Proceedings
Online ISSN: 1535-0703
What are steps toward a preparing of ”one voice” and consistent message, which may cross cultural borders? Is it so important to start with new technologies or maybe instead of this it would be better firstly to try to be ahead of them and rethink the capacity to change culture, communication management style and implement integrated communication approach? Addressing such questions leads to the m ...
We examine how accurately the belief system or cultural concepts of Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand, is reconstructed in the virtual world of the Internet. Nine Maori web sites were searched using a list of 44 key concepts in Maori culture. We registered how many pages within a particular web site contain each of the key concepts. These numbers were set up in a data matrix for further ...
The main question of this analysis is a character of mechanism of increasingly netted culture as an intercultural communication context. The shift of culture is related with tendencies of post-modernity and globalization. In fact the contemporary culture is lying on another paradigm, which has a different structure and consecution from traditional culture.” Double virtuality” and infotainment are ...
The UML (Unified Modeling Language) has been widely accepted as a standard language for object-oriented analysis and design. Among the UML diagrams, one of the most difficult and time-consuming diagrams to develop is the object interaction diagram (OID), which is rendered as either a sequence diagram or a collaboration diagram. Our experience shows that developers have significant trouble in under ...
The relevance of the communication in the complex information system (IS) development projects is becoming issue of primary importance. Various researches show that many projects failed due to inadequate management of communication. Project data exchange is still not performed in a structured and standardised manner, which leads to misunderstandings between team members. Too many complex IS projec ...
Efficient delivery of relevant product information is increasingly becoming the central basis of competition between firms. The interface design represents the central component for successful information delivery to consumers. However, interface design for web-based information systems is probably more an art than a science at this point in time. Much research is needed to understand properties o ...
A web based course management tool, 'Net-Class', developed in Middle East Technical University is presented. The tool features such as web browsing abilities, instructor and student tools, synchronous and asynchronous sharing is discussed. It is compared to the commercially available tools in terms of these features. The evaluation shows Net-Class is at least as effective as the others in teaching ...
This paper presents a part of a larger needs assessment study that aimed at designing a course called Instructional Planning and Evaluation (IPE), which is offered at Middle East Technical University, Faculty of Education, Turkey. The purpose of this study was to understand how undergraduate students perceived portfolio assessment (PA) with respect to IPE courses, and how students wanted to work d ...
This paper reports on a longitudinal research study on the attitudes to computers, and the perceptions of a computing career, of students enrolled in an introductory computing course in the years 1995 to 1998. Previous programming experience had a positive effect on computer confidence, and ownership of a home computer had a positive effect on computer anxiety and computer confidence. There was a ...
The paper describes a distance education course which uses ICT in a number of ways. In the first place the World Wide Web provides for part of the content. Next, the course is as far as possible available in a hyperstructure in electronic form. Finally, most of the necessary communication (for example between the students and between the students and their teacher) is supported by ICT. The paper d ...
Distance education through the Internet represents a paradigm shift in higher education. The implementation of an information technology (IT) enabled teaching and learning environment necessitates the redesign of conventional structures. This paper addresses some of the issues involved in the design and delivery of an Internet-based interdisciplinary graduate program in Informatics at Middle East ...
A study of the perceptions of learning technologies of a group of high school teachers was undertaken. Underlying the study was the research-based notion that enhanced learning outcomes are likely only if learning technologies are perceived as a means for students to seek the meaning of the subject material. The teachers were interviewed about their perceptions at the beginning and end of a two ye ...
In this paper we report about ongoing research on navigation assistance in virtual environments. Our aim is to contribute to the development of forms of navigation assistance that enable non-professional visitors of a virtual environment to find their way without previous training. The environment used in this research is a virtual theatre that models a real world music theatre. This virtual theat ...
The rise of the information revolution has led to information becoming a major producer of wealth. This revolution has increased the importance of being able to access and utilise information from a variety of sources, including information published electronically. The Skills.net program was designed to increase electronic- information literacy skills by providing "free or low cost access to trai ...
