Recall differences in the reconstitution of a tour through a virtual environment

A rapidly expanding area of human geography is the study of spatial knowledge. This growth can be partly attributed to the recent emergence of user-friendly and affordable technology that allows more researchers (notably students) to design, build and use virtual environments in spatial knowledge research. The purpose of this thesis project is to explore recall differences in the reconstitution of spatial knowledge acquired by means of a tour through a virtual environment. The motivation behind this area of inquiry is the apparent assumption that the order of spatial knowledge tasks may have some effect on acquisition or recall, which is evidenced in some current research methodologies. The results show that there is no significant difference between two groups of participants with respect to the order of recall tasks; however, one group of participants performed better in almost every task, suggesting that the first recall task appears to be influencing the succeeding recall task. This study contributes to the ongoing debate regarding the recall of spatial knowledge and introduces issues of concern regarding methodological desig

Gender Differences in Virtual Collaboration on a Creative Design Task

Collaboration is an important activity in every organization because it fundamentally affects work processes and organizational outcomes. Diversity adds complexity to the mechanism of virtual teams because teams routinely operate virtually by spanning temporal, geographic, national, and cultural boundaries. One important way to decode such complexity is to understand gender differences and their impacts on virtual modes of collaboration. In this research, we examine gender differences and how they influence outcomes and attitudes on virtual collaboration in the context of team gender composition. Phase one of our study involved male-male dyads and female-female dyads that collaborated virtually in Second Life. The preliminary results show that impression management and team effort both have significant positive impacts on team outcomes (trust and satisfaction). Phase two of our study is on dyads of mixed gender

An Examination of a Theory of Embodied Social Presence in Virtual Worlds

In this article, we discuss and empirically examine the importance of embodiment, context, and spatial proximity as they pertain to collaborative interaction and task completion in virtual environments. Specifically, we introduce the embodied social presence (ESP) theory as a framework to account for a higher level of perceptual engagement that users experience as they engage in activity-based social interaction in virtual environments. The ESP theory builds on the analysis of reflection data from Second Life users to explain the process by which perceptions of ESP are realized. We proceed to describe implications of ESP for collaboration and other organizational functions

Mining for meaning: The use of unstructured textual data in information systems research

The objectives of this research are to demonstrate how text was used in (1) developing a theory to examine collaborative interaction in virtual worlds, (2) creating a framework for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of dealing with large text datasets for social network analysis, and (3) approaching an understanding of the role of meaning individuals attribute to their mobile devices

Academic E-Books: Publishers, Librarians, and Users

Academic E-Books: Publishers, Librarians, and Users provides readers with a view of the changing and emerging roles of electronic books in higher education. The three main sections contain contributions by experts in the publisher/vendor arena, as well as by librarians who report on both the challenges of offering and managing e-books and on the issues surrounding patron use of e-books. The case study section offers perspectives from seven different sizes and types of libraries whose librarians describe innovative and thought-provoking projects involving e-books. Read about perspectives on e-books from organizations as diverse as a commercial publisher and an association press. Learn about the viewpoint of a jobber. Find out about the e-book challenges facing librarians, such as the quest to control costs in the patron-driven acquisitions (PDA) model, how to solve the dilemma of resource sharing with e-books, and how to manage PDA in the consortial environment. See what patron use of e-books reveals about reading habits and disciplinary differences. Finally, in the case study section, discover how to promote scholarly e-books, how to manage an e-reader checkout program, and how one library replaced most of its print collection with e-books. These and other examples illustrate how innovative librarians use e-books to enhance users’ experiences with scholarly works.https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/purduepress_ebooks/1036/thumbnail.jp

Academic E-Books

Academic E-Books: Publishers, Librarians, and Users provides readers with a view of the changing and emerging roles of electronic books in higher education. The three main sections contain contributions by experts in the publisher/vendor arena, as well as by librarians who report on both the challenges of offering and managing e-books and on the issues surrounding patron use of e-books. The case study section offers perspectives from seven different sizes and types of libraries whose librarians describe innovative and thought-provoking projects involving e-books