Information seeking behaviour and international students: The role of social media in addressing challenges while abroad

Social media are now becoming necessary tools for researchers, teachers and students in seeking for information. Past research conducted on information seeking behaviour highlighted the challenges of the international students and how they used social media to overcome their challenges while being abroad in new culture and unfamiliar surroundings.In order to understand how international students cope with the various challenges that they are facing, a systematic literature review (SLR) study on their information seeking behavior using social media was conducted. Results show that international students actively use social media to seek for information.Their interactions with (i) online contents, (ii) fellow international students, (iii) local students, and (iv) the local community have benefited them in overcoming their struggles.This research contributes in enriching our understanding on the types of information sought by international students in the respective host country, the role of social media in supporting information seeking process and how best universities could provide the necessary support

A Generic Integrated Intelligent Agent (GIIA) for electronic business

Intelligent agent is a program that automates our interactions on the Web. It is a program that performs functions such as information gathering, information filtering, or mediation (running in the background) on behalf of a person or entity. This marvelous program can be delegated to do among others, the following tasks: to make airline and hotel reservations, to order new books from an online store, to find out about the latest song from a favorite musician, or to monitor stock portfolios.Some of the more sophisticated intelligent agents can even negotiate the purchase of raw materials for a factory, schedule factory production, negotiate delivery schedules with a customer's intelligent agent, and automate the billing process.As a body of knowledge, intelligent agent is indeed, an area extensively researched.However, most of the existing intelligent agents are not generic in the sense that they are not designed to be compatible with one another and the interfaces including the navigational systems are often cumbersome to use. Thus, a Generic Integrated Intelligent Agent (GIIA) is proposed to be developed in order to overcome the two major limitations of the available intelligent agents mentioned earlier. The GIIA should be able to integrate the existing agents capabilities into one powerful system (by making the system generic enough for a multipurpose usage) and also by providing a single, common and friendly user interface for the whole activities need to be run by the agent’s user.The GIIA architecture to be built should fulfill all the following six systems requirements: open, extensible, distributed, parallel, mobile and multimodal.As electronic commerce is now fast becoming trend which simplifies lives, it is expected that electronic commerce applications such as GIIA will enhance the living quality of its users

Nonlinear finite element analysis of reinforced concrete beams strengthened with textile fine grained mortar

Nowadays, there was an increasing need of repairing and upgrading the reinforced concrete (RC) structure due to the deterioration of the structure. The fibre reinforced polymer (FRP) was commonly used for structural retrofitting purposes. However, owing to the debonding of the FRP from the concrete substrate and high cost of epoxy, it was gradually replaced with textile fine grained mortar (TFGM) nowadays. The TFGM system has been widely used in the construction field nowadays to repair the structure. Our study focus on the strain performances of the concrete surface, steel reinforcement and the textile itself. There were many proven experimental results showing that the TFGM was more effective than the other strengthening method such as FRP plate method. The experimental work done by previous researcher on investigation of strain performances of the concrete surface, steel reinforcement and the textile itself which consists of eleven (11) RC beams with dimension 150 x 200 x 2500 mm. The RC beams were strengthened with FGM and TFGM with 4 layers. The investigation continued with the finite element (FE) strain performance analysis with using Advanced Tool for Engineering Nonlinear Analysis (ATENA) software. The strain of the concrete surface, steel reinforcement and the textile were measured at a mid-point of RC beam. Then, the results of the finite element analysis software ATENA compared against the experimental results. The strain performances of the concrete and steel reinforcement improved noticeably when the number of layers of textile reinforcement used increased

The Use of Online Social Networking for Higher Education from An Activity Theory Perspective

Social technologies including blogs, wikis, social bookmarking sites, photo sharing, video sharing and social networking sites (SNS) have been widely used to facilitate online social networking (OSN). We define OSN as a range of activities enabled by online social technologies and operationalised by a group of people. OSN is widely popular for non-educational purposes among students. However, OSN also has the potential to be appropriated and repurposed to support teaching and learning delivery in a formal learning environment. Despite the availability of implementation cases and trials, detailed studies on why and how lecturers and students appropriate and repurpose social technologies for OSN in education are still lacking. In addition, these understandings are seldom guided by any theoretical frameworks. This paper suggests the use of Activity Theory as the theoretical lens in investigating the use of OSN in higher education. A conceptual model of how social technologies can be appropriated and repurposed guided by the theoretical understandings is proposed and discussed

