Culture or social interaction? A study of influential factors on weblog design

The importance of blogs and social networking as medium of interactions had gain substantial popularity in mainstream media. Such popularity is due to blogs timely publication, ease of use and wide availability. Blogs hypertext and hyperlinks spread information and influence through an underlying social network. Taking into consideration that past studies on web design have focused on cultural traits on design elements, this paper aims to analyse the patterns on blog design from the perspectives of social influence and interactions. Examining design patterns from five networks of blogs using content analysis method, the results show that design of blogs in an online network shares similar elements and the pattern is different from one network to the other

E-Government in Amarah: Challenges and Recommendations for Future Implementation

The growth and changes in the 21st century in the sectors of economics, politics, and technology mean that governments must provide all the services that can serve the demands of their citizens. One way for governments to facilitate this is by implementing e-government. E-government migrates services previously implemented by government employees to internet connected systems accessible by citizens from wherever they are at whatever time they are needed. This system can connect citizens to the government ministries via rule-based systems. Amarah, a city in the south of Iraq, started to integrate electronic systems into the facilities of the city in 2005. In 2012, the Amarah Provisional Council began the first step to build the e-government for the city by working with the UN, but the e-government systems still have not been built because the Council of Amarah is trying not to fall into the same mistakes of other e-government projects in the country. The purpose of this study is to cover some of the challenges that face governments in implementing e-government in developing countries. Another goal is to provide a comparative study to analyze the successful implementations of e-government in such places as South Korea, Bahrain, and Australia. Moreover, this thesis presents a workable framework to implement an e-government system which is suitable to the current situation of the city of Amarah, Iraq because existing successful e-government models or frameworks cannot be adopted as is and be expected to work successfully because of financial, cultural, political, educational, and other differences that exist between the locations

Establishing Appropriate Best Practices in Intellectual Property Management and Technology Transfer in the United Arab Emirates: Building Human Capital, Global Networks and Institutional Infrastructure to Drive Sustainable Knowledge-Based, Innovation-Driven Development

Best practices (BP) are integral to national and international IP law, practice, and management. For the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to build, foster, and sustain globally-networked knowledge-based, innovation-driven, economic development in the 21st century, a suite of internationally-standardized BP in intellectual property (IP) management, technology transfer and information analysis will be necessary. For the UAE, and the other GCC states, appropriate and applicable BP will be critical to diversify from commodity over-dependence (petroleum) towards nationally, regionally and globally interconnected innovation ecosystems. Therefore, strategically building human capital, institutions, institutional infrastructure and global networks which will be required for UAE to leapfrog from commodity dependence to innovation. A series of prescriptive recommendations are suggested as a basis for a strategic action plan

Seminar Users in the Arabic Twitter Sphere

We introduce the notion of "seminar users", who are social media users engaged in propaganda in support of a political entity. We develop a framework that can identify such users with 84.4% precision and 76.1% recall. While our dataset is from the Arab region, omitting language-specific features has only a minor impact on classification performance, and thus, our approach could work for detecting seminar users in other parts of the world and in other languages. We further explored a controversial political topic to observe the prevalence and potential potency of such users. In our case study, we found that 25% of the users engaged in the topic are in fact seminar users and their tweets make nearly a third of the on-topic tweets. Moreover, they are often successful in affecting mainstream discourse with coordinated hashtag campaigns.Comment: to appear in SocInfo 201

Exploring the Level of Utilizing Online Social Networks as Conventional Learning Settings in UAE from College Instructors’ Perspectives

This research study aims to measure the level of accepting the Online Social Networking applications as an appropriate environment for learning in both of the social and the academic skills of undergraduate students in the UAE colleges from the instructors’ point of view. Moreover, this study investigates the social skills of undergraduate students and their learning attitudes through their use of social applications and webpages. Ten instructors from the City University College of Ajman were the participants of this research study. The paper followed a qualitative method of collecting and analyzing data through assigning a set of semi-structure interview with instructors and a number of observation sessions for their students. The results came up with a positive feedback about using online learning through social networking sites and applications. Both of the social and academic skills of students were improved positively. Keywords: social networking, distance education, perspectives.

Social technologies for online learning: theoretical and contextual issues

Three exemplars are presented of social technologies deployed in educational contexts: wikis; a photo-sharing environment; and a social bookmarking tool. Students were found to engage with the technologies selectively, sometimes rejecting them, in the light of their prior conceptions of education. Some students (a minority in all the studies) were unsympathetic to the educational philosophy underpinning the technology’s adoption. The paper demonstrates, through an examination of in-context use, the importance of socio-cultural factors in relation to education, and the non-deterministic nature of educational technology. The academic study of technology has increasingly called into question the deterministic views which are so pervasive in popular discourse and among policy makers. Instead, socio-cultural factors play a crucial role in shaping and defining technology and educational technology is no exception, as the examples in the paper show. The paper concludes by drawing out some implications of the examples for the use of social technologies in education

Does Mobile Technology Matter? A Student Centric Perspective

Based on a student-centric perspective, this study seeks to understand how mobile technology influences students’ learning experiences. Our research motivation is driven by the increasing attention paid to mobile technology in the research and business community. Set in a public university setting, our investigation seeks to shed light on how teaching and learning could be reshaped by mobile technology, most specifically, emerging tablet PCs. The findings, based on two MIS (Management Information Systems) courses, one graduate and the other undergraduate, suggest that overall students perceived the mobility of tablet PC positively. In addition, graduate students expressed a higher degree of learning satisfaction and greater expectation of future technology usage than undergraduate students. Indeed, mobile technology seems to matter to students’ learning in general. The finding is particularly relevant when considering how to incorporate mobile technology into teaching practice as such technology-driven teaching practice is increasingly being expected in the contemporary networked society. Additional insights for managers, technology vendors, and college instructors are also discussed

Cyber physical systems: A smart city perspective

Cyber-physical system (CPS) is a terminology used to describe multiple systems of existing infrastructure and manufacturing system that combines computing technologies (cyber space) into the physical space to integrate human interaction. This paper does a literature review of the work related to CPS in terms of its importance in today’s world. Further, this paper also looks at the importance of CPS and its relationship with internet of things (IoT). CPS is a very broad area and is used in variety of fields and some of these major fields are evaluated. Additionally, the implementation of CPS and IoT is major enabler for smart cities and various examples of such implementation in the context of Dubai and UAE are researched. Finally, security issues related to CPS in general are also reviewed