Acceptance of competency-based workplace e-learning systems: Effects of individual and peer learning support

Current endeavors to integrate competency-based learning approaches with e-learning systems designed for delivery of training to adult learners in the workplace are growing. However, academic efforts in examining learners’ perceptions of, and reactions toward, this technology-delivered pedagogical innovation are limited. Drawing together perspectives from the literature on training and instructional design and technology acceptance, this research proposed a conceptual model to examine the influences of perceived individual and social learning support on employees’ acceptance of competency-based e-learning systems. Structural equation modeling and multi-group structural equation modeling techniques were applied to sample data collected from work settings in Mainland China. The results show the positive effects of perceived individual learning support and perceived support for promoting a norm of cooperation on employees’ intention to use the competency-based e-learning system. It was also found that perceived support for enhancing social ties had a negative effect on employees’ behavioral intention. The gender, age, prior experience, and work experience differences in the main effects were also investigated. Besides, qualitative data collected via semi-structured in-depth interview provide complementary evidence to the findings.     

Web 2.0-based webstrategies for three different types of organizations

Lately, web technology has gained strategic importance. It can be seen in the growing number of organizations that realize the importance of a proper webstrategy in this globalization era, where distributed work environment, knowledge-based economy and collaborative business models have emerged. The phenomenon of web 2.0 technologies has led many internet companies and communities, such as Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, and Facebook, to successfully adjust their webstrategy by adopting web 2.0 concepts to sustain their advantage and reach their objectives. As a consequence, interest has risen from more traditional organizations to benefit from web 2.0 concepts in enhancing their competitive advantage. This paper discusses the influence of web 2.0 concepts in the webstrategy formulation for organizations with differing requirements, characteristics and objectives. The research categorizes organization types into Customer Intimacy, Operational Excellence and Product Leadership, based on the Value Disciplines model.     

Inclusive social tagging and its support in Web 2.0 services

This paper investigates the Web 2.0 phenomenon of social tagging in the context of existing approaches to semantic data structuring. Social tagging is embedded into the space spanned by current structuring approaches like taxonomies, meta-data, and ontologies in order to identify its semantic and pragmatic foundations. Thereby, we use the Inclusive Universal Access paradigm to assess social tagging with respect to socio-technical criteria for inclusive and barrier-free provision and usage of web services. As a result of this analysis we propose a concept we chose to call “Inclusive Social Tagging”. We subsequently use the requirements set forth by this concept to assess the tagging functionality of currently popular Web 2.0 services. We found that these services differ significantly in their implementation of tagging functionality, and we did not discover any service providing full compliance with Inclusive Social Tagging requirements.     

Development and evaluation of a Web 2.0 annotation system as a learning tool in an e-learning environment

The emergence of Web 2.0 technology provides more opportunities to foster online communication and sharing in an e-learning environment. The purpose of this study was to develop a Web 2.0 annotation system, MyNote, based on the Web 2.0 core concepts which emphasize ease of access and active sharing and then to gain an understanding about people’s perceptions of MyNote from a usability perspective. MyNote was employed on multimedia learning objects in a Learning Management System (LMS), and out of the LMS as well in this study. The evaluation results showed that, with factor analysis, interactivity, usefulness, helpfulness, and willingness for future use were categorized to represent the perceptions of MyNote. It was also found that the factors of interactivity and helpfulness were statistically significant to predict the future use of MyNote. Lastly, the habit of taking notes also affected learners’ perceptions of using MyNote.     

Integrating a case-based reasoning shell and Web 2.0: design recommendations and insights

The design and implementation of case-based reasoning (CBR) applications is time-consuming. To facilitate the development of CBR applications in various problem domains, the CBR community has created a number of CBR shells and software frameworks in the past twenty years. This paper provides a review of the state-of-the-art of CBR shells and software frameworks, highlights why the integration of Web 2.0 and CBR development tools is useful, and gives an example as to how we implement such integration. We use this example to illustrate how Web 2.0 features such as blogging functions can be integrated in a CBR system. Design recommendations and insights for implementing a Web 2.0-based CBR shell are also provided.     

