Minerva Elements Records
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ItemThe use of online social networking (OSN) for higher education( 2013)The emergence and popularity of social technologies in the past few years has motivated some lecturers to appropriate these technologies for Online Social Networking (OSN) educational activities for higher education. Social technologies or Web 2.0 technologies include social networking sites, blogs, microblogs, and wikis. OSN for higher education use is defined as a range of educational activities enabled by appropriated social technologies and operationalised by a group of people. Despite the availability of implementation cases of OSN use discussed in the literature, an in-depth study investigating why and how lecturers appropriate social technologies is still lacking. Further, extant research provides a limited discussion of students’ experience and use of OSN for educational activities. Motivated by an increasing interest in OSN use amongst academics, as well as the research gaps stated above, this research aimed to: explore and understand why lecturers appropriate social technologies; investigate the processes used by lecturers to appropriate social technologies; investigate students’ experiences of using appropriated social technologies; and explore and understand the benefits, challenges and opportunities of OSN use for lecturers and students. The data collection was divided into two main studies. In Study 1, interviews were conducted with sixteen Malaysian lecturers and fourteen Australian lecturers. In Study 2, a total of nine focus group discussions with students were held in Malaysian and Australian universities. The data from both studies were analysed manually using thematic data analysis. The findings of this research increase current understanding of the factors motivating lecturers’ appropriation of social technologies. Lecturers were found to appropriate social technologies in a range of practices from an ad-hoc to a systematic approach. Lecturers also experienced several outcomes that can be seen from the aspects of benefits, challenges and opportunities. Students also encountered several outcomes in terms of benefits and challenges arising from their use of OSN for educational activities. The implications of the research are discussed from the perspectives of its theoretical and practical contributions. As the empirical evidence reported in this thesis was based on the real-life experiences of the main stakeholders (i.e. the lecturers and the students), the thesis contributes to advanced evidence-based OSN research within the higher education field.
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ItemEnabling agility in existing information systems: a capability structure for the IT function( 2010)This thesis identifies how the IT function can create agility in existing information systems. Agility is the capability to quickly sense and respond to environmental perturbations. This thesis contrasts the agility perspective from a widely used industry framework with research perspectives on agility in the IS literature. Beer’s Viable System Model is a useful meta-level theory to house agility elements from IS research literature and applies cybernetic principles to identify the capabilities required of the IT function. Indeed, a survey of 70 organizations confirms that the meta-level theory better correlates with reported agility measures than existing practice measures do on their own. There were three stages to the research. First, was conceptually applying the Viable System Model to the concept of agility from IS research literature. The cybernetic model proposed an explanative theory for agility in information systems and prescribed capabilities for the IT function. The second research stage was a qualitative study with an IT consultancy. Managers and consultants participated in applicability checking the theoretical development to the agility topic. The level of analysis was the client base of an IT consultancy, which consists of approximately 250 Australian organizations. A research deliverable was a joint white paper between the University of Melbourne and the IT consultancy. The final stage was two quantitative surveys for theory testing. The first survey mailed a Likert-type questionnaire to business and IT managers amongst the IT consultancy’s clients. The second survey invited international members of professional interest groups to complete a web-based questionnaire. The responses from the surveys were analyzed using partial-least-squares modeling and linear regression. The data analysis correlated process maturity of the IT function and the likelihood of agility in existing information systems. The thesis claims to generalize the survey findings to other large organizations in OECD countries. The thesis offers an agility-capability model for the IT function, which extends IS research with a theory that explains and predicts agility in existing information systems. A further contribution is to improve IT industry ‘best practice’ frameworks by prescribing capabilities to develop.
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ItemThe use of online social networking for higher education from an activity theory perspective(National Taiwan University, 2010-12-01)
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ItemPruned query evaluation using pre-computed impacts(ACM, 2006-01-01)
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ItemLoad balancing for term-distributed parallel retrieval(ACM, 2006-01-01)
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ItemPrecision-at-ten considered redundant(ACM, 2008-12-15)
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ItemSimilarity search: A matching based approach(ACM Press, 2006)
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