Accommodating practices during episodes of disillusionment with mobile IT

This study investigates how tablet users react when technology falls short of their expectations. We deploy a data/frame model to study this process and investigate resistance-related reactions and the deployment of accommodating practices at the individual level. Analyzing user blogs that provide narratives on user interaction with tablets, we identify triggers of episodes of disillusionment and illustrate five sensemaking paths that users follow, eventually leading to one of three practices: 1) users choose to defer tasks until the situation changes, or they abandon the platform altogether; 2) they develop workarounds at different levels of proficiency; or 3) they proceed by reframing their expectations of the platform. By revealing user decision-making process during episodes of disillusionment, the findings contribute to information systems post-adoption research. At a practical level, the findings inform IT artifact and application design by offering insights on how users process discrepancies between their expectations and actual use experience

SAUDI STUDENTS’ ATTITUDES TOWARD USING SOCIAL MEDIA TO SUPPORT LEARNING

The Pew Research Center (2015) reported that 74% of the Internet users use social networking sites worldwide. Studies have provided evidence that social media is promising for increasing collaboration and cooperation in project –based learning. However, few empirical studies investigate the use of social media in educational settings, especially in the Middle East. This study investigates factors and barriers affecting the attitudes toward using social media in one of Saudi Arabia’s universities, King Abdul-Aziz University, Jeddah, with the intent of understanding when and how social media can best be used to support learning. The hypothesized model was developed through the social learning theories of Bandura and Vygotsky, the Technology Acceptance Model of Davis, and the Diffusion of Innovation model of Rogers. Five hundred ten students (214 male and 296 female) participated in an electronic survey, and its findings reveal the students have positive attitudes (M= 3.99, SD=.76) towards using social media to support learning. The most frequently used tool by students was WhatsApp (M= 4.60, SD=.88), with which students have the highest experience (M= 4.58, SD=.84). Students reported facing two major barriers when utilizing social media which are some of the social media contents are against the students’ religion (M= 4.12, SD= 1.1) and concerns about privacy and security issues related to the usage of social media (M= 3.72, SD=1.19). Only five predictors were significant determinants of attitudes of the students including: perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, subjective norms, experience with Skype, and age. There was a significant relationship between the overall attitudes of the students and their intentions, with r(508)= .67, p=.00. As social media tools continue to attract students’ attention, more research on developing effective instructional methods for using social media to support students’ learning, with consideration of cultural and religious aspects, is needed

Toward a theory of positive psychology in supporting child-centred family language policy

This dissertation focuses on exploring the role of positive psychology in the design of child-centred family language policy (FLP) to support home language maintenance in transnational bilingual families with young children learning two or more languages simultaneously at home. This study aims to understand and describe how FLP is co�constructed by the members of transnational bilingual families who have sought to build a child-centred FLP and practices to facilitate building a thriving environment for bilingual language maintenance. In doing this, the research aims to understand the role and use of positive psychology in such attempts to develop a theoretical model explaining successful bilingual home language maintenance through positive FLP strategies. The study uses data collected from online blogs in which bilingual families share their experiences and strategies in raising active bilingual children. Based on the literature and the findings of the data, the study develops a theoretical model titled “Positive FLP model for child-centred home language maintenance” which connects the elements of positive psychology, the micro-elements of FLP, as well as macro elements shaping the FLP that form parental language beliefs and ideology based on their personal experiences and considering the societal context in which the family resides. The findings contribute to a psychologically oriented stream of studies on FLP and offer valuable insights for transnational families seeking more effective and meaningful strategies to enhance home language maintenance

Journal of Applied Communications vol. 99 (4) Full Issue

Journal of Applied Communications vol. 99 (4) - Full Issu

Combining granularity-based topic-dependent and topic-independent evidences for opinion detection

