Native or Novice?: An Exploratory Study of the Access to and Use of Digital Technologies among Pathway Students

Access to and use of technology by students deemed to be ‘Digital Natives' studying in the Higher Education (HE) sector has been an area of much interest, speculation and publication. This chapter reports on a small-scale exploratory study that aimed to uncover the digital technology access and practices in both everyday life and academic study of ‘new' international first-year ‘pathway' students at the Eynesbury Institute of Business and Technology (EIBT). The purpose of this study was to contribute to the debate on digital natives by providing a ‘piece of evidence' on the access to and use of digital technologies by a group of pre-university pathway students. This exploratory study stemmed from the realisation that EIBT lecturers could better meet the needs of the current generation and cohort of 20+ ethnically diverse students, and help them acculturate and transition as lifelong learners who are able to adapt to an evolving information landscape in Australian HE and upon their return home

Reflections on the impact of social technologies on lecturers in a pathway institution

Education has evolved over time from face-to-face teaching to computer-supported learning, and now to even more sophisticated electronic tools. In particular, social technologies are being used to supple- ment the classroom experience and to ensure that students are becoming increasingly engaged in ways that appeal to them. No matter how educationally beneficial, however, new technology is affected by its users. To investigate this, lecturers at the Eynesbury Institute of Business and Technology (EIBT)—a Higher Education pathway provider—were surveyed to determine their perception and application of social technolog(ies) in their personal, but predominantly ‘professional’ lives. Utilising a qualitative and autoethnographic approach, one author provides an insight into their own attitude toward social technologies, coupled with responses to three open-ended questions. Thereafter, the same questions were posed to EIBT academic staff to understand their willingness or reluctance to use social technologies in their practice as part of their first-year pathway course(s)

Factors Affecting RFID Adoption: An Exploratory Study

In marketing, a customer purchases a product while a consumer uses the product; which means that an adopter of an innovation behaves like a consumer of a new product. But surprisingly no initiative has been made to relate/integrate an adopter with a consumer. This article has done this. Technological, organizational, environmental factors as well as “expectations” from using the technology are important for the acceptance and continued use of a technological innovation. This paper integrates the effect of innovation characteristics along with the expectation on RFID adoption, in the context of Australian livestock industry. To do this, this study first presents a theoretical analysis then presents the outcomes from eight interviews which were con¬ducted among livestock farms in Australia. Finally, it proposes a research framework while proposing eleven propositions related to RFID adoption. Contribution-wise, policy makers may compare their experience with this study, evaluate the past, and find the future direction