Critical Success Factors in M-Learning: A Socio-Technical Perspective

Educational institutions around the world increasingly view mobile technology as an effective platform for educating a new generation of students. Unfortunately, educational institutions often fail to achieve substantial results with their mobile-learning initiatives. Studies on m-learning have produced several recommendations about how to improve of its success. These recommendations cover a set of factors limited to people, technology, and pedagogy. This qualitative case study adopts a broader socio-technical perspective on m-learning and produces an extended list of critical success factors in m-learning. These factors fall into organization, people, pedagogy, and technology domains. I used the Abilene Christian University as the site for this study. Additional critical success factors I uncovered include executive involvement, resource allocation, technology injection, supporting creation of m-learning content and applications, technological pluralism, championship, infrastructure development, pedagogical freedom, collaboration, continuous learning and improvement, and external recognition

Anything You Search Can Be Used Against You in a Court Of Law: Data Mining in Search Archives

AOL\u27s recent public release of user search information resulted in a heated privacy debate. This case study is a detailed account of this incident. The case is designed as an in-class teaching aid covering managerial, legal, and ethical issues related to privacy. It consists of four sections (A, B, C, and D). Each section is fairly short and is designed to be read in class, separated by discussion of the previous section. Alternatively, the first section might be distributed in advance; though this runs the risk of students identifying the case and jumping ahead in the discussion (AOL\u27s identity is concealed from students until the end of section B). A set of potential discussion questions for each section appears in the appendix. While there are too many questions to be covered in a single class, instructors can choose questions based on their particular teaching objective. A teaching note is also available from the authors

Web Scraping in the R Language: A Tutorial

Information Systems researchers can now more easily access vast amounts of data on the World Wide Web to answer both familiar and new questions with more rigor, precision, and timeliness. The main goal of this tutorial is to explain how Information Systems researchers can automatically “scrape” data from the web using the R programming language. This article provides a conceptual overview of the Web Scraping process. The tutorial discussion is about two R packages useful for Web Scraping: “rvest” and “xml2”. Simple examples of web scraping involving these two packages are provided. This tutorial concludes with an example of a complex web scraping task involving retrieving data from Bayt.com - a leading employment website in the Middle East

Future Security Approaches and Biometrics

Threats to information security are proliferating rapidly, placing demanding requirements on protecting tangible and intangible business and individual assets. Biometrics can improve security by replacing or complementing traditional security technologies. This tutorial discusses the strengths and weaknesses of biometrics and traditional security approaches, current and future applications of biometrics, performance evaluation measures of biometric systems, and privacy issues surrounding the new technology

Tutorial: Legality and Ethics of Web Scraping

Researchers and practitioners often use various tools and technologies to automatically retrieve data from the Web (often referred to as Web scraping) when conducting their projects. Unfortunately, they often overlook the legality and ethics of using these tools to collect data. Failure to pay due attention to these aspects of Web Scraping can result in serious ethical controversies and lawsuits. Accordingly, we review legal literature together with the literature on ethics and privacy to identify broad areas of concern together with a list of specific questions that researchers and practitioners engaged in Web scraping need to address. Reflecting on these questions and concerns can potentially help researchers and practitioners decrease the likelihood of ethical and legal controversies in their work

ERP Implementation Gone Terribly Wrong: The Case of Natural Springs

A Russian start-up company successfully introduced bottled still water to the Russian market and, despite the rapid growth of competition, three years later remained the market leader. The firm’s CFO convinces the CEO of the need for an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. He justifies the ERP as the means to enhance financial and administrative controls, to prepare for an IPO, and, among other reasons, to create efficiencies by better linking the St. Petersburg headquarters with their bottling facility located 100 miles to the north. The implementation fails, primarily due to widespread resistance within the factory as well as from the firm’s COO. The Case provides students with a rich look at implementation and counter-implementation of information systems as well as the high-level politics that can often seemingly mysteriously impact systems implementation. Further interest and opportunities for discussion are added via the Russian context and the transition to free markets, as well as the technical and operational work-arounds often required to deal with the inadequate public infrastructure often found in less developed parts of the world or, as in this case, in sections of a particular country

Predicting the Future of Disruptive Technologies: The Method of Alternative Histories

Predicting the future of disruptive technological innovations is an essential task of any business leader. Looking into the future of disruptive technologies requires an epistemological stance that accommodates the inherent uncertainty and non-linearity of these technologies. Unfortunately, much of the current theoretical tradition with respect to adoption and diffusion of innovation is linear and deterministic; it does not accommodate the inherent uncertainty and non-linearity of disruptive technologies. This work in progress is an attempt to propose a philosophical base together with a practical method that would allow business professionals to glimpse into the future of disruptive technologies. This proposed approach is referred to in this paper as “the method of alternative histories”. This approach is based on the philosophical ideas of Imre Lakatos, Roy Bhaskar, Bruno Latour, and Nassim Taleb

Teaching Principles of Effective Written Communication to International Students

After many years of teaching international students, I realized there is a rather limited and reoccurring list of problems in the students’ writing. These problems seem to be present in students’ writing regardless of their country of origin or first language. While many of these problems do not constitute a “fatal flaw”, they seriously undermine effectiveness of their written communication. To put in simple words, they make it harder for a reader to understand one’s true message. And this often has little to do with one’s knowledge of English. Therefore, this poster focuses primarily on the fundamental principles of written communication that make communication more effective regardless of which language is used for communication. Written communication effectiveness is defined here as the ability to get your recipient understand your true intended message with the minimum amount of time and effort. If English is a second or third language for a student, this does not automatically put him her at a disadvantage with respect to written communication. International students can still learn how to communicate effectively in written form despite the limited vocabulary or lack of understanding of many of the nuances of English grammar. Teaching international students these principles of effective written communication requires educating them about those principles and enforcing those principles in every assignment. These principles can be communicated and enforced via handouts, presentations and written communication rubrics. These materials will be distributed as a part of this presentation free of charge