‘Facebook surveillance = parental love’, and other puzzling equations of the mobile age

Sun Sun Lim explores the effect of asymmetries in families created by the use of mobile devices in Asia. Sun has studied the social implications of technology domestication by young people and families in Asia for over 10 years. Her forthcoming book, Mobile communication and the family – Asian experiences in technology domestication, features chapters on Cambodia, China, India, Indonesia, Korea, the Philippines, Singapore and Vietnam. Sun is Assistant Dean for Research at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and Associate Professor at the Department of Communications and New Media, National University of Singapore

Why Students Drop Out of School: A Review of 25 Years of Research

Reviews research on the underlying causes of the high school dropout crisis -- individual and institutional characteristics that predict whether a student is likely to drop out of high school. Discusses student engagement, deviance, and other models

From Senseless Swarms to Smart Mobs: Tuning Networks for Prosocial Behaviour

Social media have been seen to accelerate the spread of negative content such as disinformation and hate speech, often unleashing reckless herd mentality within networks, further aggravated by malicious entities using bots for amplification. So far, the response to this emerging global crisis has centred around social media platform companies making reactive moves that appear to have greater symbolic value than practical utility. These include taking down patently objectionable content or manually deactivating the accounts of bad actors, while leaving vast troves of negative content to circulate and perpetuate within social networks. Governments worldwide have thus sought to intervene using regulatory tools, with countries such as France, Germany and Singapore introducing laws to compel technology companies to take down or correct erroneous and harmful content. However, the relentless pace of technological progress enfeebles regulatory measures that seem fated for obsolescence.Comment: To appear in IEEE Technology and Society Magazin

AN INVESTIGATION OF STUDENTS' EXPERIENCES WITH A WEB-BASED, DATA-DRIVEN WRITING ASSISTANCE ENVIRONMENT FOR IMPROVING KOREAN EFL WRITERS' ACCURACY WITH ENGLISH GRAMMAR AND VOCABULARY

Computer-assisted language learning (CALL) has played an increasingly important role in writing instruction and research. While research has been conducted on English as a second language (ESL) learners and the benefits of using web-based writing assistance programs in writing instruction, insufficient research has been done on English as a foreign language (EFL) students. This study is an empirical investigation of students' experiences with a web-based, data-driven writing assistance environment (e4writing) designed by the researcher to help Korean EFL writers with their grammar and vocabulary. This study investigated Korean university students' perceived difficulties with English grammar and vocabulary as they wrote in English. It also explored their perceptions of e4writing as used in a writing course to enhance English grammar and vocabulary. This study investigated 12 participants' perceptions and "academic profiles" (learning styles, confidence, motivation, and other factors) when they were enrolled in a 16-week course called Teaching Methods for English Composition. To gain a more specific and personal view, the study also included detailed case studies of four of the study participants. The major sources of data for the analyses include interviews, reflective journals, questionnaires, samples of the students' writing before and after their use of e4writing and the researcher's reflective notes. The study revealed that most of the students had difficulty with grammar and vocabulary in English writing. They positively perceived e4writing, as it provided individualized help on their problems with grammar and lexis. Overall, the students showed improvement in accuracy from the pretest to the posttest, and observations suggested that e4writing was probably related to this improvement; however, strong claims about e4writing as a cause of improvement cannot be made without a control group. The students felt e4writing was more beneficial for improving grammatical accuracy than for vocabulary accuracy. The students recommended that some features of e4writing be written in Korean to help students understand grammar and vocabulary explanations

DYNAMIC RESOURCE-BASED VIEW OF ENTREPRENEURIAL FIRM GROWTH An Integrative Theory of Sustainable Growth

This study makes several important contributions to the literature. The proposed theory provides the foundation of a meaningful research program on entrepreneurial firm growth. It helps close the gap between the mainstream resource-based view and entrepreneurship research, adding to the growing body of dynamic resource-based view research. Finally, the study complements the extant literature on firm growth by addressing a main gap in the literature. The proposed theory also has important managerial implications. Practicing entrepreneurs will benefit from using the proposed dynamic resource pyramid as the cognitive foundation for developing their growth strategy. Entrepreneurs should constantly monitor all elements of their resource pyramid and coordinate these resources in such a way as to support firm growth. Sustainable firm growth can only be achieved when growth in every dimension is dynamically balanced and synchronized

Internet shopping - A taxonomy of consumer online actions.

This thesis applied the theory of activity and goal-directed action to the study of online shopping actions. It first studied qualitatively the structures of online shopping actions using the self-confrontation interview method. The qualitative findings established the structural, cognitive and dispositional dimensions of online shopping actions including knowledge and value structures, attention processes and flow. The typical behavioural traits of online shoppers were also identified. Findings also emerged about the tensions between consumers' online and offline actions and the consequences of the technological mediation of shopping. From these qualitative findings, a survey instrument was developed to query online shoppers on various dimensions of their online shopping actions. Cluster analysis of the survey results produced a taxonomy of consumer online actions from which a typology of online shoppers was generated. The qualitative findings on the typical behavioural traits of online shoppers were then used as criteria for the qualitative usability analysis of retail websites. Retail websites of four product and service categories were analysed for their usability, i.e. ability to accommodate the typical behavioural traits of online shoppers such as propensity to experience information overload and to multi-task, potential for experiencing affect and flow etc. This thesis made several theoretical, methodological and practical contributions. It extended goal-directed action theory beyond its traditional scope of work actions and group activity to the realm of consumer behaviour. It also introduced a different theoretical framework to consumer psychology by applying the theory of activity and goal directed action to consumer behaviour. It made a methodological contribution by applying the self-confrontation interview method to the study of online behaviour. This thesis' findings also have practical implications for the understanding of online behaviour, the diffusion of e-commerce and the design of Internet interfaces