Desirable ICT Graduate Attributes: Theory vs. Practice

The majority of ICT graduates must begin their careers by successfully fulfilling the requirements advertised within online recruitment sites. Although considerable research into employer requirements is commonly undertaken when preparing curricula, studies investigating how well the graduate attributes on which curricula are based match those required by employers have been limited in terms of the techniques used. This study employs an innovative approach of analyzing online ICT employment advertisements in Australia and the United States to determine the key attributes sought by ICT employers, together with the most commonly required skill groupings. A position-based wrapper system was developed to extract the advertisement data, which was then analyzed using a text mining package. The results are benchmarked against those from standard ICT curricula produced by academic and professional bodies. The findings suggest that employers place greatest emphasis upon experience and technological skills; although current curricula meet these requirements, their emphases warrant revision. There also appear to be differences between professional body curricula and the ISCC ’99 curriculum which was produced by industry and academia, with the latter appearing to match employment market demands more closely

Semiautomated text analytics for qualitative data synthesis

Approaches to synthesizing qualitative data have, to date, largely focused on integrating the findings from published reports. However, developments in text mining software offer the potential for efficient analysis of large pooled primary qualitative datasets. This case study aimed to (a) provide a step‐by‐step guide to using one software application, Leximancer, and (b) interrogate opportunities and limitations of the software for qualitative data synthesis. We applied Leximancer v4.5 to a pool of five qualitative, UK‐based studies on transportation such as walking, cycling, and driving, and displayed the findings of the automated content analysis as intertopic distance maps. Leximancer enabled us to “zoom out” to familiarize ourselves with, and gain a broad perspective of, the pooled data. It indicated which studies clustered around dominant topics such as “people.” The software also enabled us to “zoom in” to narrow the perspective to specific subgroups and lines of enquiry. For example, “people” featured in men's and women's narratives but were talked about differently, with men mentioning “kids” and “old,” whereas women mentioned “things” and “stuff.” The approach provided us with a fresh lens for the initial inductive step in the analysis process and could guide further exploration. The limitations of using Leximancer were the substantial data preparation time involved and the contextual knowledge required from the researcher to turn lines of inquiry into meaningful insights. In summary, Leximancer is a useful tool for contributing to qualitative data synthesis, facilitating comprehensive and transparent data coding but can only inform, not replace, researcher‐led interpretive work

Main gamification concepts: a systematic mapping study

Gamification involves incorporating elements of online games, such as points, leaderboards, and badges into nongame contexts, in order to improve engagement with both employees and consumers. The main point of this paper is, to sum up, what previous authors investigated in the field of Gamification. An analysis of the literature covering 50 papers from 2011 to 2016 was conducted, using Leximancer software, to determine and shape the main themes and concepts proposed in gamification papers. Answering our research question, “What guidelines may provide to future research, the key themes and concepts found in published scientific papers on gamification?”, we conclude that the researchers identified eight themes (gamification; game; use; users; business; points; engagement; learning) and twenty-eight related concepts. The present systematic review contributes to establishing possible guidelines for prospective studies, based on the analyzed papers, considering particularly their 'Conclusions' and on the 'Future research' sections, integrating game design contents in business, learning and education. Further, highlights the usefulness of Leximancer for qualitative content analysis, in this field of research.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Using language technologies to support individual formative feedback

In modern educational environments for group learning it is often challenging for tutors to provide timely individual formative feedback to learners. Taking the case of undergraduate Medicine, we have found that formative feedback is generally provided to learners on an ad-hoc basis, usually at the group, rather than individual, level. Consequently, conceptual issues for individuals often remain undetected until summative assessment. In many subject domains, learners will typically produce written materials to record their study activities. One way for tutors to diagnose conceptual development issues for an individual learner would be to analyse the contents of the learning materials they produce, which would be a significant undertaking. CONSPECT is one of six core web-based services of the Language Technologies for Lifelong Learning (LTfLL) project. This European Union Framework 7-funded project seeks to make use of Language Technologies to provide semi-automated analysis of the large quantities of text generated by learners through the course of their learning. CONSPECT aims to provide formative feedback and monitoring of learners’ conceptual development. It uses a Natural Language Processing method, based on Latent Semantic Analysis, to compare learner materials to reference models generated from reference or learning materials. This paper provides a summary of the service development alongside results from validation of Version 1.0 of the service

Computer Aided Phenomenography: The Role of Leximancer Computer Software in Phenomenographic Investigation

