The influence of social communications networks on intentions to purchase on the web

Despite the increased offering of online communication channels to support web-based retail systems, there is limited marketing research that investigates how these channels act singly, or in combination with offline channels, to influence an individual's intention to purchase online. If the marketer's strategy is to encourage online transactions, this requires a focus on consumer acceptance of the web-based transaction technology, rather than the purchase of the products per se. The exploratory study reported in this paper examines normative influences from referent groups in an individual's on and offline social communication networks that might affect their intention to use online transaction facilities. The findings suggest that for non-adopters, there is no normative influence from referents in either network. For adopters, one online and one offline referent norm positively influenced this group's intentions to use online transaction facilities. The implications of these findings are discussed together with future research directions.

An innovative use of the web to build graduate team skills

Successful graduates in today's competitive business environments must possess sound interpersonal skills and the ability to work effectively in team situations within, and across, disciplines. However, developing these skills within the higher education curriculum is fraught with organisational and pedagogical difficulties, with many teachers not having the skills, time or resources to facilitate productive group processes. Furthermore, many students find their teamwork experiences frustrating, demanding, conflict-ridden and unproductive. This paper brings together the perspectives and experiences of an engineer and a social scientist in a cross-disciplinary examination of the characteristics of effective teamwork skills and processes. A focus is the development and operation of 'TeamWorker', an innovative online system that helps students and staff manage their team activities and assessment. TeamWorker was created to enhance team teaching and learning processes and outcomes including team creation, administration, development and evaluation. Importantly, TeamWorker can facilitate the early identification of problematic group dynamics, thereby enabling early intervention.

A community leadership web site project: Sustainability and other issues

This paper reports on an ongoing partnership between Queensland University of Technology and Volunteering Queensland regarding the development and revision of a website for community leaders. The website, designed in late 2003, was established to provide a range of learning activities for community leaders including a problem based learning activity, case studies of community leaders and a range of resources deemed significant for leaders in the community. To date, anecdotal evidence as well as some more hard evidence (i.e. number of visits to the site), indicates that the site appears to be a valuable resource for community leaders. The purpose of this paper was firstly to investigate the utility of the site and secondly to consider some bigger issues concerning its sustainability. To achieve this, the paper explores the perceptions of (i) a group of community leaders regarding the strengths and weaknesses of the site; and (ii) key stakeholders (from QUT and Volunteering Queensland) who participated in a focus group discussion to consider important issues relating to its management and sustainability. Themes emerging from the two groups are provided and implications for small scale partnership projects such as this one are discussed.

Towards more personalized web: Extraction and integration of dynamic content from the Web

Information and content integration are believed to be a possible solution to the problem of information overload in the Internet. The article is an overview of a simple solution for integration of information and content on the Web. Previous approaches to content extraction and integration are discussed, followed by introduction of a novel technology to deal with the problems, based on XML processing. The article includes lessons learned from solving issues of changing webpage layout, incompatibility with HTML standards and multiplicity of the results returned. The method adopting relative XPath queries over DOM tree proves to be more robust than previous approaches to Web information integration. Furthermore, the prototype implementation demonstrates the simplicity that enables non-professional users to easily adopt this approach in their day-to-day information management routines.

Building learning communities to support beginning teachers use of technology

This paper reports on the early stages of a three year study that is investigating the impact of a technology-enriched teacher education program on beginning teachers' integration of computers, graphics calculators, and the internet into secondary school mathematics classrooms. Whereas much of the existing research on the role of technology in mathematics learning has been concerned with effects on curriculum content or student learning, less attention has been given to the relationship between technology use and issues of pedagogy, in particular the impact on teachers' professional learning in the context of specific classroom and school environments. Our research applies sociocultural theories of learning to consider how beginning teachers are initiated into a collaborative professional community featuring both web-based and face to face interaction, and how participation in such a community shapes their pedagogical beliefs and practices. The aim of this paper is to analyse processes through which the emerging community was established and sustained during the first year of the study. We examine features of this community in terms of identity formation, shifts in values and beliefs, and interaction patterns revealed in bulletin board discussion between students and lecturers.

'Worldmarks': Web guidelines for socially and culturally responsive assessment in university classrooms

In the early 21st century, we need to prepare university students to navigate local and global cultures effectively and sensitively. These future professionals must develop comprehensive intercultural communication skills and understanding. Yet university assessment in Australia is often based on a western template of knowledge, which automatically places International, Indigenous, as well as certain groups of local students at a study disadvantage. It also ensures that Australian students from dominant groups are not given the opportunity to develop these vital intercultural skills. This paper explores the issues embedded in themes 1 and 4 of this conference and provides details of an innovative website developed at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, which encourages academic staff to investigate the hidden assumptions that can underpin their assessment practices. The website also suggests strategies academics can use to ensure that their assessment becomes more socially and culturally responsive.

Investigating Concept Mapping and Stimulated Recall to Reveal Academic Teacher Beliefs and how they are enacted through learning designs for the Web

Increasingly, academic teachers are designing their own web sites to add value to or replace other forms of university teaching. These web sites are tangible and dynamic constructions that represent the teachers thinking and decisions derived from an implicit belief system about teaching and learning. The emphasis of this study is to explore the potential of the research techniques of concept-mapping and stimulated recall to locate the implicit pedagogies of academic teachers and investigate how they are enacted through the learning designs of their web sites. The rationale behind such an investigation is that once these implicit belief systems are made visible, then conversations can commence about how these beliefs are transformed into practice, providing a potent departure point for academic development.

