ABSTRACT
Child-welfare practices transformed drastically in 2020 after governments instituted quarantining and social-distancing measures. Child visitation, mental health evaluations and treatment, and court hearings either ceased or only accessible via information communication technologies (ICTs). Peer-reviewed published scholarship about technology use in child welfare is limited to voluntary, supplemental contexts and insufficient to understand the nuanced effects of this transition on vulnerable populations. We used a critical case study ethnography to name this phenomenon, 'pandemic practice', and describe how case-management challenges were compounded and/or masked by pandemic practice. Mandatory ICT use in case management contributed to injustices for some families in the child-welfare system, including children spending extended time in foster care, families receiving superficial treatment services and irreparable harm to timely case progression. We used technology adoption theory and technological capital framework to identify and understand the complexities of pandemic practice beyond a simple digital divide perspective. We present a hierarchy of technological capital necessary to participate in pandemic practice, suggestions to create sufficient capital and implications for policy and practice.
ABSTRACT
This paper proposes a university course centred around a problem-based laboratory called “Crowd Engineering (CE)”. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, collaborative work had to be moved predominantly into the virtual space. Thus, the need for virtual collaborative work in teaching increased significantly. CE is a joint remote collaboration by two academic institutions working together in a transfer-oriented, publicly funded project. In the course, design and product engineering students learnt to cope with today's complex problems. They acquire skills to think beyond subject and system boundaries and are equipped with these job-related qualities already during university education by solving a crowd-sourced real-world task. Students worked with various tools to arrive at an initial design proposal that is supposed to be implemented in a future physical prototype. This paper describes the collaboration context of both university partners, concept development and implementation of the laboratory course and lessons learned from the collaboration. © PDE 2021.
ABSTRACT
Nowadays, products and services are commonly developed by cross-functional teams in collaborative approaches. In course of these, individual team members bring expertise in various areas, e.g., product management, UX design, implementation, testing, marketing, to the table. Hence, collaboration in projects is more important than ever and design thinking or design processes cannot be done without collaboration. But since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, many institutions from the academic and the business sector are still facing the challenge of converting the usual on-site workday to remote work settings. This challenge includes issues such as finding appropriate tools, which are capable of replacing or replicating the on-site workflow. The problem with such tools is mainly that they are often too expensive or come with issues regarding data privacy. Our proposed approach aims to solve these challenges especially for one activity: working together on a whiteboard. The resulting solution is Whitebird, a collaborative, digital whiteboard built with Nest.js, Nuxt.js, Fabric.js and MongoDB. Our poster presentation discusses the pros and cons of embracing the principle of web-based skeuomorphism, i.e. mimicking real-world objects and applying them to the whiteboard in order to foster a sense of familiarity in users. From the web development perspective, we discuss the use of free and open-source web application/front-end development web frameworks such as Nest.js and Nuxt.js along with illustrating the implementation of JavaScript library Fabric.js which provides an object model on top of HTML5 canvas methods. We conclude by showing how the results obtained within the scope of this project can be used for further open-source web service development. © 2021, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
ABSTRACT
Abstract In December 2019 an outbreak of a new corona virus was reported in the city Wuhan, China. End of January, the WHO declared this development as a public health emergency of international concern (WHO, 2020). Germany reported a rapidly increasing number of 186,461 infected persons in the period from February to June (Robert-Koch-Institut, 2020). This pandemic, caused by a respiratory disease, presents the dental profession with an unprecedented challenge in terms of dental care for the population.