A framework to enhance the mobile user experience in an Mlearning interaction

The new millennium is witness to a telecommunications world that is vastly different from even the recent past with developments in the mobile sector having dramatically changed the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) landscape. Mobile cellular technology has proliferated faster than any previous technology and is now the most ubiquitous technology in the world. The focus of this thesis is the development of a framework to enhance the Mobile User Experience in an Mlearning interaction. This research is contextualised by the goal-oriented use of mobile cellular technologies in a formal educational environment. As such the study, although residing in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), acknowledges issues arising in the Education Domain as a specific field of application. The aim of the research was to investigate the components of a framework to enhance the Mobile User Experience in an Mlearning interaction. The development of the framework was facilitated by the exploration of: the Mobile User Experience factors and their impact, on the Mobile User Experience of learners participating in a goal-oriented Mlearning interaction. These critical factors were documented in terms of the Mobile User Experience components, and the relationships of these components to each other as well as the Mobile User Experience of an Mlearning interaction. The research, grounded in a phenomenological research philosophy, applied an inductive reasoning approach, and was operationalised through a single case study methodology. A qualitative research strategy was considered appropriate, as the phenomenon of User Experience is linked to the hedonistic attributes of the interaction. This study was conducted in four phases with focus on three embedded units of analysis. The three units of analysis were identified as: The learner as end user in an Mlearning interaction; The educator as designer of the Mlearning interaction; and The Mlearning interaction. The research revealed that the Mobile User Experience of an Mlearning interaction is affected by the mobile user, mobile use, mobile device, mobile business practices, mobile networks, mobile interaction and mobile context. Within the Mlearning interaction the significant components are the learners as mobile users, the enhance interactions, removal of barriers to the interaction, goal-oriented nature of the interaction and the ducational context. Identifying these components and their associated Mobile User Experience factors and impacts, present the main contribution of this thesis. In conclusion, the limitations of the study are documented and topics for future research are outlined

A framework to enhance the mobile user experience in an Mlearning interaction

The new millennium is witness to a telecommunications world that is vastly different from even the recent past with developments in the mobile sector having dramatically changed the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) landscape. Mobile cellular technology has proliferated faster than any previous technology and is now the most ubiquitous technology in the world. The focus of this thesis is the development of a framework to enhance the Mobile User Experience in an Mlearning interaction. This research is contextualised by the goal-oriented use of mobile cellular technologies in a formal educational environment. As such the study, although residing in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), acknowledges issues arising in the Education Domain as a specific field of application. The aim of the research was to investigate the components of a framework to enhance the Mobile User Experience in an Mlearning interaction. The development of the framework was facilitated by the exploration of: the Mobile User Experience factors and their impact, on the Mobile User Experience of learners participating in a goal-oriented Mlearning interaction. These critical factors were documented in terms of the Mobile User Experience components, and the relationships of these components to each other as well as the Mobile User Experience of an Mlearning interaction. The research, grounded in a phenomenological research philosophy, applied an inductive reasoning approach, and was operationalised through a single case study methodology. A qualitative research strategy was considered appropriate, as the phenomenon of User Experience is linked to the hedonistic attributes of the interaction. This study was conducted in four phases with focus on three embedded units of analysis. The three units of analysis were identified as: The learner as end user in an Mlearning interaction; The educator as designer of the Mlearning interaction; and The Mlearning interaction. The research revealed that the Mobile User Experience of an Mlearning interaction is affected by the mobile user, mobile use, mobile device, mobile business practices, mobile networks, mobile interaction and mobile context. Within the Mlearning interaction the significant components are the learners as mobile users, the enhance interactions, removal of barriers to the interaction, goal-oriented nature of the interaction and the ducational context. Identifying these components and their associated Mobile User Experience factors and impacts, present the main contribution of this thesis. In conclusion, the limitations of the study are documented and topics for future research are outlined

Design research in the Netherlands 2010 : proceedings of the symposium held on 20-21 May 2010, Eindhoven University of Technology