Fouille des opinion, une sous-discipline dans la recherche d'information (IR) et la linguistique computationnelle, fait référence aux techniques de calcul pour l'extraction, la classification, la compréhension et l'évaluation des opinions exprimées par diverses sources de nouvelles en ligne, social commentaires des médias, et tout autre contenu généré par l'utilisateur. Il est également connu par de nombreux autres termes comme trouver l'opinion, la détection d'opinion, l'analyse des sentiments, la classification sentiment, de détection de polarité, etc. Définition dans le contexte plus spécifique et plus simple, fouille des opinion est la tâche de récupération des opinions contre son besoin aussi exprimé par l'utilisateur sous la forme d'une requête. Il y a de nombreux problèmes et défis liés à l'activité fouille des opinion. Dans cette thèse, nous nous concentrons sur quelques problèmes d'analyse d'opinion. L'un des défis majeurs de fouille des opinion est de trouver des opinions concernant spécifiquement le sujet donné (requête). Un document peut contenir des informations sur de nombreux sujets à la fois et il est possible qu'elle contienne opiniâtre texte sur chacun des sujet ou sur seulement quelques-uns. Par conséquent, il devient très important de choisir les segments du document pertinentes à sujet avec leurs opinions correspondantes. Nous abordons ce problème sur deux niveaux de granularité, des phrases et des passages. Dans notre première approche de niveau de phrase, nous utilisons des relations sémantiques de WordNet pour trouver cette association entre sujet et opinion. Dans notre deuxième approche pour le niveau de passage, nous utilisons plus robuste modèle de RI i.e. la language modèle de se concentrer sur ce problème. L'idée de base derrière les deux contributions pour l'association d'opinion-sujet est que si un document contient plus segments textuels (phrases ou passages) opiniâtre et pertinentes à sujet, il est plus opiniâtre qu'un document avec moins segments textuels opiniâtre et pertinentes. La plupart des approches d'apprentissage-machine basée à fouille des opinion sont dépendants du domaine i.e. leurs performances varient d'un domaine à d'autre. D'autre part, une approche indépendant de domaine ou un sujet est plus généralisée et peut maintenir son efficacité dans différents domaines. Cependant, les approches indépendant de domaine souffrent de mauvaises performances en général. C'est un grand défi dans le domaine de fouille des opinion à développer une approche qui est plus efficace et généralisé. Nos contributions de cette thèse incluent le développement d'une approche qui utilise de simples fonctions heuristiques pour trouver des documents opiniâtre. Fouille des opinion basée entité devient très populaire parmi les chercheurs de la communauté IR. Il vise à identifier les entités pertinentes pour un sujet donné et d'en extraire les opinions qui leur sont associées à partir d'un ensemble de documents textuels. Toutefois, l'identification et la détermination de la pertinence des entités est déjà une tâche difficile. Nous proposons un système qui prend en compte à la fois l'information de l'article de nouvelles en cours ainsi que des articles antérieurs pertinents afin de détecter les entités les plus importantes dans les nouvelles actuelles. En plus de cela, nous présentons également notre cadre d'analyse d'opinion et tâches relieés. Ce cadre est basée sur les évidences contents et les évidences sociales de la blogosphère pour les tâches de trouver des opinions, de prévision et d'avis de classement multidimensionnel. Cette contribution d'prématurée pose les bases pour nos travaux futurs. L'évaluation de nos méthodes comprennent l'utilisation de TREC 2006 Blog collection et de TREC Novelty track 2004 collection. La plupart des évaluations ont été réalisées dans le cadre de TREC Blog track.Opinion mining is a sub-discipline within Information Retrieval (IR) and Computational Linguistics. It refers to the computational techniques for extracting, classifying, understanding, and assessing the opinions expressed in various online sources like news articles, social media comments, and other user-generated content. It is also known by many other terms like opinion finding, opinion detection, sentiment analysis, sentiment classification, polarity detection, etc. Defining in more specific and simpler context, opinion mining is the task of retrieving opinions on an issue as expressed by the user in the form of a query. There are many problems and challenges associated with the field of opinion mining. In this thesis, we focus on some major problems of opinion mining