The Family Access Project will deploy innovative community empowerment, education, consensus building, and information system development strategies to strengthen community, ensure the efficient and effective delivery of needed services, and address the unique needs of families requiring public assistance from a host of public and private agencies in Lake County. The goal of the project is to enha ...
Web based systems has started to broaden their span of a applications. Implementing Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS) are now more likely with higher speed and country-wide. In this study, a web based GDSS framework has been designed, a pilot study has been developed and demonstrated on car selection process.
Significant recent research in the decision support area has been concentrating on the human side of the person-technology relation. Knowledge, perceptions, beliefs and experiences have been researched in a number of works. The author has used individual interviews with business decision makers to find out their attitudes towards factors influencing the quality of business decisions. The issues di ...
This paper describes the This paper describes the inception phase of the development process of a Framework for Developing Distributed Cooperative Decision Support Systems (DSSs). It analyzes the reasons why the broad use of DSSs has not occurred yet and makes propositions to improve this situation. It shows that, for the most part, modern distributed computing architectures could solve many of th ...
The task-oriented disciplines require acquisition ofphysical and cognitive skills, besides the domain’s conceptual knowledge to get ready for challenges of real work environment. Traditional academic practices tend to emphasize facts acquisition and fail to provide adequate learning of cognitive skills required in the day-to-day application of these facts in real life, requiring the learners to su ...
Distance learning improves access to education and - in most cases - advances the quality of education delivery. Its key attributes are: openness, interactiveness and using multimedia teaching materials allowing: learning by anybody, at any place and anywhere. In order to assure high quality of learning, the offered courses should satisfy audience expectations and should convey knowledge in modern ...
For a long time researchers have been considered the question of the use of Internet for its users. In this study we do not want to execute a collection over companies or an entire state, but to limit us to a user group, the students of the Graz University of Technology.From the total extent of the students with a valid e-mail address a representative sample survey has been carried out. To those s ...
In the last 10 years we have seen enormous and dramatic changes in the way we view and use Information. These changes have had far reaching effects, including, but certainly not limited to, the creation of a complex and vibrant global economy, and a sea change in the way we live, work and play. Profitability and survival are increasingly contingent upon an ability to successfully operate in this g ...
In this paper the authors relate an example of an approach to conceptualising curriculum innovation based on Innovation Translation, informed by Actor-Network Theory (ANT). This approach has an advantage over other innovation models in allowing the researcher to concentrate on just those aspects of the innovation that led to its adoption in a particular form, rather than relying on the explanatory ...
Many courses are still delivered by primarily a lecture format. However, many faculty are now realizing that students may gain more by active learning exercises. Upon graduation these students will work on many projects and work as team members. This paper present a new IS literacy course which is heavily reliant on project management techniques, teamwork, and active learning, while incorporating ...
The so-called information society is one attribute of the modern innovative society. Due to complicatedness and complexity of the modern reality, it requires holistic, if. systematic thinking. On the other hand, systems thinking requires a rather holistic information at its basis. On such suppositions, authors discuss relation between information, innovation, and systems thinking, ad their implica ...
The majority of school reforms’ efforts are often realized without any contribution from technology in the main content of school “production" process. Technological solution is not necessarily related to the reform’s activities. Categories of educational technology implementation are designed to highlight differences in the learning activities and related (technological) applications. The “educat ...
Economics of business decision-making (BDM) is target-oriented into management of the economic flow of business activities. Has a major impact on the level of quality of enterprise's operation. Business decision-making (BDM) is based on information, which shows the characteristics of the decisions and provides an additional and necessary knowledge. The main field of the management of the BDM is pr ...
The World Bank Development Report (2000) findings show that at the macro level the most effective anti poverty policies are those that achieve equity through redistribution whilst simultaneously enhancing the efficiency of the markets used by poor people. It also found that even if markets work, poor people need assistance to overcome the obstacles that prevent them from freely accessing markets o ...