The science and technology of corpus, and corpus for science and technology

Corpus Linguistics is a young discipline. The earliest work was done in the 1960s, but corpora only began to be widely used by lexicographers and linguists in the late 1980s, by language teachers in the late 1990s, and by language students only very recently. This course in corpus linguistics was held at the Departamento de Linguistica Aplicada, E.T.S.I. de Minas, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid from June 15-19 1998. About 45 teachers registered for the course. 30% had PhDs in linguistics, 20% in literature, and the rest were doctorandi or qualified English teachers. The course was designed to introduce the use of corpora and other computational resources in teaching and research, with special reference to scientific and technological discourse in English. Each participant had a computer networked with the lecturer’s machine, whose display could be projected onto a large screen. Application programs were loaded onto the central server, and telnet and a web browser were available. COBUILD gave us permission to access the 323 million word Bank of English corpus, Mike Scott allowed us to use his Wordsmith Tools software, and Tim Johns gave us a copy of his MicroConcord program.

An assessment of the learning benefits of using a web-based learning environment when teaching accounting

The impact and use of information and communication technology on learning outcomes for accounting students is not well understood. This study investigates the impact of design features of Blackboard 1 used as aWeb-based Learning Environment (WBLE) in teaching undergraduate accounting students. Specifically, this investigation reports on a number of Blackboard design features (e.g. delivery of lecture notes, announcements, online assessment and model answers) used to deliver learning materials regarded as necessary to enhance learning outcomes. Responses from 369 on-campus students provided data to develop a regression model that seeks to explain enhanced participation and mental effort. The final regression shows that student satisfaction with the use of a WBLE is associated with five design features or variables. These include usefulness and availability of lecture notes, online assessment, model answers, and online chat.

People, technology, processes and risk knowledge sharing

The present global economic crisis creates doubts about the good use of accumulated experience and knowledge in managing risk in financial services. Typically, risk management practice does not use knowledge management (KM) to improve and to develop new answers to the threats. A key reason is that it is not clear how to break down the “organizational silos” view of risk management (RM) that is commonly taken. As a result, there has been relatively little work on finding the relationships between RM and KM. We have been doing research for the last couple of years on the identification of relationships between these two disciplines. At ECKM 2007 we presented a general review of the literature(s) and some hypotheses for starting research on KM and its relationship to the perceived value of enterprise risk management. This article presents findings based on our preliminary analyses, concentrating on those factors affecting the perceived quality of risk knowledge sharing. These come from a questionnaire survey of RM employees in organisations in the financial services sector, which yielded 121 responses. We have included five explanatory variables for the perceived quality of risk knowledge sharing. These comprised two variables relating to people (organizational capacity for work coordination and perceived quality of communication among groups), one relating to process (perceived quality of risk control) and two related to technology (web channel functionality and RM information system functionality). Our findings so far are that four of these five variables have a significant positive association with the perceived quality of risk knowledge sharing: contrary to expectations, web channel functionality did not have a significant association. Indeed, in some of our exploratory regression studies its coefficient (although not significant) was negative. In stepwise regression, the variable organizational capacity for work coordination accounted for by far the largest part of the variation in the dependent variable perceived quality of risk knowledge sharing. The “people” variables thus appear to have the greatest influence on the perceived quality of risk knowledge sharing, even in a sector that relies heavily on technology and on quantitative approaches to decision making. We have also found similar results with the dependent variable perceived value of Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) implementation.

Feature LDA:a supervised topic model for automatic detection of web API documentations from the web

Web APIs have gained increasing popularity in recent Web service technology development owing to its simplicity of technology stack and the proliferation of mashups. However, efficiently discovering Web APIs and the relevant documentations on the Web is still a challenging task even with the best resources available on the Web. In this paper we cast the problem of detecting the Web API documentations as a text classification problem of classifying a given Web page as Web API associated or not. We propose a supervised generative topic model called feature latent Dirichlet allocation (feaLDA) which offers a generic probabilistic framework for automatic detection of Web APIs. feaLDA not only captures the correspondence between data and the associated class labels, but also provides a mechanism for incorporating side information such as labelled features automatically learned from data that can effectively help improving classification performance. Extensive experiments on our Web APIs documentation dataset shows that the feaLDA model outperforms three strong supervised baselines including naive Bayes, support vector machines, and the maximum entropy model, by over 3% in classification accuracy. In addition, feaLDA also gives superior performance when compared against other existing supervised topic models.

Is question answering fit for the semantic web? A survey

With the recent rapid growth of the Semantic Web (SW), the processes of searching and querying content that is both massive in scale and heterogeneous have become increasingly challenging. User-friendly interfaces, which can support end users in querying and exploring this novel and diverse, structured information space, are needed to make the vision of the SW a reality. We present a survey on ontology-based Question Answering (QA), which has emerged in recent years to exploit the opportunities offered by structured semantic information on the Web. First, we provide a comprehensive perspective by analyzing the general background and history of the QA research field, from influential works from the artificial intelligence and database communities developed in the 70s and later decades, through open domain QA stimulated by the QA track in TREC since 1999, to the latest commercial semantic QA solutions, before tacking the current state of the art in open user-friendly interfaces for the SW. Second, we examine the potential of this technology to go beyond the current state of the art to support end-users in reusing and querying the SW content. We conclude our review with an outlook for this novel research area, focusing in particular on the R&D directions that need to be pursued to realize the goal of efficient and competent retrieval and integration of answers from large scale, heterogeneous, and continuously evolving semantic sources.

AquaLog : an ontology-driven question answering system to interface the semantic web

The semantic web (SW) vision is one in which rich, ontology-based semantic markup will become widely available. The availability of semantic markup on the web opens the way to novel, sophisticated forms of question answering. AquaLog is a portable question-answering system which takes queries expressed in natural language (NL) and an ontology as input, and returns answers drawn from one or more knowledge bases (KB). AquaLog presents an elegant solution in which different strategies are combined together in a novel way. AquaLog novel ontology-based relation similarity service makes sense of user queries.