‘It’s Almost Like Talking to a Person’: Student Disclosure to Pedagogical Agents in Sensitive Settings.

This paper presents findings of a pilot study which used pedagogical agents to examine disclosure in educational settings. The study used responsive evaluation to explore how use of pedagogical agents might affect students’ truthfulness and disclosure by asking them to respond to a lifestyle choices survey delivered by a web-based pedagogical agent. Findings indicate that emotional connection with pedagogical agents were intrinsic to the user’s sense of trust and therefore likely to affect levels of truthfulness and engagement. The implications of this study are that truthfulness, personalisation and emotional engagement are all vital components in using pedagogical agents to enhance online learning

The impact of mobile phone uses in the developing world: giving voice to the rural poor in the Congo

In recent years, the rise of information and communication technologies (ICTs) contrasted with the dire living conditions of the world’s poorest has been the subject of debate among industry and academia. However, despite the amount of writings produced on mobile phones, Western bias is surprisingly unbridledly prevailing alongside the fêted dissemination of mobile phones. Expansive literature tends to present the rapid adoption of mobile phones among rural individuals, with little to no indication of how local values and voices are respected or promoted. We undertook semi-structured interviews with 16 rural chiefs to inquire into ways in which mobile phones enabled socio-economic development in the rural Congo. Rather than using quantitative, large-scale, or top-down data, we sought to give voice to chiefs themselves about the role of mobile phones. We found that Western bias dominates the literature and deployment of mobile phones more than usually acknowledged. We suggested some paths forward, while bringing the African communal Utu or Ubuntu culture to the center stage

Absorptive capacity and ERP implementation in Indian medium-sized firms

Whilst absorptive capacity has been identified as an important contributor to the effective implementation of IT systems, previous studies have failed to explicitly consider the contribution of individual and organizational knowledge processes. Nine case studies of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation were undertaken. The case studies were all undertaken in SMEs in a developing country since this is an important but under research area for the application of the concept of absorptive capacity. A particular implication of the findings is that firms lacking knowledge of IT implementation cannot simply seek this from external sources but must develop internal organizational knowledge processes if their implementations of IT systems are to be effective. This finding is particularly pertinent to the developing country and SME context of this study, where low levels of experience within the firm and the loss of experienced staff are found to impact on the development of absorptive capacity

Positioning Teacher Candidates as Self-Regulated, Critically Thinking Learners and Teachers in an Elementary Writing Course With a Tutoring Component

Few interventions attempt to foster teacher candidates\u27 self-regulated learning and teaching roles concurrently. This chapter explores 12 education majors\u27 development of self-regulated, critical thinking skills related to learning and teaching as they participated in an elementary writing methods course with a tutoring component. The instructor of the course devised and offered a four-step model of intervention to stimulate the teacher candidates\u27 self-regulatory dispositions. The teacher candidates perceived their responses to context-specific questions created by the instructor as most beneficial to their development of self-regulated attributes