At the Intersection of Gender & Technology: A Meta-Analysis

With the proliferation of novel technology-infused learning environments, there is a need to further our understanding of their impact on learners, the learning process, and the learning outcomes for diverse student bodies in various study programs. Investigating gender differences in usage and attitudes towards different technologies is important because educational institutions, especially public ones, are seen by policy makers as structures that aim to reform societal inequalities. The objective of this dissertation is to conduct a systematic review of the literature to establish the relationship between (a) gender and Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) usage and (b) gender and attitudes towards the use of ICT, in the context of formal educational settings from elementary to postsecondary levels. This dissertation takes an in-depth look at ICT attitudes in learning by avoiding treating it as one indivisible construct. I subdivided the attitudinal construct into the different theoretical frameworks embedded in the literature related to technologies in pedagogical settings. These include Computer Anxiety, Negative Attitudes Towards ICT, Computer Confidence, Perceived Ease of Use of ICT, Perceived Usefulness of ICT, Perceived Satisfaction with ICT, Positive Attitudes Towards ICT, Motivation to Use ICT, Computer Self-efficacy, Intention to Use ICT, and Mixed Perceptions Towards ICT. After a systematic literature review, I synthesized the results of 213 studies and used random-effects meta-analytic techniques to evaluate gender differences across students’ reported usage and attitudes towards ICT in learning. Findings of this dissertation reveal significant gender differences between female and male students’ reported usage of ICT and attitudes towards ICT in favor of males. Average effect sizes ranged from small to moderate. The highest average effect size belonged to the construct of Computer Confidence where male students typically reported higher confidence with computers, with .38 standard deviations above the female students. The lowest effect size belonged to the construct of Perceived Satisfaction with ICT where male students typically reported higher perceived satisfaction with ICT, with .05 standard deviations above the female students. A number of contextual factors impacted the results of the outcomes to differing degrees. These include ‘research country’, ‘grade level of students’, ‘technology type surveyed’, ‘questionnaire used’, ‘ethnicities’, ‘subject matter’, ‘participation rate’, ‘sampling selectivity’, ‘competency’, ‘publication date’, ‘technology acceptance model’, ‘class context’, and ‘socioeconomic status’. This dissertation concludes with educational implications and suggestions for future research investigating gender differences in students’ usage and attitudes towards ICT in learning. Considerable effort should be made by researchers to contextualize the studies as possible and as such, I recommend that gender should not be researched as a homogeneous independent variable. After all, gender is embedded in many other variables, in the same way that it is embedded in the many structures of society. Gender therefore needs to be researched with other intersecting demographics, including but not limited to participants’ home country, ethnicity, age, and socioeconomic background. Intersectionality is a theory and a methodology that is suited to addressing the complexities of gender differences concerning the usage of and attitudes towards ICT. It imparts differences and particularities in social statuses in the hope of militating against those silent prejudices that result in social inequities. This theory allows us to inspect social demographic variables as they truly are: complex and interwoven. Adopting this theory does not mean that each study investigating gender differences needs to include all possible demographic variable interactions. However, it invites social scientists to be more comprehensive in their sampling selections and to be more aware of the complexity of social phenomena. Last but not least, intersectional methods require more than just an analysis of statistical interactions among social groups. They need to analyze the fundamental and significant impacts of these interactions

Developing Learning System in Pesantren The Role of ICT

According to Krashen's affective filter hypothesis, students who are highly motivated have a strong sense of self, enter a learning context with a low level of anxiety, and are much more likely to become successful language acquirers than those who do not. Affective factors, such as motivation, attitude, and anxiety, have a direct impact on foreign language acquisition. Horwitz et al. (1986) mentioned that many language learners feel anxious when learning foreign languages. Thus, this study recruits 100 college students to fill out the Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) to investigate language learning anxiety. Then, this study designs and develops an affective tutoring system (ATS) to conduct an empirical study. The study aims to improve students’ learning interest by recognizing their emotional states during their learning processes and provide adequate feedback. It is expected to enhance learners' motivation and interest via affective instructional design and then improve their learning performance

Fòrum de Recerca nº 18. Número complet.