From surveyed responses and evolving technologies, technical issues related to developing a secure county/regional based human services information systems solution are identified. Components of such a system are identified and discussed as to their viability to successfully design and implement shared data between government agencies and non-profit groups throughout Lake County and the State of I ...
Business, academic, and government leaders have spoken out for professional education to integrate solid knowledge and skills with a spirit of volunteerism and community service (Briscoe, 1998; Hayes, 1997; Small/Venkatesh, 1998). This paper describes an example of how community service-learning has been applied in an information systems course that emphasizes information literacy required in a Ba ...
Advances in information technology and explosion of internet technology is creating new professional users, across and within countries. These users are looking at technology to provide decision support for non-recurring tasks, to provide prototyping capabilities and to provide research support. However, organizational decision environment is also changing, creating havoc for system builders who m ...
This study investigated the impact of increased information availability on people's ability to process and use information in a judgemental decision making task context. The main findings indicate that increased availability had a detrimental effect on people's information processing efficiency. This, in turn, led to reduced decision accuracy. These findings have important practical implications, ...
A conceptual framework for Decision Support Systems (DSS) is developed based on the dominant technology component or driver of decision support, the targeted users, the specific purpose of the system and the primary deployment technology. Five generic categories based on the dominant technology component are proposed, including Communications-Driven, Data-Driven, Document-Driven, Knowledge-Driven, ...
The purpose of this paper is to present a new software tool that has been developed, the purpose of which is to help novices learn programming. The tool supports what is know as the “completion” method of learning to program. It begins by discussing the difficulties that students face when learning to program and the use of part-complete solutions as a teaching and learning method. CORT has been d ...
Object-Oriented Programming-OOP is now replacing procedural programming in almost all applications. Software developers prefer using it because of its many advantages. Therefore colleges should be prepared to make changes to their current curriculums to be able to start teaching programming by using an object-oriented language. This paper describes the usage of Java, an object-oriented language, a ...
The advent of Internet as a global communication medium has brought a new focus on an area of research in designing Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) that has not been adequately considered so far. In the main, this has been due to the localised nature of most academic environments limiting the sources of information and an implicit assumption that information and knowledge are synonymous. These f ...
This paper reflects upon the teaching of two final year undergraduate subjects, Information Systems Policy and E Commerce, in a Management Information Systems degree program that is located in a School of Accounting and Information Systems. Both of the subjects were taught from an ‘interpretive’ standpoint, an approach that some students found to be challenging given that they were more familiar w ...
In this paper we share the interim results of an on-going research on the emerging profession "broker of information" (infobroker) in today's Information Society. The infobroker concept is developed and the required knowledge and skills for the infobroker successful professional performance are identified. The research findings are based on an extensive investigation and analysis of existing forms ...
At first glance, electronic commerce seems to be inconsistent with electronic privacy. Personalization plays an important strategic role in e-commerce. Thus, a lot of information about online consumers are collected, analysed and used. By contrast, e-privacy is aimed at reducing the amount of collected information about the Internet users. On the other hand recent empirical studies show that lack ...
The purpose of this study was to evaluate a course called ‘Oral Presentation and Advanced Reading Skills' in higher education in Turkey. Subjects were 86 students from science and social sciences departments. Data was collected through responsive and holistic approaches. Results indicate that higher education learners consider a course on oral presentation skills as indispensable in higher educati ...
Many polls conducted in the field of Information Technology indicate that communication skills rate very high on the agenda of IT employers. At the University of Auckland, over the years we had noticed that and that formed the basis for creating a university course, which would be a sort of "total package”, exposing students to the real world of systems design. The major objective of the students ...
