8 research outputs found

    A model for the measurement and presentation of participation awareness in online groupware systems

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    The need to support effective group work in online environments has become a prominent issue in both education and enterprise. Universities continue to adopt constructivist-based learning strategies which see learners engage in group work to build knowledge, coupled with an increase in online and distance learners. In enterprise, where group or team based work is commonplace, the prevalence of the Internet has seen the emergence of teams that collaborate wholly or partially online. In response to this emergent need, groupware, software used to support online group work, has become widely used in both education and enterprise. Although based upon sound pedagogical principles, the use of groupware does not always meet expectations or compare favourably to face-to-face collaboration. The literature has identified the issue of awareness, defined by Dourish and Bellotti (1992, p. 107) as “an understanding of the activities of others, which provides a context for your own activity”, as a core factor in the effectiveness of groupware. Numerous awareness mechanisms have been developed and implemented into groupware applications, aiming to replace the information that is implicit in face-to-face collaboration, but largely absent in online environments. This study defined and modelled a new form of awareness named ‘participation awareness’, which aggregates and processes activity in a groupware environment in order to present a persistent display of group member participation. A field study was conducted, wherein university students utilised a groupware application named GroupShare to support group work required in their studies. GroupShare contained an implementation of a participation awareness mechanism, and participating students completed pre and post-usage questionnaires primarily concerning group work and the participation awareness mechanism. Further survey and observational techniques were also utilised to gather data. Two iterations of the field study were conducted, each running for one semester. Analysis of the data found that the participation awareness mechanism was well received, eliciting largely positive responses from a range of participant demographics, group dynamics and group work scenarios. Participant feedback was utilised to define and refine the constituents of participation awareness and create a generic model for its implementation as an awareness mechanism. The model outlines the steps and considerations required to capture and process activity within a groupware environment, and establishes three complimentary methods of presenting participation awareness. The author feels that the research was successful in creating and justifying a model of participation awareness which can be implemented in groupware environments and utilised in further research

    Teaching PHP with security in mind

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    The PHP server-side scripting language has found significant popularity due to its accessibility, simplicity and affordability. With the deployment of PHP-inclusive web development environments becoming easier, universities have begun to offer units of study in the language. However, students coming from a background of HTML-based web development will often not be adequately prepared to consider the security implications associated with a powerful scripting language. It is important that students are taught to recognise and respond to the security implications of their code from an early stage, as a matter of good programming practice. This paper demonstrates how security teachings can be implemented throughout a PHP-based web development unit, and details four pertinent PHP security issues which can and should be addressed in such a unit

    GeoIntelligence: Data Mining Locational Social Media Content for Profiling and Information Gathering

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    The current social media landscape has resulted in a situation where people are encouraged to share a greater amount of information about their day-to-day lives than ever before. In this environment a large amount of personal data is disclosed in a public forum with little to no regard for the potential privacy impacts. This paper focuses on the presence of geographic data within images, metadata and individual postings. The GeoIntelligence project aims to aggregate this information to educate users on the possible implications of the utilisation of these services as well as providing service to law enforcement and business. This paper demonstrates the ability to profile users on an individual and group basis from data posted openly to social networking services

    The 2017 homograph browser attack mitigation survey

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    Since their inception, International Domain Names (IDN) have allowed for non-Latin characters to be entered into domain names. This feature has led to attackers forging malicious domains which appear identical to the Latin counterpart. This is achieved through using non-Latin characters which appear identical to their Latin counterpart. This attack is referred to as a Homograph attack. This research continues the work of Hannay and Bolan (2009), and Hannay and Baatard (2012), which assessed the mitigation methods incorporated by web browsers in mitigating IDN homograph attacks. Since these works, time IDN mitigation algorithms have been altered, such as the one used in Mozilla Firefox (Gerv, 2017). This study evaluates browser homograph attack mitigation strategies in browsers released post-2011. In this study, we find a high level of effective multi-script mitigation across the browser families surveyed. Notable exceptions to this include a single version of Firefox in which the mitigation features were not present and ongoing omission of mitigation against single script attacks

    Evaluating the impact of peer review and participation awareness in an online collaborative document authoring environment

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    Online Learning Environments (OLEs) have been widely adopted by higher education facilities, offering distance education with the potential to support the social and collaborative aspects deemed crucial to modern constructivist pedagogy. Groupware, a form of software which aims to facilitate group work, has been the subject of much research, from both educational and enterprise perspectives. This research introduced Reportal, an online groupware system designed to facilitate the collaborative authoring of a document. Reportal\u27s peer review and participation awareness features were the focus of this research, and their impact was measured against the elements of online collaboration, a typology established by the author which reflects the factors that the literature has defined as being influential to effective online collaboration. The findings from a multiple case study of university students using the Reportal system indicate that peer review and participation awareness features in groupware have distinct positive impacts on the elements of online collaboration. While the research was a preliminary investigation, such findings are a first step in distinguishing, refining and implementing groupware features which support collaboration in an online environment. Implementation of such features has the potential to increase the effectiveness of online collaboration in education and enterprise significantly

    Teaching PHP with security in mind

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    The PHP server-side scripting language has found significant popularity due to its accessibility, simplicity and affordability. With the deployment of PHP-inclusive web development environments becoming easier, universities have begun to offer units of study in the language. However, students coming from a background of HTML-based web development will often not be adequately prepared to consider the security implications associated with a powerful scripting language. It is important that students are taught to recognise and respond to the security implications of their code from an early stage, as a matter of good programming practice. This paper demonstrates how security teachings can be implemented throughout a PHP-based web development unit, and details four pertinent PHP security issues which can and should be addressed in such a unit
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