EMPIRICAL STUDY OF KNOWLEDGE SHARING AMONG MULTINATIONAL ACADEMICIANS

Knowledge sharing among faculty members may enhance the quality of teaching and research activities. Despite the fact that a number of research has been conducted, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that focus on multinational academicians. The aim of this empirical study is to investigate ways and factors which contribute to knowledge sharing in the context of multinational academicians at universities. We performed this study at the Information Technology faculty at one of universities in Saudi Arabia, as a case study. The faculty employed academicians from 10 different countries including Malaysia, Jordanian, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Pakistan, Yamen, Algeria and Canada. We used qualitative and quantitative approaches. The sample size of this study is N=40, and n=38 responded to the survey. Research results indicate 100% and 95% of academicians preferred to use phone calls and social media respectively, for knowledge sharing. Between 92% and 95% of the respondents have approved that elements of self-esteem which include satisfaction and feeling proud of oneself, respectively, are factors for knowledge sharing. Despite the fact that there is a strong relationship between trust and friendship, there is a need to substantiate that assumption because only 42% of the respondents shared based on a friendship relationship. Respondents also recognized appreciation and monetary rewards as motivation factors. The language used, lack of informal interactions, voluntary efforts are among barriers of knowledge sharing in this context. Findings of this study can be used a guideline for setting up a knowledge sharing mechanism by multinational higher education institutes

The Use and Effects of Smartphones in Higher Education

The purpose of this study is to investigate the use and effects of smartphones on academic staffs at a university level, especially in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. We conducted a survey study using questionnaires. The questionnaires were randomly distributed to 66 academic staffs who own a smartphone at the Northern Border University. This study discovers the smartphone had replaced a computer, and an email application was mostly used. The academic staffs also had utilized smartphone as a means for knowledge sharing. Social media applications were greatly used in teaching and learning. Despite the benefits of smartphone use, academic staffs had been negatively affected.  This study also reveals that having a smartphone diverted academic staffs' focus at work, created "check habits", and an artificial relationship; more than 90% of the respondents admitted that they put their smartphone besides their bed before sleep, and 61.41% of them claimed that they had the feelings of incompleteness whenever smartphones were not with them.

Techn Techn Techn Techniq iq iq iques, Applications and Challenging Issue in Text Mining ues, Applications and Challenging Issue in Text Mining ues, Applications and Challenging Issue in Text Mining ues

Abstract Text mining is a very exciting research area as it tries to discover knowledge from unstructured texts. These texts can be found on a computer desktop, intranets and the internet. The aim of this paper is to give an overview of text mining in the contexts of its techniques, application domains and the most challenging issue. The focus is given on fundamentals methods of text mining which include natural language possessing and information extraction. This paper also gives a short review on domains which have employed text mining. The challenging issue in text mining which is caused by the complexity in a natural language is also addressed in this paper