2009 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

With increasing reliance on outsourcing, cross-cultural teams, distributed knowledge workers, and other international collaborations distance learning (DL) has become a key agent of strategic competitive advantage and organisational renewal. This study stresses the importance of culture to DL success. To effectively use DL, we must understand the role culture plays in conceptualizing, inventing, a... View full abstract»

This work is based on the premise that online learning environments can potentially help develop communities of scholars by enabling participants to discover persons and resources from contexts other than the original course to which they were assigned. Our software, Prometheus, is being used to support online university level education and teacher professional development under an open community ... View full abstract»

The significance of social presence in asynchronous computer conferencing has become an increasingly important factor in establishing high-quality online learning environments. Levels of social presence exhibited in asynchronous computer conferences influence students' perceptions of learning and satisfaction levels in Web-based courses. Recently, faculty teaching online courses have begun to use ... View full abstract»

Collaborative information filtering techniques play a key role in many Web 2.0 applications. While they are currently mainly used for business purposes such as product recommendation, collaborative filtering also has potential for usage in eLearning applications. The quality of a student provided solution can be heuristically determined by peers who review the solution, thus effectively disburdeni... View full abstract»

Past literatures on e-learning system and courseware have focused on the system features and on the technologies employed. To integrate IT well with pedagogical principles, it is important to involve instructors in the courseware development. This study seeks to gain insight on courseware development by investigating instructor's different roles in each courseware development phase. Using an educa... View full abstract»

According to Tim Berners-Lee, wiki technology represents an instantiation of how the World Wide Web was planned to work: a platform that users can use both to retrieve content (read) and contribute content (write). Wiki technology lends itself to many uses. One of the main features of wiki technology is its support for collaborative editing of content. In this paper, we introduce briefly wiki tech... View full abstract»

The article presents a framework for the design of ubiquitous learning applications that considers four main elements: the knowledge about learner's profile and needs; the context (physical, temporal and social) that surrounds mobile learners; the educational paradigm or model considered and the possibilities and limitations of mobile and wireless technologies. The proposed framework is applied in... View full abstract»

In this paper, we address the potential of project wikis to support reflection on the project process through participants' reconstruction of the project trajectory. Drawing on a case study of software engineering project work, we illustrate how information on project history can be found in a project wiki and may be used to support recall of and reflection on the process. We discuss implications ... View full abstract»

Second Life is an online virtual world that is gaining popularity in academic institutions as an alternative means for collaborative and distance education. However, the number of formal research efforts that assess the impacts of an educational experience in Second Life is limited. In this paper, we present the results of a pilot study that used a quasi-experimental pretest-posttest comparison gr... View full abstract»

This study aims to analyze 13 collaborative teams in a global Web-based student design project in terms of participation activity levels, participation characteristics and the use of the three types of communication: cognitive, emotional, and social. Furthermore, it examines the association between 1) participation and communication characteristics and 2) design outcomes, in order to identify pote... View full abstract»

This study analyzed rhythm and timing in 18 instant messenger (IM) conversations between one advisor and four graduate students (4 dyads), hypothesizing that individuals would show a consistent style across sessions but would differ from one another across dyads. ANOVA results supported the hypotheses for individual students and dyads; however, the advisor varied the timing of her messages to harm... View full abstract»

Two emerging trends are impacting both universities and corporate training programs: virtual learning and diversity. Virtual learning teams (VLT) learn by solving intellectual and cognitive tasks that require the sharing and utilization of information to achieve learning objectives. VLT members are separated by spatial distance and do not have the same opportunities to communicate as do traditiona... View full abstract»

We have used a design science approach to study the collaborative creation of conceptual models. We have designed a collaborative modeling architecture based on business needs and applicable knowledge from theory and empirical findings from a modeling study using conventional modeling. A tool for this architecture was then developed and used as an instrument to confirm the practical relevance of t... View full abstract»

The process of building system dynamics models ranges from linear iterative phases to the circular iterative phases. However, while all these process designs are well known and explicit to system dynamics modellers, they are not comprehensive for participative modelling involving clients/participants without prior modelling knowledge. This paper presents a detailed modelling process design of six ... View full abstract»

Collaborative effort is necessary to achieve value when input from multiple stakeholders is required. In order to deal with the complexity of information shared in collaborative efforts, groups need to organize the information they process. In this paper we present a frame of reference in terms of key concepts of organizing in order to spark thinking which will answer key questions about the natur... View full abstract»

Documenting complex and collaborative business processes is time-consuming and cost-intensive. Reference modeling offers compositional mechanisms which provide the ability to overcome such challenges by supporting component-oriented procedural structures. This paper describes a methodology for the domain-independent development of components, in the following called reference process building bloc... View full abstract»

Today's software development projects have a huge demand for a comprehensive and integrated support in the team-based development of models. Since they typically rely on file-based version control systems such as CVS and assume that working with models does not differ from working with code, current solutions solve only one part of the problem. This paper addresses this gap between what is needed ... View full abstract»