This paper addresses the problem of cooperation between team members by describing two dimensions of elements, namely the physical and abstract dimension, to be focused on by all participants of a systems development team. A conceptual framework is introduced which describes these two dimensions. In the second part of the paper the nature of and theory behind sound relationships between team membe ...
In order to introduce Internet technology literacy in the town of Westford (Boston Suburb) a new series of workshops were introduced during the winter of2000. This paper describes the strategy used to inform Westford community about the workshop and also presents an outline of the course topics and summary of research results generated from the participant's feedback and their experiences with the ...
The paper examines the Urica World Wide Web Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC) from three different perspectives. The heuristic evaluation technique showed up a number of problems at the detail level. For broader concerns this needed to be supplemented by other approaches. The use of user interface design patterns and Laurel's concepts of Computers as Theatre showed up the fact that the design ...
The American Council on Education estimates that 85% of traditional colleges and universities offers distance-accessible courses. Boston University has been an early player in this arena, and in this paper we synthesize two models for virtual learning on the basis of actual courses that took place. Also we focus on the authors experience with communicating at a distance in the context of credit an ...
This paper reports on the methodologies used and the findings of the research done by the Enterprise Social Learning Architecture (ESLA) Task into learning processes occurring in two diverse environments within the Australian Defence Organisation, tactical and strategic. The research focused on identifying factors that enable and facilitate social learning and these factors are discussed in view o ...
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems offer a software-based system that handles an enterprise’s total information system needs in an integrated fashion. Such systems have seen a phenomenal growth in the last decade in the US, Europe and Australian markets. With the recent upturn in South-East Asian economies, an increase in demand for ERP systems is expected and opportunities clearly exist f ...
Observing new concepts in information technology, we pay attention to its impact on more effective supporting human and organisational knowledge. Knowledge management (KM) is one of such promising and intriguing concepts. Its goals and infrastructures are defined in different ways, therefore interdisciplinary approach seems to be useful. We have presented a short survey of theoretical concepts in ...
The purpose of this panel is to compare the long existing "Brick and Mortar” (BM) universities with the new E-Learning (EL) universities. The comparison is based on the type of people (lecturers, students, teaching assistants), and activities (lecture, lab, seminar, office hours, library usage, one-on-one meeting, working together, testing, etc.) that are involved. In this panel we will not deal w ...
The academic career and the stages of promotion of teachers and field researchers at the Egyptian universities as well as at many research centers available in Egypt's 26 provinces is guided by a set of rules and regulations that mainly depend on the number of publications that the researcher is producing in a specific period of time. It is also important to note that such publications should be p ...
A lot of research questions are surrounding the implementation of the concept of integrated communication and possible solution may be a process of evolutionary developed integration as well as a new understanding of strategic planning directed by an outside-in view. The movement toward outside-in development seems to be one of the greatest transformations and the mostly difficult to overcome obst ...
Cemagref is a French public research institute in agricultural and environmental engineering. The first task of the 10 documentation departments of Cemagref is to provide solutions to the our engineers' information needs. The purpose of this communication is to describe various components of our information system, designed : to meet scientists' information needs, to provide a documentary survey, ...
The Digital Divide has been defined as a gap between those with access to new information technologies and those without. The term is also used to characterize the disparity between those who can effectively use information technology and those who cannot. This paper explores the digital divide within the United States (U.S.) and worldwide. Factors contributing to the widening of the gap are ident ...
The nature of data has changed as human technology has evolved. ‘Natural ' analogue data stimulate our senses, whilst machine produced data provides an intermediary for natural or artificial data to our senses. In the age of the cyborg (a machine with human attributes) and the bionic person (a human with machine attributes), it is possible for data totally alien from ‘natural reality' to be fed di ...
Internet penetration into economies around the world has been shown to be spotty at best. Yet, electronic commerce has been identified as the engine behind the growth of wealth and social development. It is forecasted to remain a driving force behind economic growth in the foreseeable future. National leaders of the Big 8 conference in Okinawa, Japan in June 2000 were vowing to eliminate, or at le ...
