Barriers to adopting technology for teaching and learning in Oman

This study investigates the perceived barriers to adopting information and communication technologies (ICT) in Omani higher education. One hundred faculty members from four different departments at the College of Applied Sciences in Oman participated in the study. The participants took a survey, which was developed based on the Western literature. Five factors were extracted from the survey: lack of equipment, lack of institutional support, disbelief of ICT benefits, lack of confidence, and lack of time. The findings showed that the faculty members perceived moderate degrees of barriers in applying ICT to their teaching practices. Group differences based on gender, academic rank, and academic field were generally not found except for the interaction effects on the barriers related to lack of equipment, disbelief of ICT benefits, and the overall mean. Male faculty members with less usage of ICT perceived more barriers regarding the lack of computing equipment, disbeliefs of ICT benefits, and the overall barrier than the female counterparts. It is recommended that the survey be further refined to include more subtle and culturally relevant items, larger sample sizes, and more heterogeneous samples to validate and extend the findings. Important implications of this study include a need to provide more institutional support, technical training, and personal time for faculty members to learn and upgrade their knowledge and skills in educational technologies.     

Conceptualising the link between information systems and resilience: A developing country field study

Resilience—the ability of systems to cope with external shocks and trends—is a topic of increasing interest to research and practice. That growing interest is reflected within information systems (IS), but a structured review of IS literature shows a number of knowledge gaps around the conceptual and empirical application of resilience. This paper investigates what the subdiscipline of information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) can contribute; finding that it offers the IS discipline fresh insights that can be built into a new framework of resilience, and an arena within which this new framework can appropriately be field tested. Application of the resilience framework was undertaken through interviews and a survey in an urban community in Costa Rica; benchmarking both community resilience and “e‐resilience” (understood here as the contribution of ICTs to community resilience), and developing from these a set of action priorities. The paper reflects on what can be learned generally from this conceptualisation and operationalisation of resilience. It also reflects on what ICTs contribute to resilience in developing countries and on what this ICT4D‐based research specifically contributes to the identified IS knowledge gaps. This includes identification of a future research agenda on information systems and resilience.     

Event detection in online social network: Methodologies,state-of-art,and evolution

Online social network such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are increasingly becoming the go-to medium for users to acquire information and discuss what is happening globally. Understanding real-time conversations with masses on social media platforms can provide rich insights into events, provided that there is a way to detect and characterise events. To this end, in the past twenty years, many researchers have been developing event detection methods based on the data collected from various social media platforms. The developed methods for discovering events are generally modular in design and novel in scale and speed. To review the research in this field, we line up existing works for event detection in online social networks and organise them to provide a comprehensive and in-depth survey. This survey comprises three major parts: research methodologies, the review of state-of-the-art literature and the evolution of significant challenges. Each part is supposed to attract readers with different motivations and expectations on the ‘things’ delivered in this survey. For example, the methodologies provide the life-cycle to design new event detection models, from data collection to model evaluations. A timeline and a taxonomy of existing methods are also introduced to elaborate the development of various technologies under the umbrella of event detection. These two parts benefit those with a background in event detection and want to commit a deep exploration of existing models such as discussing their pros and cons alike. The third part shows the development of the major open issues in this field. It also indicates the milestones of each challenge in terms of typical models. Our survey can contribute to the community by highlighting possible new problem statements and opening new research directions.     

The Mobile Phone: An Identity on the Move

This paper analyses the shifting identity of the mobile phone in the light of research carried out in 1996 on a representative population sample from five major European countries: Italy, UK, France, Germany and Spain. A total of 6609 people were interviewed by means of a telephone survey. The mobile phone emerged as a charismatic technology compared to other mobile technologies (laptop and car phone) and as a leading technology that, in just a few years, has appropriated 11% of total telephone traffic. It has “dragged” its widespread presence and amount of use from the workplace to the domestic sphere, although in Italy, where it has had greatest success, its widespread use has been detached from its use in the workplace. Another emerging result is that the use of the mobile phone is not correlated to strong residential mobility in individuals.     

The academic field of information systems in Europe

This paper reviews the institutional and cognitive profile of the information systems (IS) field in Europe, using the results of a survey of IS academics in 18 European countries. The emerging picture suggests that the study of IS in European academia is dispersed in small units with various names, which are hosted in various disciplines across the science/social science spectrum. Our survey confirms the widespread view that the IS field is concerned with the study of a wide range of themes, from developing technologies per se, to assessing the social impact of new information and communication technologies. Moreover, a variety of research perspectives and approaches is found to be pursued, drawing from both the positivist and interpretative epistemological traditions. Reflecting upon the survey findings, we argue that while the institutional dispersion is a weakness that requires remedying action, the cognitive diversity should not be considered as a characteristic of immaturity. In Europe, the diversity of themes and research perspectives probably manifests more fundamental differences of the socioeconomic context which gives rise to, and sustains, different types of IS research in different countries.     