Metcalfe's law, Web 2.0, and the Semantic Web

The power of the Web is enhanced through the network effect produced as resources link to each other with the value determined by Metcalfe's law. In Web 2.0 applications, much of that effect is delivered through social linkages realized via social networks online. Unfortunately, the associated semantics for Web 2.0 applications, delivered through tagging, is generally minimally hierarchical and sparsely linked. The Semantic Web suffers from the opposite problem. Semantic information, delivered through ontologies of varying amounts of expressivity, is linked to other terms (within or between resources) creating a link space in the semantic realm. However, the use of the Semantic Web has yet to fully realize the social schemes that provide the network of users. In this article, we discuss putting these together, with linked semantics coupled to linked social networks, to deliver a much greater effect.     

A Web 2.0-based collaborative annotation system for enhancing knowledge sharing in collaborative learning environments

A limitation of current Web-based collaborative learning is the restricted ability of students to create and share individual annotations with annotated documents. Applying Web 2.0 collaborative annotation systems and analyzing students’ annotation behavior has attracted attention to improve collaborative learning. This study designed a personalized annotation management system 2.0 (PAMS 2.0) for managing, sharing, and reusing individual and collaborative annotations as well as providing a shared mechanism for discussion about shared annotations among multiple users.     

A social software/Web 2.0 approach to collaborative knowledge engineering

Expert systems have traditionally captured the explicit knowledge of a single expert or source of expertise in order to automatically provide conclusions or classifications within a narrow problem domain. This is in stark contrast to social software which enables knowledge communities to share implicit knowledge of a more practical or experiential nature to inform individuals and groups to arrive at their own conclusions. Specialists are often needed to elicit and encode the knowledge in the case of expert systems, whereas one of the (claimed) hallmarks of social software and the Web 2.0 trend, such as Wikis and Blogs, is that everyone, anywhere can chose to contribute input. This openness in authoring and sharing content, however, tends to produce unstructured knowledge that is difficult to execute, reason over or automatically validate. This also poses limitations for its reuse. To facilitate the capture of knowledge-in-action which spans both explicit and tacit knowledge types, a knowledge engineering approach which offers Wiki-style collaboration is introduced. The approach extends a combined rule and case-based knowledge acquisition technique known as Multiple Classification Ripple Down Rules to allow multiple users to collaboratively view, define and refine a knowledge base over time and space.     

Ensuring Trust, Privacy, and Etiquette in Web 2.0 Applications

An analysis of three user studies of Web 2.0 applications reveals the most important requirements related to ethical issues. The development of features that support these requirements should be tailored to the type of application and specific community needs.     

Analyzing sentiments in Web 2.0 social media data in Chinese: experiments on business and marketing related Chinese Web forums

Web 2.0 has brought a huge amount of user-generated, social media data that contains rich information about people’s opinions and ideas towards various products, services, and ongoing social and political events. Nowadays, many companies start to look into and try to leverage this new type of data to understand their customers in order to make better business strategies and services. As a nation with rapid economic growth in recently years, China has become visible and started to play an important role in the global business and economy. Also, with the large number of Chinese Internet users, a considerable amount of options about Chinese business and market have been expressed in social media sites. Thus, it will be of interest to explore and understand those user-generated contents in Chinese. In this study, we develop an integrated framework to analyze user sentiments from Chinese social media sites by leveraging sentiment analysis techniques. Based on the framework, we conduct experiments on two popular Chinese Web forums, both related to business and marketing. By utilizing Elastic Net together with a rich body of feature representations, we achieve the highest F-measures of 84.4 and 86.7 % for the two data sets, respectively. We also demonstrate the interpretability of Elastic Net by discussing the top-ranked features with positive or negative sentiments.     

Service-Oriented Architecture and Web 2.0

Consumers rely on the Internet for commerce, banking, email, instant messaging, and a variety of other daily tasks. This current evolution is often referred to as Web 2.0. In this paper service-oriented architecture (SOA) is presented as the important part of increasing software efficiency in Web 2.0 with a basic concept of providing a basic set of services that each application can access to provide this common functionality     

Web1.0与Web2.0比较研究

Web1.0和Web2.0分别代表了互联网发展的两大重要阶段及相应的技术与应用模式.系统地对比研究两大类互联网应用对深刻理解互联网发展方式具有重要意义.本文以Web1.0和Web2.0的基本形式与特点为切入点,深入对比了两者的技术实现,商业盈利模式,发展状况等方面的情况,并对Web1.0和Web2.0发展与趋势提出了合理的预测.     