Design Research in the Netherlands occurs every five years to take stock of the state-of-the-art in design research that takes place in all design disciplines in the Netherlands. How has our understanding of design developed through research on this phenomenon? What are the research and development methodologies used to acquire insight in design? What have we achieved in the past period, and what are out expectations for the coming period? Researchers and research groups outline their development over the past five years in position papers, addressing insights, methods, results, and problems. Design Research in the Netherlands 2010 is the fourth edition, following three symposia held in 1995, 2000, and 2005. The five-year cycle allows to take conceptual distance from everyday problems that are often project-specific, and to assess how the field is developing. The proceedings form a valuable cross-disciplinary overview of research on design

The student-produced electronic portfolio in craft education

The authors studied primary school students’ experiences of using an electronic portfolio in their craft education over four years. A stimulated recall interview was applied to collect user experiences and qualitative content analysis to analyse the collected data. The results indicate that the electronic portfolio was experienced as a multipurpose tool to support learning. It makes the learning process visible and in that way helps focus on and improves the quality of learning. © ISLS.Peer reviewe

Proceedings of the Fifth Mediterranean Conference on Information Systems: Professional Development Consortium

Collection of position statements of doctoral students and junior faculty in the Professional Development Consortium at the the Fifth Mediterranean Conference on Information Systems, Tel Aviv - Yafo

Managing multiple interdependencies in large scale software development projects

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, 1997.Includes bibliographical references (p. 279-283).by Nancy A. Staudenmayer.Ph.D

Regulatory review of new product innovation: Routine-practice perspective

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonRegulatory agencies have come to represent non-market actors whose safety evaluations of products determine the market access and commercial success of new products. Yet, the extant discourse on regulatory agencies and their review of new product innovations (NPIs) has only offered an understanding of the phase-gate product review process, strategies used by innovating firms to navigate regulatory constraints, and a (re)conceptualization of the role of regulatory agencies as innovation intermediaries — all within stable and well-defined contexts. This has led to limited insights into the internal dynamics of regulatory activities and processes: specifically, their ongoing coping and adaptive responses to innovation landscapes, market conditions, and the organizing contingencies at the interface of socio-cultural and material contexts that establish their local rationale for conducting product reviews. Drawing on the contemporary turn to practice and routines in social theory as a lens, this thesis explores regulatory review of NPIs by examining how the local coping practices of product evaluators at the coalface of NPI evaluation coalesce to define the adaptive character of regulatory agencies and their responses to context-specific conditions that combine to form and shape regulatory review of NPI process. Developing the study’s contribution based on the organizing routines of a regulatory agency operating in a context marked by underdeveloped markets and institutions, the Ghana Food and Drug Agency (FDA) served as the empirical research site. Elucidating how practices and routines underpinning the review of NPIs cohere in the form of exaptive strategies to parry the disruptive and evolving innovation landscape, emphasis was placed on the product evaluators’ situated practices, dispositions, and organizing relations to theorise the product review process and adaptive tendencies of the agency. Adopting interpretive research approach and attuning to an exploratory research design, data for the empirical inquiry was chiefly collected through ethnographic semi-structured interviews with thirty-one (31) regulatory officers, supervisors and laboratory analysts working across four loosely coupled departments within the FDA. This was supplemented with three hundred and fifty (350) hours of non-participant observation, and twenty-five (25) publicly available data sources in the form of archival documents on the work of the regulatory agency. The main findings from the study are captured in threefold. First, in delineating how the regulatory review of NPIs may play out in practice in contexts marked by underdeveloped markets and institutions, the study identified salient interactive patterns of routines that are coded in artefactual materials to inform situated practices and skilled adaptive actions of product evaluators, which cumulatively constitute cognitive and noncognitive routines that give life to the regulatory review process. Second, a continuous (re)creation of established patterns of product evaluation yields a set of tacit knowledge and innovative practices that underline the adaptive qualities needed to both sustain the intention of the product evaluation framework and respond to the fluxing innovation landscape and contextual dynamics. Third, ongoing adjustments and navigation of sediment patterns of action that provide stable orders in the regulatory review process come to define the regulators’ sensitivity to local circumstances as a way-finder to achieve a responsive regulatory review framework. Four primary contributions emerge from the thesis. First, by examining the connections between structures and agency underpinning regulatory processes and decisions from a routines-practice perspective, the thesis offers theoretical specifications of how the mutually enabling bundles of codified stable patterns in the form of organizing structures, and the actual situated accomplishment of product evaluators, interact to co-constitutively define the shared organizing practices that portray what, and how, regulatory reviews are conducted. Second, explicating beyond the contents and sequence of aggregated patterns that define regulatory review processes, the thesis extends our understanding of regulatory reviews by unveiling how the situated enactment of regulatory evaluations possesses a great deal of socio-cultural contingency, such that the navigation of organizing boundaries to define new evaluation paths is construed in interactions within webs of competing and complementary logics, socio-cultural repertoires and persuasions, and a duality of stability and agility-seeking. Third, the thesis offers deeper insights into the dynamics of micro situated practices of the atomistic individual who engages in the day-to-day evaluation of new products, the interactive web of mutually enabling relationship between organizing structures, clusters of evaluation routines and their co-evolving patterns to define both stability and change in regulatory review processes. Fourth, contributing to the burgeoning discourse on the relational ties between innovating firms and regulatory agencies as a form of non-market strategy that yields competitive advantage, the thesis underlines the collaborative efforts between innovating firms and regulatory agencies as a pragmatic approach to developing expertise and narrowing the knowledge gaps that have long underpinned the enduring concerns about regulatory uncertainty.Ghana Scholarships Secretaria

