The relevance of telehealth across the digital divided the transfer of knowledge over distance

This paper explores the concept of Relevance as an explanatory factor to the diffusion of ITuse, or, in this paper particularly, the use of Telehealth. Relevance is the net value of performance expectancy and effort expectancy and contains both micro-relevance (i.e. here-and-now) and macro-relevance (i.e. actual goals) Following the case-study approach, two Telehealth situations were studied in Rwanda and The Netherlands. In the comparison, two more existing studies in Canada and Tanzania were included. The conclusion is that Relevance is the explanatory factor, whereas particularly micro-relevance is crucial. Without the micro-relevant occasions that initiate use, there will be no use on longer term In the cases studied the micro-relevance of knowledge-transfer was crucial. Furthermore distance determined Telehealth relevance. Practical conclusions to cases were drawn

A Critical Look at Decentralized Personal Data Architectures

While the Internet was conceived as a decentralized network, the most widely used web applications today tend toward centralization. Control increasingly rests with centralized service providers who, as a consequence, have also amassed unprecedented amounts of data about the behaviors and personalities of individuals. Developers, regulators, and consumer advocates have looked to alternative decentralized architectures as the natural response to threats posed by these centralized services. The result has been a great variety of solutions that include personal data stores (PDS), infomediaries, Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) systems, and federated and distributed social networks. And yet, for all these efforts, decentralized personal data architectures have seen little adoption. This position paper attempts to account for these failures, challenging the accepted wisdom in the web community on the feasibility and desirability of these approaches. We start with a historical discussion of the development of various categories of decentralized personal data architectures. Then we survey the main ideas to illustrate the common themes among these efforts. We tease apart the design characteristics of these systems from the social values that they (are intended to) promote. We use this understanding to point out numerous drawbacks of the decentralization paradigm, some inherent and others incidental. We end with recommendations for designers of these systems for working towards goals that are achievable, but perhaps more limited in scope and ambition

Guidelines Towards Better Participation of Older Adults in Software Development Processes using a new SPIRAL Method and Participatory Approach

This paper presents a new method of engaging older participants in the process of application and IT solutions development for older adults for emerging IT and tech startups. A new method called SPIRAL (Support for Participant Involvement in Rapid and Agile software development Labs) is proposed which adds both sustainability and flexibility to the development process with older adults. This method is based on the participatory approach and user empowerment of older adults with the aid of a bootstrapped Living Lab concept and it goes beyond well established user-centered and empathic design. SPIRAL provides strategies for direct involvement of older participants in the software development processes from the very early stage to support the agile approach with rapid prototyping, in particular in new and emerging startup environments with limited capabilities, including time, team and resources

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Evaluating empowerment and control of HE e-learning in a secure environment

With the increased spread of HE distance learning into a wide variety of contexts it is important for us to understand the factors involved in its successful deployment for students. E-learning has a great potential to support effective and empowering HE distance learning (Wilson, 2007; Adams, 2005; Hughes, 2005). However, within two secure environments, prisons and health service, the factors involved are complex. This paper reviews HE e-learning technology perceptions within these two contrasting contexts from 225 students' and stakeholders' perspectives. Previous research has detailed literature limitations on obtaining students' perspectives of e-learning (Conole et al, 2006). These limitations are compounded when other stakeholder perceptions are not integrated (Sun et al, 2007; Adams et al, 2005; Millen at al, 2002). This paper developed and applied an e-learning framework for student and stakeholder perceptions. This social psychological framework, is based on previous practice based e-learning studies and is used here to synthesise two large-scale case studies. The framework focuses on three concepts learner Access (e.g. learning design, technology design, physical access), Awareness (e.g. of resources, their usage and support for e-learning tasks) and Acceptability (e.g. trust, privacy, aesthetics, engagement). Students' and stakeholders' perceptions identified high levels of students' empowerment through e-learning whilst still requiring a further pedagogical tailoring and an awareness of support. However, serious problems within these contexts have identified blocks to e-learning through stakeholders perceptions and fears of acceptability (i.e. issues of risk and trust). Ultimately, through understanding competing perceptions and needs within these complex environments we can support the effective technological development, pedagogical design and deployment of e-learning systems

A global approach for a dictionary of Lingála: from the localization of software to a lemmatization strategy

Lingála is the national language spoken in Kinshasa, the capital of the country. Even if this language is going through a straightforward empowering process, its progress is still hindered by the lack of terminological and lexicographic tools; hence the need of providing monolingual or plurilingual dictionaries for this language, according to what is a demand of society. This is why we have undertaken this research on lexicography. It consists in producing lexicons as teaching aids and in making them available to primary users, i.e. teachers and students. In this communication, firstly, we will observe the approach followed by authors of existing Lingála dictionaries (monolingual and bilingual). This review aims to improve, if necessary, the presentation of entries, so as to help readers find the words they are looking for. The variations in the current spoken language (the so-called Kinshasa Lingála) and in the so-called standard language (Makanza Lingála) will be important in the choice we will make for recording occurrences in the dictionary. This concerns the orthography of words, as well as lemmatized forms and register. Secondly, we will describe the process of localization of software we will use to process the corpus. Finally, we will also very briefly describe the corpus we are processing