Whattya Mean it’s Not All About Me? Involving Undergraduate Students in an Analysis of a Tablet PC Initiative

Institutions of higher learning have understood for many years that in order stay competitive, they must have technology-based initiatives in place. Since the mid-1990’s, there has been a trend toward student laptop lease/buy programs. Beginning in the early 2000’s and until recently, many colleges and universities have begun to experiment with tablet PC computing requirements. More often than not, incoming freshmen have few choices. Typically the university tells the students and their parents which computing platform and manufacturer they have chosen for them and the students are required to purchase or lease that computer at the university’s designated price. Students rarely understand how or why the university has chosen a particular platform and often resent having to pay, what they perceive as, premium prices for their total computing package. This paper introduces a team-based project that was assigned to a 200-level undergraduate Management Information Systems (MIS) class. The purpose of this project was to have the students look at the decision-making process as it impacts not only students, but the university’s faculty, technology support, and finance

The World-Wide Web past present and future, and its application to medicine

The World-Wide Web was first developed as a tool for collaboration in the high energy physics community. From there it spread rapidly to other fields, and grew to its present impressive size. As an easy way to access information, it has been a great success, and a huge number of medical applications have taken advantage of it. But there is another side to the Web, its potential as a tool for collaboration between people. Medical examples include telemedicine and teaching. New technical developments offer still greater potential in medical and other fields. This paper gives some background to the early development of the World-Wide Web, a brief overview of its present state with some examples relevant to medicine, and a look at the future

First Year Experience: How We Can Better Assist First-Year International Students in Higher Education?

While many American colleges and universities are providing a First Year Experience (FYE) course or program for their first year students, those programs are not often customized to take into account international students’ (IS) unique challenges. Using quantitative and qualitative methods, this study evaluated a FYE course that was customized for IS in a college setting. Nineteen IS and eight domestic students (DS) who attended FYE classes completed a survey; 18 of the 19 IS were interviewed. Overall, the FYE class was successful in terms of helping IS to familiarize themselves with academic resources and expectations, understanding American culture, making more American friends, and improving their English language skills. Suggestions for future integration of IS into FYE programs are discussed

An Empirical Study of Behavioral Factors Influencing Text Messaging Intention

This manuscript provides a comprehensive review of many of the behavioral factors associated with the use of technology and tests their applicability to text messaging. The theories explored included End User Computer Satisfaction, Theory of Reasoned Action, Diffusion of Innovation, Theory of Planned Behavior, and Technology Acceptance Model. In addition, Positive and Negative Emotion factors were developed and tested to examine their influence on text messaging behavioral intention. Several statistical processes were utilized to develop and confirm the factors. The results of the study suggest that no one model can fully explain texting behavior but several factors did have a significant influence on intention at p \u3c .05. These factors were Attitude, Compatibility, Ease of Use, Satisfaction, and Visibility. These factors can serve as areas that practitioners and researchers can focus on to improve text messaging intention and obtain the significant benefits of this technology

Analysis of the Variables that Affect Frequency of Use and Time Spent on Social Networking

This manuscript provides a comprehensive review of the many potential variables associated with the use of technology and tests their applicability to social networking. Variables were included from a variety of well accepted theories including Theory of Reasoned Action, Diffusion of Innovation, Theory of Planned Behavior, Technology Acceptance Model and End User Computer Satisfaction. Prior studies have explored variables and factors that influence social networking intention and behavior. This study is an extension of prior studies that separately reviewed emotions associated with social networking behavior and intention as well as applying the TRA model and the Diffusion of Innovation theory model to behavioral intention. This study is unique in that it does not review the intention or usage of the technology but rather explores the frequency of use and the amount of time spent using the technology. In addition, it is a comprehensive look at variables from a number of important behavioral theories as well as emotions. As a result, we can explore a comprehensive review of many variables effect on the relative importance of the technology and its time and frequency penetration on the part of users rather than just a generic variable measuring agreement with an intention to use and actual use

An Empirical Study of Social Networking Behavior Using Diffusion of Innovation Theory

Online social networking (SN) has gained enormous popularity in the last ten years with users numbering in the millions. There are an equal number of males and females who use social networking and there is no difference in ethnicity; Caucasians, African-American and Hispanic adults are equally likely to use these sites. This paper studies social networking behavior using Rogers (1995) model of human behavior known as Diffusion of Innovation (DI). Specifically, findings reveal that behavioral compatibility (COMP) with social networking, relative advantage (RA), complexity (CMPX) and ease of trying (TRY) are positively associated with intention to use social networking. In addition, findings confirm that intention influences use of social networking. A review of gender shows little difference between diffusion influences on intention. The modified DI model provides a good fit with the overall data and can be used to predict and understand the usage of social networking

