Do You Understand Our Understanding? Personas as Hermeneutic Tools in Social Technology Projects

Personas, prevalent in information systems design and implementation, are often positioned as aesthetic creations imitating technology “end users”. As such, there is an inherent assumption that end user outcomes can be known prior to technology usage in practice. This assumption, however, becomes problematic in malleable end user software (MEUS) contexts, in which concrete usage is unknowable a priori. Through an auto-ethnographic account of a unique case of a small consultancy, the Ripple Effect Group, attuned to the nature of MEUS, we explore a novel approach to personas in social technology projects. We turn to the work of Gadamer (1975) to outline two distinct views of “mimesis” for contrasting the dominant portrayal of personas in the literature compared to our empirical context. Our paper challenges conventional thinking surrounding personas, and offers a practical approach, and preliminary theorizing, for personas as hermeneutic tools to convey meaning for those involved in MEUS projects

Addressing the IS Enrollment Crisis: A 12-step Program to Bring about Change through the Introductory IS Course

An enrollment crisis continues to plague the Information Systems (IS) discipline. Although recent studies have begun to offer several potentially profitable strategies to reverse plummeting student enrollments, little evidence has been put forth to document comprehensive intervention initiatives aimed at attracting students in higher education institutions. To this end, this study describes a 12-step program targeted at the introductory IS course at one such institution. Developed based on empirical evidence from the literature, discussions with our IS colleagues, and best practices at other institutions, the 12-step program covers all aspects of the course including faculty assignment, tenor and approaches used in class, and innovative ways to tell the IS story. As a result of implementing the program, enrollments in core upper-division IS courses at the institution doubled. This paper presents a powerful, integrated program that is replicable and can be used by other IS departments to address the enrollment crisis at their institutions

Social media enabled collaborative learning environments: a design science research approach

Collaborative technologies such as Group Decision Support Systems were proclaimed to be able to impact the learning environments of educational institutions twenty years ago, where the Information Systems discipline was interested in determining whether they were capable of transforming the traditional methods of teaching. It was understood that these technologies were effective at transforming learning environments from a traditional approach to a collaborative one, where the learner is part of the learning process, but little has actually changed in this time. However, new generations of these collaborative technologies often emerge, and the platforms of social media are one such technology. In a similar fashion to previous collaborative technologies, social media have been proclaimed as impacting the learning environments of educational institutions through better communication and collaboration, in new and exciting ways. However, a problem that has been identified is there is a lack of understanding on whether the platforms that are enabled by social media are effective at enabling collaborative learning. This study helps improve this understanding. A design science research (DSR) approach was adopted to build an evaluation framework to be able to evaluate the effectiveness of social media enabled collaborative learning environments (SMECLEs). The evaluation framework was developed during a five year DSR study, over six design cycles. These incorporated insights from existing literature on DSR, social media, and collaborative learning, using 272 journal and conference articles. Further, data was gathered from six SMECLEs, which consisted of 857 tweets, 1439 blog posts, and 3376 blog comments. The resulting framework was then used to evaluate the six SMECLEs, where a number of trends were identified, which suggests that the tool is effective for its intended purpose. Thus, the primary contribution of this study, to both practice and the knowledge base, is the evaluation framework for social media enabled collaborative learning environments (SMECLEs)