Sustainability Conversations for Impact: Transdisciplinarity on Four Scales

Sustainability is a dynamic, multi-scale endeavor. Coherence can be lost between scales – from project teams, to organizations, to networks, and, most importantly, down to conversations. Sustainability researchers have embraced transdisciplinarity, as it is grounded in science, shared language, broad participation, and respect for difference. Yet, transdisciplinarity at these four scales is not well-defined. In this dissertation I extend transdisciplinarity out from the project to networks and organizations, and down into conversation, adding novel lenses and quantitative approaches. In Chapter 2, I propose transdisciplinarity incorporate academic disciplines which help cross scales: Organizational Learning, Knowledge Management, Applied Cooperation, and Data Science. In Chapter 3 I then use a mixed-method approach to study a transdisciplinary organization, the Maine Aquaculture Hub, as it develops strategy. Using social network analysis and conversation analytics, I evaluate how the Hub’s network-convening, strategic thinking and conversation practices turn organization-scale transdisciplinarity into strategic advantage. In Chapters 4 and 5, conversation is the nexus of transdisciplinarity. I study seven public aquaculture lease scoping meetings (informal town halls) and classify conversation activity by “discussion discipline,” i.e., rhetorical and social intent. I compute the relationship between discussion discipline proportions and three sustainability outcomes of intent-to-act, options-generation, and relationship-building. I consider exogenous factors, such as signaling, gender balance, timing and location. I show that where inquiry is high, so is innovation. Where acknowledgement is high, so is intent-to-act. Where respect is high, so is relationship-building. Indirectness and sarcasm dampen outcomes. I propose seven interventions to improve sustainability conversation capacity, such as nudging, networks, and using empirical models. Chapter 5 explores those empirical models: I use natural language-processing (NLP) to detect the discussion disciplines by training a model using the previously coded transcripts. Then I use that model to classify 591 open-source conversation transcripts, and regress the sustainability outcomes, per-transcript, on discussion discipline proportions. I show that all three conversation outcomes can be predicted by the discussion disciplines, and most statistically-significant being intent-to-act, which responds directly to acknowledgement and respect. Conversation AI is the next frontier of transdisciplinarity for sustainability solutions