Teacher education for using microcomputers in the classroom: generic skills to think about

Abstract  My purpose is to talk about the generic skills a teacher should master to take best advantage and get the most fruitful pedagogical results from the use of microcomputers in the classroom. Yet, the organization of teacher training differs from country to country so that it is difficult to imagine a single way to prepare a teacher for these skills. So, I intend to address my topic in terms of what I think should be known by a teacher instead of in terms of what should be taught through a specific curriculum.
There is another reason for me to avoid talking formally about pre-service and in-service education. Four years ago, Quebec's Ministry of Education launched a plan of action for the pedagogical use of the computer in the classroom and we have gone through quite an evolution in our vision of how teacher training should be organized. We are still wondering whether what we do in that respect is a final picture of what ought to be done. I shall then speak more from the empirical evidence of our action plan than from established scientific proofs.     

Visual Supercomputing: Technologies, Applications and Challenges

If we were to have a Grid infrastructure for visualization, what technologies would be needed to build such an infrastructure, what kind of applications would benefit from it, and what challenges are we facing in order to accomplish this goal? In this survey paper, we make use of the term ‘visual supercomputing’ to encapsulate a subject domain concerning the infrastructural technology for visualization. We consider a broad range of scientific and technological advances in computer graphics and visualization, which are relevant to visual supercomputing. We identify the state‐of‐the‐art technologies that have prepared us for building such an infrastructure. We examine a collection of applications that would benefit enormously from such an infrastructure, and discuss their technical requirements. We propose a set of challenges that may guide our strategic efforts in the coming years.     

From Artefacts to Infrastructures

In their initial articulation of the direction of the CSCW field, scholars advanced an open-ended agenda. This continuing commitment to open-ness to different contexts and approaches is not, however, reflected in the contents of the major CSCW outlets. The field appears to privilege particular forms of cooperative work. We find many examples of what could be described as ‘localist studies’, restricted to particular settings and timeframes. This focus on the ‘here and now’ is particularly problematic when one considers the kinds of large-scale, integrated and interconnected workplace information technologies—or what we are calling Information Infrastructures—increasingly found within and across organisations today. CSCW appears unable (or unwilling) to grapple with these technologies—which were at the outset envisaged as falling within the scope of the field. Our paper hopes to facilitate greater CSCW attention to Information Infrastructures through offering a re-conceptualisation of the role and nature of ‘design’. Design within an Information Infrastructures perspective needs to accommodate non-local constraints. We discuss two such forms of constraint: standardisation (how local fitting entails unfitting at other sites) and embeddedness (the entanglement of one technology with other apparently unrelated ones). We illustrate these themes through introducing case material drawn on from a number of previous studies.     

物联网技术在军事领域的应用展望

传感器、RFID等物联网技术越来越多地在人类生活与生产活动中得到应用,同时也改变着人们的工作与生活方式。在众多的物联网技术中,有相当一部分本就源自军事领域,随着发展与应用,它们反过来又将对军事领域产生深刻影响。文中从侦察预警与态势感知、通信指挥、装备管理、后勤保障、核生化威胁监测等角度,展望了物联网技术在军事领域中可能的应用,并探讨了物联网技术在军事领域中得到推广应用需要解决的主要问题。     

Organizational Factors Affecting Capacity Planning Practices

Because of the high cost of most major equipment acquisitions, even a small improvement in the computer capacity planning (CCP— process can result in significant cost savings. The survey results presented here assess the effects of computing organization characteristics on various aspects of CCP practices. The results also should help MIS managers and analysts broaden their understanding of how this function can be conducted and what factors significantly affect its practice.     

Organizational Factors Affecting Capacity Planning Practices

Because of the high cost of most major equipment acquisitions, even a small improvement in the computer capacity planning (CCP— process can result in significant cost savings. The survey results presented here assess the effects of computing organization characteristics on various aspects of CCP practices. The results also should help MIS managers and analysts broaden their understanding of how this function can be conducted and what factors significantly affect its practice.     

计算机唇读研究进展

计算机唇读是利用计算机对说话者的唇动等视觉语音信息进行分析以识别出其所说内容的过程，并可与听觉语音信息相融合以进一步提高计算机的识别率，从而使人机交互更加自然。本文从计算机唇读系统的各环节入手综述了该领域的研究进展，并讨论了现有诸方法的优缺点，最后提出了有待进一步研究的问题。     

Is workplace surveillance legal in Canada?

