Exploring Social Media Affordances in Natural Disaster: Case Study of 2015 Myanmar Flood

Consumers’ willingness to disclose and allow electronic storage of their personal health information (PHI) is critical to the successful digitization of healthcare. However, concern about privacy and potentially negative consequences of privacy loss (e.g., loss of jobs) can discourage PHI disclosure by consumers. It is thus imperative to identify and address key roadblocks from the perspective of consumers that may impede the progress of developing countries in digitizing healthcare. Toward this end, this research-in-progress integrates the privacy calculus model with procedural justice to investigate the willingness of individuals in developing countries to disclose PHI in order to receive care in contexts where the disclosed PHI is stored and used electronically. A comprehensive model is proposed to explain the determinants of consumer PHI privacy concerns and willingness to disclose PHI. We will test the proposed model using the survey method. Several theoretical contributions expected from the study are provided

Bridging research and practice: Implementing and sustaining knowledge building in Hong Kong classrooms

Despite major theoretical progress in computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL), relatively less attention has been paid to the problem of how research advances may impact schools and classrooms. Given the global changes and educational policies for twenty-first century education, issues of how research in CSCL can be integrated with classroom practice for innovation pose important challenges. This paper draws on experiences in Hong Kong and examines research-based CSCL classroom innovations in the context of scaling up and sustaining a knowledge-building model in Hong Kong classrooms. It begins with an examination of the rationale for CSCL research in classrooms and then considers a range of problems and constraints for school implementation. Classroom innovations involve complex and emergent changes occurring at different levels of the educational system. The experience of CSCL knowledge-building classroom innovations in Hong Kong schools is reported, including: the macro-context of educational policies and educational reform, the meso-context of a knowledge-building teacher network, and the micro-context of knowledge-building design in classrooms. Three interacting themes-context and systemic change, capacity and community building, and innovation as inquiry-are proposed for examining collaboration and knowledge creation for classroom innovation. © 2011 The Author(s).published_or_final_versionSpringer Open Choice, 21 Feb 201

Learning through techno-human entwinement: Implications for the adoption of technologies drawn from agricultural and ICT interventions in the Philippines

In developing countries, such as the Philippines, there is great concern among educational, government and non-government organizations regarding the implementation of agricultural technologies delivered through Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), at both regional and national levels. While these types of introduced technologies are discussed in the literature of organizational practice, they are largely absent in studies of management and informal education. This study seeks to address this paucity by investigating the entwinement (i.e. process of interweaving) of humans and this type of introduced technologies through the theoretical perspectives of sociomateriality (i.e. interweaving of human and technologies) and sensemaking (i.e. giving meaning to experience). More specifically, it examines how farmers learn through a process of interweaving with one specific intervention – use of ICT to learn agricultural technologies. Using the theoretical perspective of sociomateriality (Orlikowski, 2008; Leonardi, 2012) to examine farmers’ views on the affordances of interventions, this study illustrates how their learning is bound up in an ever-deepening entwinement with the technology through which it is delivered. In addition, this study investigates the processes, which lead to its adoption, through the perspective of sensemaking (Weick, 2005). Conducted as an ethnographic case study, this research draws on observations of farmers’ practices for over four months in two Farmers Information and Technology Services (FITS) centres in Region XI, in the Philippines. These centres aimed to deliver agricultural technologies through ICT. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews, observations, and document analysis. Participants included 32 farmers, two FITS managers, an instructional designer, five FITS/village staff members, a farmer scientist, and three community and farmer group leaders. As to the findings related to the possibility of an action to an object, it indicates that participant’s perspectives can be grouped in three distinct ways namely: as a bundle of technical features inherent in the properties of technological tools (e.g., sending email, viewing diseases), as design features of the services provided and as relations between these features. These perspectives appear to build on one another, resulting in ongoing improvement and the emergence of new technologies, routines, affordances, and the altered perception of new constraints. This expansion of perception results in a shift from individual to group affordances. Through the perspective of sensemaking (Weick, 2005), this study identifies two types of sensemakers among the farmers: minimal sensemakers and reflective sensemakers. It also reveals two new influences, previously unrecognized in the literature which resulted to limited sensemaking: a) external affordances (e.g., subsidies) and b) the emergence of a cultural trait, “gaya-gaya” (i.e. imitation). Moreover, these results further illustrate how the sensemaking process is made visible when viewed from a sociomaterial perspective. Using the assumptions of the sociomaterial perspective that learning is made visible in practice, this study found that participants progressed through three stages, namely: figuring, configuring and reconfiguring. Findings indicate that during ‘figuring’, the farmers engaged in various learning processes by observing others and engaging in verbal exchanges (e.g., linking new abstract ideas with material objects, organizing ideas, and verbal referencing). In ‘configuring’, farmers learned by experimentation, storytelling, group learning and the integration of sociomaterial objects in farming routines. During ‘reconfiguring’, farmers engaged in experimentation that focused on the creation of new knowledge and understanding, and the manipulation of new artefacts. The findings of this study are vital for understanding how an individual’s perspectives, sensemaking and ways of learning lead to adoption. It contributes to the literature new insights into the process of entwinement between individuals and interventions using the perspectives of sociomateriality and sensemaking in the context of informal education in a developing country

