisbane (Game 6)
• the 20th minute in the first half until 81st minute in the second half to equalise against Melbourne Victory (Game 9)

Photo Credit

Celebrations