The Internet reduces much of the costs of information sharing, but it does not solve information receivers' reading and interpretation limitations. Browsers and navigators ease information retrieval but do not solve the problems of specifying information needs and evaluating retrieval results. This article approaches these problems as information market problems with solutions consisting of inform ...
Our main purpose in this paper is to start a process of a systemic definition of the notion of information and to provide some initial practical consequences of it. We will try to do that providing: 1) a conceptual definition, following Ackoff's (1962) description and method of such a kind of definition, and 2) following Peirce's (1931-5,1958) conception of "meaning", where the practical consequen ...
Information systems must be protected from unauthorized access. Authorization has been studied extensively as the main form ofpreserving the security of databases. Every database management system provides a sophisticated set of options aimed at protecting the database from unauthorized access. An important practical problem is how to take advantage of the database security options to ensure that ...
The growth of the Internet with its increasing levels of traffic, more ambitious applications and the convergence of communication technologies results in poor quality of service. New technologies such as those discussed in this paper have been developed to aid in introducing quality of service to the Internet. However, those efforts may seem to be in vain due to the heterogeneous nature of IP-bas ...
In this paper, we present a case study on the design of a web-based online service delivery system using IBM's Net.Commerce system as well as the lessons learned in completing this project. The design specification is presented using the UML notation, while database schema is presented using the IDEF1X notation. Our design specification includes architecture, system components using package diagra ...
The learning technology standardization process is taking the lead role in the research efforts into computer-based education. Institutions like the IEEE or the US Department of Defense have set up committees to deliver recommendations and specifications on this area to provide interoperability between different educational systems. The first part of this paper shows an up-to-date survey on this f ...
The paper presents the results of the analysis of the difficulties evidenced by the students while approaching some scientific disciplines (the ones the author has been teaching or involved with) and shows various kinds of these problems usually known as preconceptions, misconceptions or mental schemes in students' learning. The work describes then the strategies adopted to help students in overco ...
With the advent of Information Technology (IT), there is a change happening in universities around the world. New information technologies are increasingly being integrated into the educational process to support pedagogy and learning. Teaching methods that use only the traditional lecture approach to teaching are increasingly seen as unsatisfactory. Good teaching has been identified by Chickering ...
Some issues related to the transformation of a traditional IS service department into a modern team-based information center are discussed. The process of transformation comprises human resources analysis, investigation of possible ways of transformation, proposal of a new organization and constitution of development teams (DTs). New organization is based on DTs with flexible structure, which ensu ...
Informing Science (IS) and Science and Technology Studies (STS): The University as Decision Center )
Students of history and philosophy of science courses at my University are either naive robust realists or naive relativists in relation to science and technology. The first group absorbs from culture stereotypical conceptions, such as the value-free character of the scientific method, that science and technology are impervious to history or ideology, and that science and religion are always at od ...
After a short introduction on media evolution and their implications on human history the paper presents the results of two experiences held by the authors while using new technologies in disseminating bibliographical and historical information. The former experience concerns the Web publication of a bibliography on Beneventan manuscripts and arises from the need of overcoming the long edition tim ...
Most Japanese comoanies are facina difficulties caused from a lona term recession of Japanese economy, olaaued with such auestions as how to accelerate decision makina process, how to make orooer iudaments in decision, and how to predict the future trends of concerned industry, etc. There are two main causes of these difficulties now facina most Japanese comoanies usina the traditional so-called " ...
Modeling Using IS Methodologies: Some Guidelines Based on Authenticity and Contemporary Epistemology
This paper focuses on two contemporary problems in IS development: those of choosing which IS methodology to use (if any), and the practical problems related to using an IS methodology whilst intervening in modern, complex, turbulent organizations. As IS practitioners must, increasingly, intervene in such organizations, it is argued that an important issue for IS research is whether they choose to ...
