Higher Order Thinking through ICT: What do middle years teachers think really matters?

The middle years of schooling has emerged as an important focus in Australian education. Student disengagement and alienation, the negative effects of non-completion of the senior years of schooling and underachievement have raised concerns about the quality of education during the middle years. For many schools, reshaping the middle years has involved incorporating Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to motivate students. However, simultaneously there is a need to ensure that programs are academically rigorous. There is little doubt that there are potential benefits to integrating ICT into programs for middle years’ students. However, little is known about how middle years’ teachers perceive higher order thinking, which is a component of academic rigour. This paper investigates the question of What are teachers’ perceptions of higher order thinking in an ICT environment? The study is underpinned by socio-cultural theory which is based on the belief that learning occurs through social interaction and that individuals are shaped by the social and cultural tools and instruments they engage with. This investigation used a collective case study design. Two methods were used for data collection. These methods are semi-structured interviews with individual teachers and a class and a focus group discussion with teachers. Findings indicate that teachers hold various perceptions of higher order thinking that lead to productive approaches to integrating ICT in middle years’ classrooms. The paper highlights that there may be a continuum of perceptions of higher order thinking with ICT. This continuum may inform professional developers who are guiding and supporting teachers to integrate ICT into middle years’ classrooms.

Discussions in space

In-place digital augmentation enhances the experience of physical spaces through digital technologies that are directly accessible within that space. This can take place in many forms and ways, e.g., through location-aware applications running on the individuals’ portable devices, such as smart phones, or through large static devices, such as public displays, which are located within the augmented space and accessible by everyone. The hypothesis of this study is that in-place digital augmentation, in the context of civic participation, where citizens collaboratively aim at making their community or city a better place, offers significant new benefits, because it allows access to services or information that are currently inaccessible to urban dwellers where and when they are needed: in place. This paper describes our work in progress deploying a public screen to promote civic issues in public, urban spaces, and to encourage public feedback and discourse via mobile phones.

Modeling web search : preliminary results

This paper reports preliminary results from a study modeling the interplay between multitasking, cognitive coordination, and cognitive shifts during Web search. Study participants conducted three Web searches on personal information problems. Data collection techniques included pre- and post-search questionnaires; think-aloud protocols, Web search logs, observation, and post-search interviews. Key findings include: (1) users Web searches included multitasking, cognitive shifting and cognitive coordination processes, (2) cognitive coordination is the hinge linking multitasking and cognitive shifting that enables Web search construction, (3) cognitive shift levels determine the process of cognitive coordination, and (4) cognitive coordination is interplay of task, mechanism and strategy levels that underpin multitasking and task switching. An initial model depicts the interplay between multitasking, cognitive coordination, and cognitive shifts during Web search. Implications of the findings and further research are also discussed.

Key organizational elements for effective information and knowledge management

Effective information and knowledge management (IKM) is critical to corporate success; yet, its actual establishment and management is not yet fully understood. We identify ten organizational elements that need to be addressed to ensure the effective implementation and maintenance of information and knowledge management within organizations. We define these elements and provide key characterizations. We then discuss a case study that describes the implementation of an information system (designed to support IKM) in a medical supplies organization. We apply the framework of organizational elements in our analysis to uncover the enablers and barriers in this systems implementation project. Our analysis suggests that taking the ten organizational elements into consideration when implementing information systems will assist practitioners in managing information and knowledge processes more effectively and efficiently. We discuss implications for future research.

A pilot test on the differences between domestic and international students’ perceptions towards online learning in a Malaysian institution (Part I)

Teaching to an international audience online can be significantly different as compared to a traditional classroom setting. In a traditional classroom setting, the students are usually removed from their own cultural context and required to operate in the lecturer’s context. International students coming to Malaysia to study are implicitly expected to, and often do, become familiar with the Malaysian culture and style of education. The use of educational technologies as a blended strategy in higher education programs offers challenges and opportunities for all students but this may be different for international students who come from varied backgrounds. With an increasingly competitive global demand for higher education, Malaysian institutions strive to be the hub of educational excellence and a preferred option for international students in coping with the challenges of studying abroad in a different culture. This research will evaluate how undergraduate students perceive their online learning experiences in a Malaysian university. The OLES (Online Learning Environment Survey) will be used to explore the international and domestic students’ perception on e-learning and the findings of the first six OLES scales varying from (Computer Usage, Teacher Support, Student Interaction & Collaboration, Personal Relevance, Authentic Learning, and Student Autonomy) will be reported in this research. An in-depth study will be conducted to compare and contrast the challenges of international students with domestic students. Major difficulties encountered and how these students actually cope with e-learning, as well as the strategies and tools used to overcome the challenges will be investigated.

