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BACKGROUND: Nurses have expressed doubts about the ongoing digitalisation of Swedish primary health care. Given the potential role of eHealth in primary health care, including supporting interactive self-management for people with chronic conditions, it is important to highlight nurses' experiences. This study is part of a larger project aimed at implementing person-centred interactive self-management support (iSMS) in primary health care.

AIM: The aim of this study was to describe Swedish primary healthcare nurses' perceptions of using digital eHealth systems and services to support patient self-management.

METHODS: Focus group interviews were conducted with primary healthcare nurses (n = 20). The interview transcriptions were analysed using qualitative content analysis.

RESULTS: Three themes emerged from the content analysis: caregiving in the midst of digital chaos; a lack of overview and control in daily work; and mixed feelings towards digitalisation. Each theme was subdivided into three subthemes.

CONCLUSION AND RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE: The results of this study provide insight into a number of concerns that stand in the way of success when it comes to the implementation and use of digital technology. If nurses are to adapt to the new policies and practices that accompany the current digitalised development in Swedish primary health care, the concept of a nurse's traditional work role needs to be amended in terms of the scope of work tasks and established views of traditional nursing. The study also highlights the need for more research to enable eHealth systems/services to be designed to fulfil multiple requirements. The digitised systems should be a tool for achieving good quality self-management support as well as giving the primary healthcare nurses adequate resources to support patients' self-management while still maintaining the values associated with person-centred care.

Purpose This paper seeks to present the issue of e-learning development in a public university in Bolivia, together with challenges that could support the work of a sustainable development of practice and educational technologies.

Design/methodology/approachThe paper presents the first phase of an interpretative case study. It comprises data sources found in observations, interviews, and documents, which the authors have analysed according to three genre themes associated with e-learning - people, spaces, and technologies.

FindingsThe paper identifies a set of challenges that is aimed at directing further development and research on sustainable e-learning approaches in developing regions.

Originality/valueThe paper offers a practitioner perspective on e-learning development at a university in a developing country.

This paper presents and discusses strategies used by homecare workers to establish and maintain awareness in a mobile workplace. It capitalizes on data derived from a longitudinal translocal ethnographic study of homecare and the utilization of mobile technology. The study exposes two distinct dimensions of the work context, denoted the Case and Base dimensions, which are used as vehicles to describe situations of collaborative practice that occur (1) in a coordination meeting, (2) on a homecare visit, and (3) in an on-the-fly ‘illicit’ use of mobile technology. We propose a new conception of collaborative awareness as a 'practical sense of knowing'. Findings from the ethnographic study are consistent with a well-worn distinction between “knowing that”, declarative knowledge, and “knowing how”, procedural knowledge. Conventional structures of organizational control, encoded both procedurally and as declarations of responsibility, are routinely broken and reformed. This happens as workers devise new strategies in order to maintain the keen sense of their collaborative situation required to sustain an orderly workplace.

In this paper we present results from the case studies of two homecare groups that have recently adopted the same workflow system. From these, we present evidence that the physical layout of the meeting space can generate spheres of collaboration that influence interaction between team members, the technology and each other. This paper contributes to the CHI literature by presenting case study evidence of technological implementations in a co-located environment that have affected social spaces to create different spheres of collaboration.

In this paper, we propose the necessity to expand the concept of semiformal systems in collaborative environments. We have through extensive empirical work identified a number of salient dimensions that points towards need of broaden the space of possible actions for the users. The complexity of collaborative processes and the trend of increased use of mobile technologies have been concretized in a collaborative learning system, the MOVE system. The implication of interconnecting stationary and mobile devices in MOVE has provided a technological support for critical transitions between participants in collaborative activities.

This chapter provide a case and an investigation of how a particular mobile ICT support has been used within an established practice of homecare work. The discussion shows a perspective of how technology and practice coevolves and get enmeshed together. The importance of seeing the interface of either the mobile devices or the stationary computer as common information spaces is stressed, since the single-user interface the current system offers is not enough support for the collaborative activities the mobile workforce of homecare work is engaged in. The problem resides in this case in the relations to predecessors of the system, found in diaries and coordination tools. A modest suggestion posed by the author is that an understanding of the work maintaining the role of these predecessors can provide beneficial information for the future design of these technological supports.

The paper deals with the use of mobile technology in decentralized university education. In order to support individual and collective activities we have conducted a study, which elaborates the shift between private and public dimensions of information. To approach the problem we have used the notion of grounding and Vygotskys’ cultural approach and conducted a study where student groups are set out to construct individual and collective concept maps in PDA’s and desktop computers. The study show that personal technologies has potential features to enhance learning, as they are (1) present both in individual and collective phases of a learning activity, and (2) a support for sharing individually created representations with in a group and moreover (3) play different roles in the process of grounding.