What could Minecraft & the NHS possibly have in common?

What could Minecraft & the NHS possibly have in common?

by | Jan 18, 2015 | #NHStalktech, NHS stuff | 0 comments

A quick Internet search for *Minecraft* and *health* results in a plethora of sites which tell you how to restore the health of your player – health being the meter of endurance in Minecraft and represented by the number of hearts you have  on your screen. What pops up next are the desperate pleas of parents wanting to know how to keep their children’s obsession with Minecraft *healthy*. What doesn’t readily appear is anything about Minecraft’s application in a health context. I’ve been fascinated by Minecraft since, like millions of others, my youngest child became obsessed by this open ended creative and imaginative game. His focused hours of application, concentrated self-directed learning and mind-blowing creations must be the stuff of dreams for many a primary school teacher wanting to motivate their pupils. And not surprisingly there is a growing industry developing around Minecraft as an educational tool. I went along to the Playful Leeds Minecraft Unplugged workshop, along with my resident 10 year old Minecraft enthusiast, in order to think about how the game might have an application in an NHS context. The session was led by Adam Clarke, who amongst other things, has created Tate Worlds and Alan Lewis who has won awards for the virtual worlds he has built in Minecraft. Although I couldn’t find any reliable figures on the web, I was surprised to learn from Adam that there are fairly equal numbers of males and females playing Minecraft.  I also found out that there is a Minecraft server for children with autism and their families called AutCraft but I’m not aware of anything else out...
Digital and making the invisible visible

Digital and making the invisible visible

by | Jan 9, 2015 | Digital, NHS stuff | 2 comments

This week I was invited to speak at a Ministerial event in Leeds which showcased the growing community of data, digital and health in our city. The opportunity to share the mHealthHabitat programme with an audience was great, but that’s not what I want to talk about here. Instead, I want to reflect on who gets to be in the conversation and who doesn’t. My post is offered in a spirit of enquiry and in making visible what can easily be rendered invisible. It was visible to me that I was the only woman on the invite list (as it turned out there were two other women present in the audience). All the speakers, apart from me, were men. Once I had noticed gender it was only a small leap to notice that everyone was white, almost everyone was wearing a suit, and everyone was of a certain age. There was no one there bringing patient perspectives to the conversation. There are two things I am not doing in this post –  firstly, I am not taking the moral high ground, if it had been an event full of white women I may well have not noticed if there were no black women there. I noticed because I was in a minority myself.  Secondly, I am not criticising this particular event – it’s an example of what seems to be business as usual most places you go when it comes to digital. The event was successful in rendering visible to myself, and no doubt other participants, that there really is a growing community of people in the digital and...
Will 2015 be the year of open?

Will 2015 be the year of open?

by | Jan 4, 2015 | NHS stuff, PhD, social media | 0 comments

Will 2015 be the year of open? For me, New Year marks the beginning of a countdown to completing my PhD research which I hope to finalise before this time next year. I began this blog in January three years ago with the intention of recording my PhD journey, and it has become more of a reflective, sharing and learning tool than I ever imagined – a journey into open. Formality versus open A common tension I’ve experienced during the course of my research is the open and informal nature of shared connections and learning on social networking sites and the relative formality and rigidity of academic learning within a University context. In the blogosphere, learning is shared peer-to-peer in the spirit of collaboration. In an academic paper or a chapter in a book there is both a formal style to comply with and access constraints in the shape of a subscription or purchase. In the blogosphere feedback is instant and ideas built upon ideas; in the formal arena writing is produced as finished and polished. I appreciate the rigour of formal research and peer review whilst I enjoy the emergent nature of learning through social networks. They are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but I do wonder if open has more transgressive possibilities. Open as a way of life I’m currently reading David Price’s Open: how we’ll work, live and learn in the future and his critique of formal learning resonates with the tensions I describe above. With audacious optimism, he argues that:   “going ‘open’ is a social revolution that represents a fundamental challenge to the established order...