Sampling perceptions; testing reality : an evidence-based approach to measurably improve information literacy and student research skills

Do commencing students possess the level of information literacy (IL) knowledge and skills they need to succeed at university? What impact does embedding IL within the engineering and design curriculum have? This paper reports on the self-perception versus the reality of IL knowledge and skills, across a large cohort of first year built environment and engineering students. Acting on the findings of this evaluation, the authors (a team of academic librarians) developed an intensive IL skills program which was integrated into a faculty wide unit. Perceptions, knowledge and skills were re-evaluated at the end of the semester to determine if embedded IL education made a difference. Findings reveal that both the perception and reality of IL skills were significantly and measurably improved.

Examining the use of bid information in predicting the contractor’s performance

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the use of bid information, including both price and non-price factors in predicting the bidder’s performance. Design/methodology/approach – The practice of the industry was first reviewed. Data on bid evaluation and performance records of the successful bids were then obtained from the Hong Kong Housing Department, the largest housing provider in Hong Kong. This was followed by the development of a radial basis function (RBF) neural network based performance prediction model. Findings – It is found that public clients are more conscientious and include non-price factors in their bid evaluation equations. With the input variables used the information is available at the time of the bid and the output variable is the project performance score recorded during work in progress achieved by the successful bidder. It was found that past project performance score is the most sensitive input variable in predicting future performance. Research limitations/implications – The paper shows the inadequacy of using price alone for bid award criterion. The need for a systemic performance evaluation is also highlighted, as this information is highly instrumental for subsequent bid evaluations. The caveat for this study is that the prediction model was developed based on data obtained from one single source. Originality/value – The value of the paper is in the use of an RBF neural network as the prediction tool because it can model non-linear function. This capability avoids tedious ‘‘trial and error’’ in deciding the number of hidden layers to be used in the network model. Keywords Hong Kong, Construction industry, Neural nets, Modelling, Bid offer spreads Paper type Research paper

Information enrichment for quality recommender systems

The explosive growth of the World-Wide-Web and the emergence of ecommerce are the major two factors that have led to the development of recommender systems (Resnick and Varian, 1997). The main task of recommender systems is to learn from users and recommend items (e.g. information, products or books) that match the users’ personal preferences. Recommender systems have been an active research area for more than a decade. Many different techniques and systems with distinct strengths have been developed to generate better quality recommendations. One of the main factors that affect recommenders’ recommendation quality is the amount of information resources that are available to the recommenders. The main feature of the recommender systems is their ability to make personalised recommendations for different individuals. However, for many ecommerce sites, it is difficult for them to obtain sufficient knowledge about their users. Hence, the recommendations they provided to their users are often poor and not personalised. This information insufficiency problem is commonly referred to as the cold-start problem. Most existing research on recommender systems focus on developing techniques to better utilise the available information resources to achieve better recommendation quality. However, while the amount of available data and information remains insufficient, these techniques can only provide limited improvements to the overall recommendation quality. In this thesis, a novel and intuitive approach towards improving recommendation quality and alleviating the cold-start problem is attempted. This approach is enriching the information resources. It can be easily observed that when there is sufficient information and knowledge base to support recommendation making, even the simplest recommender systems can outperform the sophisticated ones with limited information resources. Two possible strategies are suggested in this thesis to achieve the proposed information enrichment for recommenders: • The first strategy suggests that information resources can be enriched by considering other information or data facets. Specifically, a taxonomy-based recommender, Hybrid Taxonomy Recommender (HTR), is presented in this thesis. HTR exploits the relationship between users’ taxonomic preferences and item preferences from the combination of the widely available product taxonomic information and the existing user rating data, and it then utilises this taxonomic preference to item preference relation to generate high quality recommendations. • The second strategy suggests that information resources can be enriched simply by obtaining information resources from other parties. In this thesis, a distributed recommender framework, Ecommerce-oriented Distributed Recommender System (EDRS), is proposed. The proposed EDRS allows multiple recommenders from different parties (i.e. organisations or ecommerce sites) to share recommendations and information resources with each other in order to improve their recommendation quality. Based on the results obtained from the experiments conducted in this thesis, the proposed systems and techniques have achieved great improvement in both making quality recommendations and alleviating the cold-start problem.

A Proposed Framework for Understanding Information Security Culture and Practices in the Saudi Context

An examination of Information Security (IS) and Information Security Management (ISM) research in Saudi Arabia has shown the need for more rigorous studies focusing on the implementation and adoption processes involved with IS culture and practices. Overall, there is a lack of academic and professional literature about ISM and more specifically IS culture in Saudi Arabia. Therefore, the overall aim of this paper is to identify issues and factors that assist the implementation and the adoption of IS culture and practices within the Saudi environment. The goal of this paper is to identify the important conditions for creating an information security culture in Saudi Arabian organizations. We plan to use this framework to investigate whether security culture has emerged into practices in Saudi Arabian organizations.