XVIII Jornades de Foment de la Investigació de la Facultat de Ciències Humanes i Socials (Any 2013

O projeto eTwinning LOA : uma abordagem intercultural para a integração pedagógica das TIC no ensino das línguas

A Internet introduziu novas formas de interação e novos ambientes de aprendizagem. Por um lado, os indivíduos podem interagir diretamente com as fontes de informação e conhecimento e participar ativamente na sua produção. Por outro lado, a Internet cria novos processos de socialização e de mobilidade em ambientes virtuais multiculturais e multilingues. Por esta razão, o potencial das TIC para a comunicação intercultural deve ser explorada, especialmente no contexto do ensino de línguas estrangeiras (Audras & Chanier, 2008; Kern et al., 2008; Liaw & Master, 2010; O'Dowd, 2007, 2010; O'Dowd & Ware, 2008; Ollivier & Puren, 2011; Yang, 2011, entre outros). A ação eTwinning do Programa de Aprendizagem ao Longo da Vida proporciona as condições ideais de integração das TIC. Fomenta, ainda, o desenvolvimento de estratégias de ensino-aprendizagem que promovem a descoberta intencional, a construção colaborativa de conhecimento e a abertura para a diversidade linguística e cultural no contexto da comunicação intercultural. O projeto eTwinning LOA, que apresentamos nesta tese, foi desenvolvido no contexto de um estudo de investigação-ação que visou testar o impacto da integração curricular de um projeto de colaboração intercultural na motivação dos alunos para usar e aprender línguas estrangeiras e no desenvolvimento de sua competência comunicativa intercultural. A metodologia do projeto foi inspirada nos modelos da abordagem intercultural de Candau (2003) e Maurice (2008). Os alunos interagiram com estudantes de outros países europeus com os quais trabalharam na consecução de objetivos comuns e na construção de relações de amizade, estando criadas as condições da teoria de contacto (Allport, 1954; Amir, 1969, 1976; Pettigrew, 1997, 1998; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2000, 2005, 2006). O projeto eTwinning LOA promoveu uma mudança no processo de ensino-aprendizagem que se tornou mais centrado no aluno, nas suas necessidades e nos seus interesses. Os resultados da intervenção mostram uma melhoria na competência de comunicação, na autoestima e na autonomia dos alunos, que se empenharam em usar o inglês para aprender com e sobre os seus parceiros eTwinning. Em concordância, o estudo da frequência dos contatos interculturais mostra um aumento substancial da iniciativa social. A análise dos atos comunicativos evidencia um aumento de atos que demonstram atitudes de respeito e consideração para com os seus interlocutores, um contributo para o desenvolvimento da competência comunicativa intercultural.The Internet has introduced new forms of interaction and learning environments. On the one hand, individuals can interact directly with the sources of information and knowledge and actively participate in its production. On the other, the Internet increases new processes of socialization and mobility in virtual multicultural and multilingual environments. For this reason, the potential of ICT for intercultural communication should be explored, particularly in the context of foreign language teaching (Audras & Chanier, 2008; Kern et al., 2008; Liaw & Master, 2010; O'Dowd, 2007, 2010; O'Dowd & Ware, 2008; Ollivier & Puren, 2011; Yang, 2011, among others). The eTwinning action provides European teacher with the opportunity to develop teaching-learning strategies that promote intentional discovery, social interaction, the collaborative construction of knowledge and openness to plural social and cultural contexts. LOA eTwinning project was developed as a teaching strategy in the context of an action-research study aimed at testing the impact of the integration of intercultural communication mediated by ICT tools on the students’ motivation to use and learn foreign languages and the development of their intercultural communicative competence. The project methodology was inspired by Candau (2003) and Maurice (2008)’s models of intercultural approach. In line with the contact hypothesis (Allport, 1954; Amir, 1969, 1976; Pettigrew, 1997, 1998; Pettigrew & Tropp, 2000, 2005, 2006), this experience of intercultural contact among students from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds was based on sharing equal status, working together for common goals and building friendship relationships. LOA eTwinning project led to a change in the teaching process and to the design of a learner-oriented curriculum, which contributed to increase learners’ motivation to use foreign language to interact with people from other cultures. The results show an improvement in students’ linguistic self-esteem and autonomy as learners showed to be committed in using English to learn from and with their eTwinning partners. The study of the frequency of the intercultural contacts shows a substantial increase in social initiative. Moreover, the analysis of the communicative acts gives evidence of an increase of acts that reveal attitudes of respect and consideration towards their interlocutors