Factors Influencing Extension Workers’ Behavioural Intentions Towards Digital Farm Technologies in Malawi

Information and Communication and digital farm technologies are vital in improving agriculture produc-tion. Despite introducing digital farm technologies in Malawi, the country continues to have low agriculture production. The country has a low uptake of technology, which is a major driving factor of agriculture productivity. Therefore, this research aims to examine factors that influence the behavioural intention of extension workers towards using digital farm technologies to improve agriculture production. The research covers 14 districts of Malawi, where the digital farm technology, National Agriculture Management Infor-mation System (NAMIS), is currently operational. Centring on the Theory of Planned Behaviour and the quantitative study approach showed that perceived behaviour control and subjective norms influence be-haviour intention. At the same time, attitude is not a significant determinant of behaviour intention of using digital farm technologies

The effect of using entry-level keyboards in improving user-adaptability to new keyboards: Case of the Central-Bantu keyboards

Current trends in keyboard design show that QWERTY-similarity is a key factor for high user-adaptability keyboard design. This design approach has the challenge that the higher the similarity the lower the text-entry rate for the optimized keyboard. This article reports on the findings of an empirical study which we conducted on QWERTY-users to measure the effect of using an entry-level keyboard in improving user-ability to adapt to a new keyboard. The study used two Central-Bantu physical keyboards (entry-level: with high QWERTY-similarity, and advanced-level: with low similarity) which we had designed in an earlier study. The empirical study obtained learning-curves of the Advanced-level keyboard, of a 12-participant group which was first introduced to an entry-level keyboard, against a control-group of similar size, in a longitudinal study design. A two-sample t-test on the empirical results showed that the entry-level approach caused a marginally significant text-entry-rate improvement of 9.4% with p < .09. A two-sample U-test on word-error rates indicated a non-significant improvement of 8.4%. Our study has shown that the use of entry keyboards is an effective strategy in improving keyboard user-adaptability