The qualitative research methodology of phenomenography has traditionally required a manual sorting and analysis of interview data. In this paper I explore a potential means of streamlining this procedure by considering a computer aided process not previously reported upon. Two methods of lexicological analysis, manual and automatic, were examined from a phenomenographical perspective and compared. It was found that the computer aided process - Leximancer - was a valid investigative tool for use in phenomenography. Using Leximancer was more efficacious than manual operation; the researcher was able to deal with large amounts of data without bias, identify a broader span of syntactic properties, increase reliability, and facilitate reproducibility. The introduction of a computer aided methodology might also encourage other qualitative researchers to engage with phenomenography

Towards effective knowledge application capability in ITSM through socialisation, externalisation, internalisation and combination

Prior research has focused on issues that are relevant to knowledge creation and sharing in Information Technology Service Management ITSM. Instead, the purpose of this paper is to examine how knowledge application capability effectiveness (KACE) in ITSM can be affected through several knowledge management processes. In ITSM, IT service desk function is on the most important functions that keeps and maintains IT services running. This function deals with various IT problems and incidents on a daily basis through utilisation of all available knowledge resources (i.e. organisational knowledge and personal knowledge). A framework was developed to identify factors affect KACE in IT service desk function. The framework is based on Nonaka (1994) model of organisational knowledge creation. The framework focuses upon socialisation, externalisation, internalisation and combination as contributors to the formation of KACE. The empirical research was conducted at group of eight (Go8) Universities in Australia, based on set of semi-structured interviews. Four major factors are shown to be related to the extent to which IT SD managers feel that KACE can be influenced. The results are founded upon a qualitative data in which manual and computer-aided content analysis were undertaken

Exploring Formative Feedback on Textual Assignments with the Help of Automatically Created Visual Representations

Learners, particularly lifelong learners, often find it difficult to determine the scope of their expertise. Formative feedback could help them do so. To use this feedback productively, it is essential to then suggest to them the remedial actions they need to overcome the gaps in their knowledge. This paper presents the design considerations of a support tool that aims at providing formative feedback on textual assignments. It does so by facilitating comparisons between learner’s input texts and group input texts with respect to the intended learning outcomes. Using language technologies, the tool automatically extracts the concepts and relations of input texts; it then creates visual representations that can be put side by side to identify conceptual overlaps and missing concepts. The paper first introduces the theoretical underpinnings of the tool – specifically those concerning expertise development, knowledge creation and assessment of knowledge. It then draws up design considerations and clarifies how the tool should work. Next, it discusses the results of an initial study in which word clouds and concept maps have been applied to generate graphical visual representations. These help learners identify overlapping and missing core concepts, both in individual texts and in a compiled group text. Finally, the paper provides conclusions and directions for future work

New lenses to investigate media use: The layering process perspective

Email has been recognized as one of the chief sources of the current epidemic of information overload. The work described in this paper is part of an ongoing project to re-focus the attention of information workers on “what needs to be done” rather than “what someone wants us to read”. The approach is to base a software agent that pre-processes incoming email on the user’s “personal ontology”. The ontology used in this work contained two facets, namely Work Topics and Task Types, and also included lexical “clues” whereby, if such a word or phrase is found in the text of a message, the system can infer with a certain probability that a particular ontology concept (class or instance) is relevant. The paper describes the prototype tools developed and some initial trials. Further trials and improvements are planned

Building an analysis of new venture startup with Leximancer

Leximancer is a valuable qualitative analysis tool. Analysing qualitative data requires expertise on the part of the researcher. Leximancer is a computer assisted text analysis program that examines the actual language of research participants. The software generates visual concept matrix maps that display principal concepts and themes and relationships among them. Leximancer provides a system for discovering the underlying core associations in a body of text while reducing any bias that may occur with grounded thematic coding. A study examining the startup of entrepreneurial ventures combined Leximancer and thematic analyses. The dual analysis verified major concepts and themes generated in Leximancer, thus increasing the quality of the study by providing coherence, credibility and confirmability of findings

Revisiting James March (1991): Whither Exploration and Exploitation

We revisit March’s seminal 1991 article, “Exploration and exploitation in organizational learning”, and analyze the impact it has had on scholarly thinking, providing a comprehensive and structured review of the extensive and diverse research inspired by this publication. We show that although this influence has changed significantly over the years, there are still unexplored opportunities left by this seminal work. Our approach enables us to identify promising directions for future research that reinforce the themes anchored in March’s article. In particular, we call for reconnecting current research to the behavioral roots of this article and uncovering the microfoundations of exploration and exploitation. Our analysis further identifies opportunities for integrating this framework with resource-based theories and considering how exploration and exploitation can be sourced and integrated within and across organizational boundaries. Finally, our analysis reveals prospects for extending the notions of exploration and exploitation to new domains, but we caution that such domains should be clearly delineated. We conclude with a call for further research on the antecedents of exploration and exploitation and for studying their underexplored dimensions