This paper reports on the results of a research project into employer practices with respect to workplace privacy, funded by the Privacy Commissioner of Canada’s Contributions Program. The paper discusses the variety of privacy invasive technologies used by Canadian Employers in order to survey and monitor their workers. It then discusses the legal basis for such workplace surveillance as perceived by the employers, and concludes with an assessment whether, and under what circumstances, such surveillance is lawful in Canada.     

Social acceptance toward a childcare support robot system: web-based cultural differences investigation and a field study in Japan

This paper investigates people’s social acceptance of a childcare support robot system and compares it with existing childcare technologies (anesthesia during labor and baby food, i.e. processed food and formula milk) through web-based questionnaires between Japan and USA and a field study in Japan. We investigated social acceptance through four scales: intention to use, safety and trustworthiness, negative attitudes, and decreasing workload. For this paper, our participants included 400 people (200 from each country) in Japan and USA located through a web-based survey who answered questionnaires about the four scales to investigate their social acceptance of childcare support technologies. Our web-based survey results indicate that our system’s concept was evaluated lower than current childcare support technologies in both Japan and USA. We also conducted a field trial with 30 additional people in Japan and through their actual experiences investigated their evaluations of the prototype of our childcare support robot system.     

Recurrent routines: Analyzing and supporting orchestration in technology-enhanced primary classrooms

The increasing presence of multiple Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the classroom does not guarantee an improvement of the learning experiences of students, unless it is also accompanied by pedagogically effective orchestration of those technologies. In order to help teachers in this endeavour, it can be useful to understand how this orchestration takes place in real-world classrooms, and to provide teachers with professional development opportunities that can be easily applied to their everyday classroom practice. This paper describes a qualitative field study conducted in five primary school classrooms where a new collaborative software was introduced alongside existing classroom technology. For six months, teachers designed and orchestrated classroom activities in these authentic, technologically-rich settings. The analysis of the resulting activity designs and enactments uncovered a limited set of recurrent elements of teacher practice, or routines. These routines and their graphical representation are posited as a useful analysis tool for researchers in understanding complex teacher practices with ICT. Moreover, the authors propose that these routines offer new opportunities for professional development of teachers in effectively using ICT in their classrooms. Initial uses of these routines in teacher workshops, with encouraging results, are also presented.     

Parallel computing in the 1980s—one person's view

This paper is a survey of activities related to parallel computing that took place primarily during the 1980s. The major areas covered are hardware, software, and performance measurement and characterization. Emphasis is on identifying the major milestones of the decade and on commercial computers rather than present a comprehensive survey of the field. The material is treated from the user's point of view.     

Integration of Cloud computing and Internet of Things: A survey

Cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) are two very different technologies that are both already part of our life. Their adoption and use are expected to be more and more pervasive, making them important components of the Future Internet. A novel paradigm where Cloud and IoT are merged together is foreseen as disruptive and as an enabler of a large number of application scenarios.In this paper, we focus our attention on the integration of Cloud and IoT, which is what we call the CloudIoT paradigm. Many works in literature have surveyed Cloud and IoT separately and, more precisely, their main properties, features, underlying technologies, and open issues. However, to the best of our knowledge, these works lack a detailed analysis of the new CloudIoT paradigm, which involves completely new applications, challenges, and research issues. To bridge this gap, in this paper we provide a literature survey on the integration of Cloud and IoT. Starting by analyzing the basics of both IoT and Cloud Computing, we discuss their complementarity, detailing what is currently driving to their integration. Thanks to the adoption of the CloudIoT paradigm a number of applications are gaining momentum: we provide an up-to-date picture of CloudIoT applications in literature, with a focus on their specific research challenges. These challenges are then analyzed in details to show where the main body of research is currently heading. We also discuss what is already available in terms of platforms–both proprietary and open source–and projects implementing the CloudIoT paradigm. Finally, we identify open issues and future directions in this field, which we expect to play a leading role in the landscape of the Future Internet.     

建筑工程多媒体仿真环境设计技术研究

结合作者运用多媒体仿真技术，研制建筑工程领域计算机仿真系统的实践，论述为实现工程力学场和建筑形态变化的动力学仿真，建造适用于系统环境和工具的理论和方法。     

Cisco在线实验室的设计与实现

提出Cisco在线实验室的建设方案,解决建设过程中的关键技术问题,使计算机网络专业的教师、学生和网络爱好者能充分、便捷和安全地利用网络设备实验室进行教学和学习,实现资源的共享.