Sensemaking in virtual settings: a practice-based approach

Since the mainstream uptake of computers and the internet, our world has become increasingly virtualised. Modern organisations are deeply reliant on virtual technologies to carry out their business across time and distance. Indeed, virtual technologies are now implicated in almost all organisational activities, from (virtual) meetings to (online) collaboration. Many scholars have been drawn to investigate the new organisational phenomena that have resulted from the virtualisation of our world, such a virtual learning, virtual leadership and virtual decision making. My research, however, tackles a more fundamental question about how organising more generally is accomplished in the virtual age. Namely, the research question is, “How does sensemaking, as the basis of organising, take place in virtual settings?” To explain, sensemaking – a foundational concept in Organisation Studies – underpins all organisational activities. Therefore understanding how sensemaking takes place in virtual settings will necessarily illuminate how organising more generally is accomplished virtually. To date, how sensemaking takes place in virtual settings has hardly been studied. Further, the studies that do exist impose Weick’s (1969, 1979, 1995) theory of sensemaking (which was developed at a time pre-dating virtual technologies) on to the new context. As a result, existing studies do not illuminate what is new, unique and interesting about how we make sense in virtual settings. In this thesis I develop an alternative, practice-based conception of sensemaking (which serves as the theoretical framework for the study) that sensitises me to previously overlooked but critical concepts, namely materiality, embodiment and ongoing accomplishment. First, materiality describes how things, which in virtual settings are often digital, are implicated in sensemaking. Second, embodiment describes how physical bodies, and their digital representations in virtual settings, are involved in accomplishment of activities. Finally, ongoing accomplishment describes how sensemaking takes place in the flow of activities as they are carried out in the physical world, the virtual world, or combination of both. This framework also enables me to position activities as the unit of analysis for sensemaking. Taken together, this is a novel approach that reveals new facets of the phenomenon of sensemaking in virtual settings. This theoretical framework is applied in three different fieldsites (of varying levels of virtuality) which are selected using a virtuality continuum developed within the thesis. These fieldsites are Yammer (a social media platform), telepresence (a video-based collaboration platform), and Second Life (a three-dimensional virtual world). The methodology is a hybrid traditional-virtual ethnography in which data is collected through participant observation, complemented by interviews. Empirical data are presented in the form of accounts that exemplify the key activities of practitioners in each fieldsite. The analysis reveals how sensemaking is enabled, constrained and altered owing to activities being carried out virtually (rather than in traditional settings). Further, various unique features of sensemaking as it takes place in each fieldsite are articulated, which become the subject of a cross-fieldsite comparison. By overlaying the results from each fieldsite on to the virtuality continuum, the question of how sensemaking takes place in virtual settings is answered in two ways. First, features of sensemaking that are common across all fieldsites, and therefore levels of virtuality, are identified. Second, I identify features of sensemaking that are specific to particular fieldsites and make inferences about how sensemaking features change depending on the level of virtuality of the setting. Some anomalies arising from this analysis are resolved by suggesting an alternative matrix model of virtuality which has potential to be included in future research. The findings culminate in articulation of a practice-based theoretical account of “virtual sensemaking”. This virtual sensemaking is then compared to traditional sensemaking, further illuminating the uniqueness of how sensemaking takes place in virtual settings. I then articulate contributions to the fields of sensemaking and organising as follows. This is the first study to articulate an account of sensemaking as it takes place specifically in virtual settings. Moreover, the account of virtual sensemaking broadens our understanding of sensemaking generally by opening up previously under-theorised aspects of how we accomplish (virtual) organisational activities. Contributions to broader organising include reconsideration of how we define quintessential organising activities, such as meetings. Practical implications pertain to creators, administrators and users of virtual technologies who may use this knowledge of virtual sensemaking to inform more effective and efficient design, implementation, management and application of virtual technologies in organisations. Finally, exciting avenues for future research are suggested, including opportunities to reconceptualise the theoretical, empirical and analytical landscape for investigating organising in the modern virtual age. Namely, we may let go of notions of organising that are rooted in traditional settings and embrace new conceptions of virtual organising. Organising is no longer place-specific or linear, nor does it require our physical presence or real-time participation. Instead, modern virtual organising is a complex, multi-dimensional blending of the physical and virtual. As technologies evolve and our activities become ever more integrated with them, understanding how we achieve this blending will be paramount to progressing the field of Organisation Studies generally