Web2.0下的Ajax及其应用

传统的网络应用是按照"输入-提交-等待-重新显示"的过程设计的,动辄需要重新刷新全部界面、缺乏互动性、资源浪费严重是其最大的弊端,随着进入web2.0的时代,网络应用需要更好的交互性和更快的响应速度.Ajax异步通讯概念,综合XML、JavaScript、DOM、CSS几大技术的优势,提出无刷新更新页面的概念,不会打断交互流程.在用户和服务器之间加了一个中间层,只有需要从服务器读取新数据时才由Ajax引擎代为向服务器提交请求,按需取数据.Ajax的提出,能够创建更接近桌面应用、更直接、更丰富、更动态的web用户界面.     

Integrating learning styles and adaptive e-learning system: Current developments,problems and opportunities

Learning styles which refer to students’ preferred ways to learn can play an important role in adaptive e-learning systems. With the knowledge of different styles, the system can offer valuable advice and instructions to students and teachers to optimise students’ learning process. Moreover, e-leaning system which allows computerised and statistical algorithms opens the opportunity to overcome drawbacks of the traditional detection method that uses mainly questionnaire. These appealing reasons have led to a growing number of researches looking into the integration of learning styles and adaptive learning system. This paper, by reviewing 51 studies, delves deeply into different parts of the integration process. It captures a variety of aspects from learning styles theories selection in e-learning environment, online learning styles predictors, automatic learning styles classification to numerous learning styles applications. The results offer insights into different developments, achievements and open problems in the field. Based on these findings, the paper also provides discussion, recommendations and guidelines for future researches.     

Integrating Web caching and Web prefetching in client-side proxies

Web caching and Web prefetching are two important techniques used to reduce the noticeable response time perceived by users. Note that by integrating Web caching and Web prefetching, these two techniques can complement each other since the Web caching technique exploits the temporal locality, whereas Web prefetching technique utilizes the spatial locality of Web objects. However, without circumspect design, the integration of these two techniques might cause significant performance degradation to each other. In view of this, we propose in this paper an innovative cache replacement algorithm, which not only considers the caching effect in the Web environment, but also evaluates the prefetching rules provided by various prefetching schemes. Specifically, we formulate a normalized profit function to evaluate the profit from caching an object (i.e., either a nonimplied object or an implied object according to some prefetching rule). Based on the normalized profit function devised, we devise an innovative Web cache replacement algorithm, referred to as Algorithm IWCP (standing for the Integration of Web Caching and Prefetching). Using an event-driven simulation, we evaluate the performance of Algorithm IWCP under several circumstances. The experimental results show that Algorithm IWCP consistently outperforms the companion schemes in various performance metrics.     

Evaluation of virtual reality products and applications from individual,organizational and societal perspectives—The “VIEW” case study

Virtual reality (VR) has evolved in technology and applications within the last decade. Technical advances have led to the development of novel interaction devices, interaction concepts, more reliable and robust VR set-ups, advanced visualization and modeling software. However, decisions regarding which VR set-ups and devices are suitable for particular applications are becoming more difficult due to the rapid stream of technical development.In the “VIEW of the Future” project (IST-2000-26089), the development process was coupled with an extensive and multivariable evaluation procedure. The latter has taken advantage of direct neurophysiological and psychophysiological measurements and a variety of self-report tools administered in a set of different but closely linked experiments. Furthermore, the implementation of VR solutions in different applications was examined with a socio-economic perspective, by applying a multi-criteria analysis (MCA) using an analytical hierarchical model.The data collected during the experimental trials enabled us to reach general conclusions regarding the systems used, and to derive applicability guidelines to facilitate the implementation of VR products. This paper presents all aspects of the evaluation methodology: Usability Test Battery for neuro- and psycho-physiological measurements, VIEW-IT heuristic assessment tool, questionnaires, MCA methodology). A summary of the results includes usability and ergonomic findings for different VR set-ups, and the impact of VR implementation on a variety of applications.