This paper discusses an MIS Capstone course in a graduate information technology program. The course provides an environment that allows students to apply the information and skills that they have obtained in the program. Teams of students work with organizations and deal with actual IS issues in a real world environment. This paper describes elements of the course, the tasks required to ensure co ...
The author compares the relative successes of two different teaching techniques in seminars for a first year university course in Finance. This paper tests to see if there is one overriding approach that enables all students to learn effectively in seminars or whether different students benefit from different teaching techniques. An experiment will be carried out on a subset of a first year Financ ...
The paper presents a revised model for handling the computer literacy and information systems requirements for undergraduates. The model was proposed for School of Business students at the Metropolitan State College of Denver. Through a combination of entrance screenings, self-paced Web Based Training courses on the campus network, and traditional classroom Introduction to Computers courses, a mor ...
Business has become increasingly dependent on the Internet and computing to operate. It has become apparent that there are issues of evidence gathering in a computing environment which by their nature are technical and different to other forms of evidence gathering, that must be addressed. This paper offers an introduction to some of the technical issues surrounding this new and specialized field ...
Higher education institutions are increasingly embracing the Internet as a tool to support academic courses and/or programs. Little research has been done to assess students' attitudes toward the Web-based instructions and communication tools that supplement academic courses and/or programs. The purpose of this study was to assess students’ attitudes toward the on-line asynchronous communication t ...
Characteristics of the new millennium suggest that we give students the experience of working in multi-cultural distributed teams to prepare them for present and future organizational demands. In general, students respond positively to this type of learning activity. However, we know little in terms of what they are really learning, how to improve the environment in which that learning takes place ...
This paper presents a new theoretical model to explain behavior toward electronic communication tools based on evolution theory. The model proposes that inherited biological traits acquired by the human species through Darwinian evolution bias an individual's choice of preferred communication toward face-to-face communication. The model also suggests that e-communication media that selectively inc ...
Today agility of management cannot be realized unless given all of the following three kinds of quickness: a) quick recognition of environmental changes, b) quick decision-making on countermeasures against these changes, and c) quick implementation of the countermeasures chosen. In the business world nowadays the quickness of a) concerns information that an MIS deals with, the quickness of b) conc ...
We describe the development and implementation of a management informing system (MIS) to aid the mining, transporting, stockpiling and shipping of iron ore. Ore is railed from mines to a port, where it is blended on stockpiles and recovered to ships. The project commenced as a Decision Support System to aid quality control of ore grade. It evolved to become an MIS aiding operators, decision makers ...
Having in mind today's growth of information sources, both in terms of their number and of their size, whether we are referring to the Internet, a corporate intranet, or a library information retrieval system, we can say that manipulating information is not a trivial task. The user is not often being catered for in distributed information systems. He/ she seems to be interacting with systems that ...
The main objective of the CD-ROM project is to provide all students, especially distance learners, with a virtual laboratory environment where they can be exposed to the physical and technical aspects of electronic communication equipment. We believe this CD-ROM resource will contribute towards the enhancement of the distance education experience and go some way to providing educational equity.
This paper discusses the planning and observations of a group project using the Internet between two schools, one in Indiana and one in North Carolina. Students at each school are members of a group assigned to do some financial research on the Internet. Specifically, two companies are researched by each group and two financial ratios computed and compared. Finance students in North Carolina have ...
In flexible, asynchronous e-learning environments, student-tutor interactions are usually by telephone, email or fax. In courses that utilise software in their teaching, many such interactions involve students requesting assistance from a tutor in connection with the use of that software to solve problems. Not only is it difficult for a student to explain a problem which they are having, but it is ...
This tutorial deals with the broad class of intelligent learning systems for cognitive skills development. These systems have proved very effective, especially within the applied domains where learning is more concerned with the operational knowledge. These systems can accommodate both the 'instruction' and 'construction' of knowledge and involve active engagement, they have been more successful a ...