Social Media, Institutional Innovation and Affordances: The Case of Free Lunch for Children in China

This paper presents an interpretivist case study of an NGO innovation in China based on the Chinese twitter-like microblogging platform Weibo. We investigate the performativity of social media in generating innovative sociomaterial practices of an NGO campaign, embedded in a context where civil society is under-developed and politically restricted. We propose a situated perspective of technological affordances, and through the collective action model, explicitly take into account the enactment of, and potential changes to, institutional arrangements. Such an approach moves beyond the individual level of analysis both in ICT affordance studies and the institutional entrepreneurship, and considers technological affordances as relational to human agency as well as institutional constraints and opportunities. The paper generates theoretical and practical implications in understanding the role of social media in social transformation

When Environment Matters: Inter-Organizational Effects on Sociomaterial Imbrications and Change

Previous research on sociomateriality, a recently developed perspective arguing that social and material aspects acquire their properties in the process of their mutual imbrications, has mainly focused on an intra-organizational level of analysis. In this paper we investigate how the inter-organizational relations influence within-organizational processes of sociomaterial imbrications. We conducted case-study of communities of social computing developing their routines and technologies over a 16-year period in the market of Internet access providers. Our findings indicate that inter-organizational influence is an important factor shaping the processes of change in organizational routines and technologies and only partly supports the recent findings of Paul Leonardi about the perception-based nature of these changes as we evidence that this is not applicable in certain types of environments. Based on our findings we develop a process model of inter-organizational influence on sociomaterial imbrications and change and discuss its implications for theory and practice

Exploring Lebanese Teachers’ Engagement in a Low-Cost, Technology-Enhanced, Problem-Solving, Orientated Learning Intervention with Refugee Children

The research explored what learning was fostered when 41 Lebanese teachers from 21 schools engaged in a low-cost, problem-oriented, technology-enhanced situated learning intervention with refugee children to understand teacher agency in practice within challenging contexts. The research is at the intersection of pedagogy, technology, curriculum, and teacher professional development, and explored a situated teacher professional development (TPD) intervention in the context of refugee education. The low-cost technologies utilised in the intervention share similarities with those used in maker-spaces and are taught within a pedagogical process rooted in knowledge-building in the real world. The research is informed by complexity thinking, socioconstructivist, and interpretivist epistemologies and underpinned by a conceptual framework drawing on Mezirow’s transformative theory and Habermas’s (1985) communicative action around teachers’ lifeworld (subjective, objective, and social) as a shared experience. Conversations around teachers’ lifeworld draw on Laurillard’s conversational framework to help teachers design projects through experiential and discursive conversations. Qualitative data was collected through interviews and observations which were analysed thematically using Pachler et al.’s ecological sociocultural framework. The research adopted an understanding of agency as situated, temporal, and rooted in teachers’ past, present, and projected future experiences, drawing on Gidden’s structuration theory. Teacher agency in practice appeared as ecological, temporal, complex, and intertwined in dialectic relationships around emergent knowledge-building pedagogy, between collective and individual dimensions in the situated intervention, and in actions driven by moral values, in school and in the community. The research revealed that situated transformative TPD models can be used even in challenging, post-conflict contexts and may contribute to generating contextually relevant solutions

Professional learning communities in elementary schools and how technologies are utilized

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Technology Affordance and Constraint Perspectives on Social Media Use in eParticipation : A Case Study in Indonesia

Paper I-V are not available as a part of the dissertation due to the copyright.This doctoral thesis explains the role of social media within eParticipation from the perspective of politicians in the Indonesian context using the Technology Affordance and Constraints Theory (TACT) as a lens. Previous research findings into citizens’ perceptions of social media in eParticipation have been ambivalent; namely, social media can both encourage and discourage the democratic process depending on where, when, and how it is used. Furthermore, there is little understanding of the role of social media in influencing decision-making in the democratic process from the politicians’ perspective. Thus, my research is focused on gaining a more in-depth understanding of the role of social media in eParticipation from perspective of politicians through three main research questions: (1) How do politicians use social media for eParticipation purposes? (2) What are the constraints of social media use within eParticipation? and (3) What are the conditions needed for social media affordance acutalization to take place?publishedVersio