A Conceptual Model Of Foreign Student Profiling

The proliferation of the foreign student’s enrolment is projected at 7.2 million in the year 2025 from 1.8 million in 2000. Malaysian institutions are driven by foreign student’s recruitment in line with Ministry of Higher Education vision of recruiting 200,000 foreign students by the year 2020. Although Malaysia emerging as one of top ten foreign students’ recruiter, the knowledge of the extent of foreign students’ intention to study in Malaysia is still modest. Yet, there is no precise profiling system that could infer whether these foreign students are genuinely coming into Malaysia for education purpose. To fill this study gap, we utilize the immense of information which available through the various types of social media, we adopt the user profiling method using social network analysis for the detection purpose of foreign students in Malaysian public universities

A Systematic Appropriation of Social Technologies for Educational Activities: Empirical Study of Australian Lecturers

The use of Online Social Networking (OSN) for teaching and learning is a phenomenon observed in many countries today. However, how academics use and appropriate social technologies in higher education is still not well understood. In particular, the systematic appropriation processes of the social technologies have not been discussed much in the literature. This paper offers an empirical study concerning the way lecturers appropriate social technologies based on interviews with fourteen lecturers in seven Australian universities. The findings discovered two appropriation approaches, namely systematic-procedural and non-systematic-ad hoc process. There are also two key reasons for using social technologies: as content for the course, and as the core teaching and learning tool. Further, for student learning, the social technologies are used either as a medium for coursework or for supporting informal communication. This research provides new insights into a methodological and systematic appropriation of social technologies from which higher education may benefit from

Virtual reality applications in manufacturing system

Virtual reality (VR) is a high-end human computer interface that strives to immerse the designers and users completely in a virtual interactive environment for a simulation of real world. In order to meet the requirements of market competition, VR technologies can not only reduce effectively the time and cost, but also optimize complex products in the design process. Virtual reality is a rapidly developing computer interface that strives to immerse the user completely within an experimental simulation, thereby enhancing the overall impact and providing a much more intuitive link between the computer and the human participants. Virtual reality has been applied successfully to hundreds of scenarios in diverse areas including prototyping, manufacturing, scientific visualisation, engineering, and education. This paper discusses the applications of virtual reality in the manufacturing industry

Exploring the Issues of Open Government Data Implementation in Malaysian Public Sectors

The paper presents a preliminary study of current progress and the issues of OGD implementation in Malaysia. With this objective, the authors attempt to identify initial factors that influence OGD implementation in the public sectors and discern how far the OGD initiative in Malaysia has grown since its inception. The authors make the highlight of the OGD implementation phase rather than adoption phase due to the research aim is to look at the OGD activities beyond adoption. Adoption phase is where the organization is in the state of deciding whether to adopt an innovation or not, while the implementation phase is the extent where the innovation is taking into actual use. Taking from the perspective of the central agency who is leading the OGD initiative, by using interview, observation, and desk research as the research approaches, the issues pertaining to OGD implementation is consolidated into the technology-organization-environment framework. The findings have indicated that data granularity, culture, policy, resources, skills, incentives, use and participation, and external pressure are the current issues transpired in the OGD implementation. These findings are contributing to the conceptual framework of authors’ future works in determining the factors influencing OGD post-adoption in the public sectors

Opinion spamming in social media: a brief systematic review

Opinion spamming in social media is an activity of people giving or sharing fake reviews or irrelevant opinions to online communities. The fake reviews are not merely misguided sentiment analysis and opinion mining system, but also severely affected online communities’ decision and businesses reputation.Thus, opinion spamming detection (OSD) technique is needed to enhance an opinion mining system and prevent such cases from happening to the online communities.This study was conducted using the systematic literature review (SLR) procedure to classify known opinion spam features in social media platforms, and to reveal types of social media platforms that are being addressed by OSD’s researchers.The result is, we found that, spatial and temporal factors in reviewer feature type is a current issue and is important to be solved because of spammer always changing their spamming strategy.On the other hand, most of the studies leveraged ngram character and part-of-speech approaches in a review feature type because of its significant improved OSD’s accuracy. Furthermore, we found that, most of the studies focused on trading and marketing-based social media platform, in which a lack of OSD’s study in other forms of social media platforms i.e. social networking and user generated content sites