The Benefits of Service Learning in a Down-Turned Economy

With businesses struggling for resources during economic downturns, traditional business student internships were becoming more difficult to develop. One business school extended its experiential learning opportunities with specific management projects in community small business, healthcare, education, and non-profit organizations. The on-campus service learning center provided project development, logistical support, and assessment for forty-five business students to participate in 38 on-site, Human Resource Management projects. Means and standard deviations for self-report, end-of-semester surveys were determined for six Likert-scale items that measured the students? satisfaction with the project experience, and percentages were calculated of students who indicated specific personal and intellectual benefits derived from the projects. Most students reported favorable experiences with these non-traditional learning sites. Student projects developed management career choice information through the on-site application of their practitioner skills. They also benefited from their classroom reflections and interactions in sharing their problems, insights, and outcomes among their classmates. Students indicated they felt increased self-confidence, more comfortable about entering the working world, and more awareness of the linkages between the business and community service worlds. Through service learning, students gained experience in leadership, scholarship, and citizenship to become better members of their communities despite an economic downturn

Specifying reactive system behavior

Fundamentally, the development of software applications involves dealing with two distinct domains: the real world and software domains; the two converge at the point where a software application is used to make an unsatisfactory real world situation into a satisfactory one. Thus, software application development is a problem solving activity that assumes a problem has been identified and a software application is desired to address this problem. In this context, it is necessary to take measures that ensure the solution will be both adequate and appropriate with respect to the problem. In particular, it is of utmost importance that the problem in hand and the application's role in helping to solve it are satisfactorily understood by the development team. If this condition is not observed then the application produced is doomed to be inadequate and/or inappropriate, independently of the capabilities of the available technologies and resources, and also independently of other wicked aspects of software development: constantly changing requirements, time-to-market pressures, significant social, political, ethical or economic issues in the project, etc. The principal objective of this thesis was to improve the state-of-the-art of specifications that are used to communicate to the development team the behavior of the (future) system. In addressing this objective, this work initially involved defining the essential requirements of specifications that could ensure that the development team has a precise, correct and common understanding of the way the system is required to behave. As a result of analyzing the identified requirements, two general kinds of specifications were distinguished and perceived to be necessary to address the requirements adequately; one that addresses the concerns of the designers, providing a precise description of the system responsibilities; and one that addresses the concerns of the stakeholders in general, providing an informal description of the goals that the stakeholders have against the system. The first specification is referred to as the Behavioral Design Contract and the second one is referred to as the Behavioral Stakeholders Contract. In this thesis, these two specifications were concretely realized as part of the ANZAC approach. The ANZAC approach defines two work artifacts called the ANZAC use case descriptions and the ANZAC specification, which express the Behavioral Stakeholders Contract and the Behavioral Design Contract, respectively. ANZAC use case descriptions offer an informal and usage-oriented description of the concordant goals that the stakeholders have against the system. An ANZAC specification offers a precise, operational description of the system's responsibilities in servicing all possible requests that it can receive over its lifetime; it uses a restricted subset of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) and its Object Constraint Language (OCL). In the ANZAC approach, the ANZAC use case descriptions are developed following the ANZAC use case framework. This framework defines the context, purpose, style and form of an ANZAC use case description, and it provides a goal-based approach to use case elicitation. Once a number of ANZAC use case descriptions are established, they can be refined to an ANZAC specification. This refinement procedure is (informally) defined by the ANZAC mapping technique. An ANZAC specification is developed by the description of three models, which each express a different but complementary view of the system. These three models are called the Concept Model, the Operation Model, and the Protocol Model. The Concept Model defines an abstract system state space in terms of concepts from the problem domain, the Operation Model describes the effect of system operations on the system state, and the Protocol Model defines the correct behavior of the system in terms of its (allowable) input protocol. As a "proof of concept", this thesis demonstrates the ANZAC approach applied to an elevator control system, which is used to show how ANZAC offers a clean approach for capturing the Behavioral Stakeholders and Design Contract. The elevator case study demonstrates the mapping between the Behavioral Stakeholders Contract and the Behavioral Design Contract using the ANZAC mapping technique. It also highlights the difference in the level of precision and formality that can be found between ANZAC use case descriptions and an ANZAC specification. Furthermore, it demonstrates some of the more advanced features of the ANZAC approach, in particular, its ability to specify performance constraints and concurrent behavior

Does Gender Play A Role In Text Messaging?

This purpose of this research was to study the effect of gender on text messaging (SMS). A comprehensive survey was developed to explore various aspects of text messaging usage. The survey included factors from the Theory of Reasoned Action, Technology Acceptance Model, Theory of Planned Behavior, End User Computer Satisfaction, Expectation/Confirmation Theory, and Diffusion of Innovation. Overall, there was very little statistical difference based on gender with the exception of emotions. All of the positive emotions were higher for females than males. In other words, females were more pleased, satisfied, contented, and delighted with their text messaging experience