Staff edutainment on a corporate intranet‐lessons learned

This paper discusses the results from a case study of an intranet‐based staff education programme at the national Swedish telecommunications corporation. The programme attempts to convey the environmental benefits of telecommunication services, aiming at increased staff awareness and new business opportunities. A multidisciplinary production team packaged the factual content in a rich mixture of audio and video clips, text, images, animations, quizzes, games, tests and polls. A standard Web browser with downloadable plug‐ins is used to view the material. The self‐paced studies on the intranet are followed by a seminar, combining the advantages of individual and teacher‐assisted education. The impact of the programme has been studied partly through a questionnaire distributed to a number of users, and partly through interviews. The results show that intranet‐based ‘edutainment’ is a practicable and successful tool for organizational learning. Ease of use, interactivity, ease of distribution and renewal, flexibility in time and space, are just some of the benefits offered. However, a number of pedagogical, organizational and technical requirements must be met in order to succeed Context, pedagogical aims and standards, content, information structure, user characteristics, management commitment, technical platform, media types, the production team, user interface and user tests are just a few of the important factors that must be considered This paper attempts to identify some of the factors essential to successful staff education on the corporate intranet, discussing observations and lessons learned from the case study

Silicon Valley versus Corporate Welfare

The estimated $65 billion a year that the federal government now spends on corporate welfare programs harms U.S. industry in general and Silicon Valley companies in particular. The competitiveness of America's semiconductor firms and other high-technology industries would benefit if corporate subsidies were eliminated altogether and the savings were devoted to reducing corporate income taxes, the capital gains tax, or the personal income tax. Given Congress's reluctance to vote down corporate pork, one strategy for eliminating corporate welfare would be to form an independent commission to identify unnecessary subsidies. That would force Congress to vote yes or no on a package of corporate spending subsidies. More than 50 Silicon Valley CEOs agree with this critical assessment of federal subsidies to industry and have signed a "Declaration of Independence" from corporate welfare. In the statement, which appears in the Appendix of this study, the CEOs urge Congress to end corporate welfare "even if it means funding cuts to my own company.

Design of a secure unified e-payment system in Nigeria: A case study

The automatic teller machine (ATM) is the most widely used e-Payment instrument in Nigeria. It is responsible for about 89% (in volume) of all e-Payment instruments since 2006 to 2008. Some customers have at least two ATM cards depending on the number of accounts operated by them and they represent the active users of the ATM cards. Furthermore, identity theft has been identified as one of the most prominent problems hindering the wider adoption of e-Business, particularly e-Banking, hence the need for a more secure platform of operation. Therefore, in this paper we propose a unified (single) smart card-based ATM card with biometric-based cash dispenser for all banking transactions. This is to reduce the number of ATM cards carried by an individual and the biometric facility is to introduce another level of security in addition to the PIN which is currently being used. A set of questionnaire was designed to evaluate the acceptability of this concept among users and the architecture of the proposed system is presented

INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES – ONE ENGINE OF GLOBALIZATION

Technological changes are “the main engine of capitalism and evolution” (A. Toffler), “the fundamental driving force in transformation of an economy” (C. Freeman). The paper proposes a theoretical investigation of information and communication technologies evolution and their impact on the globalization of economy. It defines terms like globalization - with special attention focused on its economical dimension, technological change, and information and communication technologies.globalization, information technology, communications, internet, digitization

The use of narrative to provide a cohesive structure for a web based computing course

Narrative has long been used as an educational tool. This article explains how narrative, in the form of popular accounts, has been used to provide context, structure and broad appeal to a large-scale, entry-level university course on Information and Communication Technology (ICT). This course is delivered via the web with online tuition. Students' responses to the use of narrative and the scope of the material has been encouraging. It is argued that narrative performs an enculturation function that is often under-utilised in ICT education