Adapting a learning tool for specialized nursing
Abstract
Purpose
Nursing has for a long time used a variety of technological tools to improve and support patient care. Tool use changes knowledge processes, offering opportunities to explore processes of specialization in this field. The purpose of this paper is to report from a collaborative process to achieve shared meaning potential while adapting a generic learning tool to meet learning needs of specialized nursing. A complex chain of actions, interactions and negotiations during the adaptation process is disentangled. The paper draws from the theoretical construct known as trajectories of participation.
Design/methodology/approach
The method employed in data analysis is interaction analysis, allowing detailed studies of the actions represented in the participants' intersecting trajectories.
Findings
The analysis shows how project members seek to combine different modes of knowledge when they sort out and establish shared meaning potential. Typically the negotiations start with a concrete problem arising from the current practice's use of tools. The participants clarify and specify a shared object of activity by mobilizing three different modes of knowledge (practical, diagnostic and technical). During this process, the participants' trajectories converge toward consensus. This consensus is a process of constructing and reconstructing tools and practices and an interdependency of tools and practices that is “materialized” in the adapted learning tool.
Originality/value
This analysis shows the importance of taking account of processes in the concrete settings when developing new tools for change in specialist nursing. Different trajectories of participation that intersected in the planning activities give insight into how knowledge is mobilized when tools and practices co-evolve on an interactional level.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors thank the project participants for allowing the first author to observe their work and for giving them time to answer questions. This case study is a case in “Knowledge creation and production processes in transforming social practices,” a case study in the EU-funded project KP-Lab (project no 27490, Priority 2, Information Society Technologies, FP6-2004-IST-4). The authors acknowledge funding from the University of Oslo and the KP-Lab project.
Citation
L. Nygård, K., I. Mørch, A. and Moen, A. (2013), "Adapting a learning tool for specialized nursing", Journal of Workplace Learning, Vol. 25 No. 7, pp. 441-454. https://doi.org/10.1108/JWL-01-2013-0046
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2013, Emerald Group Publishing Limited