Information security culture : a behaviour compliance conceptual framework

Understanding the complex dynamic and uncertain characteristics of organisational employees who perform authorised or unauthorised information security activities is deemed to be a very important and challenging task. This paper presents a conceptual framework for classifying and organising the characteristics of organisational subjects involved in these information security practices. Our framework expands the traditional Human Behaviour and the Social Environment perspectives used in social work by identifying how knowledge, skills and individual preferences work to influence individual and group practices with respect to information security management. The classification of concepts and characteristics in the framework arises from a review of recent literature and is underpinned by theoretical models that explain these concepts and characteristics. Further, based upon an exploratory study of three case organisations in Saudi Arabia involving extensive interviews with senior managers, department managers, IT managers, information security officers, and IT staff; this article describes observed information security practices and identifies several factors which appear to be particularly important in influencing information security behaviour. These factors include values associated with national and organisational culture and how they manifest in practice, and activities related to information security management.

Mining Negative Relevance Feedback for Information Filtering

It is a big challenge to clearly identify the boundary between positive and negative streams. Several attempts have used negative feedback to solve this challenge; however, there are two issues for using negative relevance feedback to improve the effectiveness of information filtering. The first one is how to select constructive negative samples in order to reduce the space of negative documents. The second issue is how to decide noisy extracted features that should be updated based on the selected negative samples. This paper proposes a pattern mining based approach to select some offenders from the negative documents, where an offender can be used to reduce the side effects of noisy features. It also classifies extracted features (i.e., terms) into three categories: positive specific terms, general terms, and negative specific terms. In this way, multiple revising strategies can be used to update extracted features. An iterative learning algorithm is also proposed to implement this approach on RCV1, and substantial experiments show that the proposed approach achieves encouraging performance.

An effective model of using negative relevance feedback for information filtering

Over the years, people have often held the hypothesis that negative feedback should be very useful for largely improving the performance of information filtering systems; however, we have not obtained very effective models to support this hypothesis. This paper, proposes an effective model that use negative relevance feedback based on a pattern mining approach to improve extracted features. This study focuses on two main issues of using negative relevance feedback: the selection of constructive negative examples to reduce the space of negative examples; and the revision of existing features based on the selected negative examples. The former selects some offender documents, where offender documents are negative documents that are most likely to be classified in the positive group. The later groups the extracted features into three groups: the positive specific category, general category and negative specific category to easily update the weight. An iterative algorithm is also proposed to implement this approach on RCV1 data collections, and substantial experiments show that the proposed approach achieves encouraging performance.

Improving the Traversal of Large Hierarchical Process Repositories

Business Process Management (BPM) has increased in popularity and maturity in recent years. Large enterprises engage use process management approaches to model, manage and refine repositories of process models that detail the whole enterprise. These process models can run to the thousands in number, and may contain large hierarchies of tasks and control structures that become cumbersome to maintain. Tools are therefore needed to effectively traverse this process model space in an efficient manner, otherwise the repositories remain hard to use, and thus are lowered in their effectiveness. In this paper we analyse a range of BPM tools for their effectiveness in handling large process models. We establish that the present set of commercial tools is lacking in key areas regarding visualisation of, and interaction with, large process models. We then present six tool functionalities for the development of advanced business process visualisation and interaction, presenting a design for a tool that will exploit the latest advances in 2D and 3D computer graphics to enable fast and efficient search, traversal and modification of process models.

International students using online information resources to learn

This qualitative study views international students as information-using learners, through an information literacy lens. Focusing on the experiences of 25 international students at two Australian universities, the study investigates how international students use online information resources to learn, and identifies associated information literacy learning needs. An expanded critical incident approach provided the methodological framework for the study. Building on critical incident technique, this approach integrated a variety of concepts and research strategies. The investigation centred on real-life critical incidents experienced by the international students whilst using online resources for assignment purposes. Data collection involved semi-structured interviews and an observed online resource-using task. Inductive data analysis and interpretation enabled the creation of a multifaceted word picture of international students using online resources and a set of critical findings about their information literacy learning needs. The study’s key findings reveal: • the complexity of the international students’ experience of using online information resources to learn, which involves an interplay of their interactions with online resources, their affective and reflective responses to using them, and the cultural and linguistic dimensions of their information use. • the array of strengths as well as challenges that the international students experience in their information use and learning. • an apparent information literacy imbalance between the international students’ more developed information skills and less developed critical and strategic approaches to using information • the need for enhanced information literacy education that responds to international students’ identified information literacy needs. Responding to the findings, the study proposes an inclusive informed learning approach to support reflective information use and inclusive information literacy learning in culturally diverse higher education environments.

The self-Googling phenomenon : investigating the performance of personalized information resources

This paper investigates self–Googling through the monitoring of search engine activities of users and adds to the few quantitative studies on this topic already in existence. We explore this phenomenon by answering the following questions: To what extent is the self–Googling visible in the usage of search engines; is any significant difference measurable between queries related to self–Googling and generic search queries; to what extent do self–Googling search requests match the selected personalised Web pages? To address these questions we explore the theory of narcissism in order to help define self–Googling and present the results from a 14–month online experiment using Google search engine usage data.